Rather than a text-based blog entry, we decided to do a video based blog entry. We trace the long strange journey of creating the first, all-digital textbook for theatre, and talk about some of the unexpected delights and disappointing shortcomings
–Michael O’Hara and Judith Sebesta (authors of Explore Theatre)
Andy White's "Yes It Is" Exercise at MATC 2012. Photo by Ann Haugo.
In Chicago during the first weekend of March, the Mid-America Theatre Conference held its annual meeting. Scott Magelssen reminded me that the conversation that eventually led to the creation of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions started at this conference many years ago. To build on the link between the conference, the Bial-Magelssen edited collection, and this website, I decided to address my final blog to the response given by Heather Nathans to the theatre history symposium. In what follows, I’d like to replay a bit of that response, analyze some of the reaction it provoked, and offer my own thoughts on the role of theatre history and theatre historiography within the University.
Nathans played the part of respondent, which meant that she had to act the challenging role of what I call “the synthesizer.” From four days of panels on topics ranging from the accidental immolation of ballerinas to the archive of Penumbra Theatre Company to the economics of local Burning Man events, Nathans located a thru-line and shared her reflections with all of us. Her comments focused on issues of methodology. Specifically, she drew our attention to how we as theatre historians and historiographers talk about our individual objects of study. The underlying purpose of her remarks was not isolated to issues of scholarship but looked outward to our role as scholars of theatre within the University. Her response began with a hypothetical question: if we had a meeting with our University president, and asked him/her to tell us how we as theatre scholars think, for example, about race or identity formation, what would the president say? Nathans posited that the president would be at a loss, and that his/her inability to articulate an answer to that question reflects a shortcoming on our own parts. The president would likely not have a response because we as theatre scholars do not always do a good job explaining how we think about certain issues, how we go about our historical investigations, or how we differentiate ourselves from other practitioners such as art historians or ethnomusicologists.
This focus on methodology and its relationship to self-reflexivity certainly demands our attention. As audience members pointed out, within Nathans’s call for a more articulate framing of how we do what we do exists a pedagogical challenge. After all, as teachers we should be able to help our students learn the how in addition to the what. Theatre history, as a practice, requires an understanding of the research process as well as an understanding of the basic tenets of, say, the Cid controversy or the main elements of Ancient Greek tragedy. On top of that, and perhaps more obviously, theatre historians and historiographers must place ourselves within our work and formulate a clear notion of how we navigate the archives. Without wishing to challenge either of those beliefs, I would like to trouble another aspect of the group’s reaction to Nathans, as well as an underlying assumption as to the purpose of articulating how we do what we do.
Once the conversation opened up to include comments from the audience, the topic of conversation turned to use. If we develop the ability to explain how we do what we do, then we will be able to prove our use to the University. The vibe of the room transposed to a more lightweight and joyous resonance once people got behind this notion that theatre historians might be able to adequately express our value to the University, thereby securing our position within the liberal arts and, perhaps, gaining access to increased research funds. To be honest, my internal resonance clashed with the predominant tenor of the room at this point. I wondered if our segue from the how-ness of what we do to our use within the University pointed to an obfuscation of the discourse on use pervading the current “crisis.” While listening and reflecting on the discussion that unfolded there in that room, I began to imagine a different way of discussing our position within the University. Finally, some weeks later, I’ve put my thoughts into words and I offer this alternate perspective for your consideration.
To begin this alternate line of thought I’d like to summon Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “On Tradition” (Telos vol. 94 [Winter 93/94]: 75-82). In that work, Adorno explores the dialectic of tradition: on the one hand, a questionable value whose link to the past appears fruitless and useless because of the cult of the new which drives culture forward; on the other hand, an imported article to be valued, but valued only as a curiosity (75). University discourse presents us with both sides of this dialectic. We can see this by thinking about the place of theatre history within this discourse. Theatre history, as a discipline, seems to be out of date; as a practice, it appears as something that once had its place but now serves no clear purpose. At the same time, and because of its out-of-placeness, theatre history is a curiosity, an endeavor that unearths bizarre and titillating rituals from days gone by. The curiosity may lose its charm, however, and deflate into an unarticulated otherness. “The less the bourgeois principle tolerates otherness, the more urgently it appeals to tradition and cites what then appears from the outside as ‘value’” (76). Theatre historians face this shift today, as Nathans pointed out. As theatre history becomes more a curiosity and less of a stable link to the recognizable tradition of liberal arts education, the more it loses its value in the eyes of the University.
As we decide what to do about all of this, I would caution us against arguing within the terms laid down by the University discourse, a discourse thoroughly imbued with the logic of the market. Articulating how we do what we do as theatre historians or historiographers will lead to self-reflexive scholarship, there is little doubt of that. But we should not leverage our ability to articulate the specifics of our scholarly practice as a method for proving our usefulness or value within the University. By working to reveal our use, are we not capitulating to the logic of equal exchange, that principle derived from capitalist economic principles applied to all other social relations? If we prove that our discipline provides a service that has immediate applicability to the working on the University administration, then I think we have already conceded the very terms that we should be disputing.
Adorno’s negative dialectic practice reveals another was of thinking about this problem. “What fails to establish its immediate social usefulness in the market place,” he suggests, speaking specifically of the United States in the 1960s, “does not count and is forgotten. Even when someone dies, it is as if he had never lived; he is as replaceable as anything functional. Only what has no function is irreplaceable!” (75). This last sentence deserves out attention, partially because of the exclamation point but also, and more importantly, because it raises a counter-intuitive path for us to follow. We should not develop tools to prove our value and our usefulness to the University; rather, we should contest the terms of any discussion based on “value” and, simultaneously, work to imagine how consciousness of our functionlessness might enrich our practice as scholars of theatre. What would it mean to embrace our uselessness?
Before discussing this functionlessness or uselessness in more detail, I’d like to offer one final fragment of Adorno’s work that serves as a warning for us all as we decide how to position ourselves in the University:
Those who cherish the past and refuse to surrender their love of it so as not to become impoverished, immediately expose themselves to an insidiously inspired misunderstanding, namely that they might not be so dedicated after all and might even be willing to embrace the present. (77)
There is a tendency in the reception of Adorno’s criticism to dismiss the thinker outright because of what appears to be an ultra-obtuse cantankerousness. Rather than disagree with this statement I’d like to embrace the bristly German philosopher because of the difficulty inherent in that very act of embrace. After all, what would it mean to take this warning seriously? It would surely mean at least two things. First, Adorno’s words force us to reflect on what we’re doing when we approach our object of study. He suggests that we should not cherish those objects of study. We must not think of them as our bread and butter, that off which we make our living.
Second, grappling with Adorno’s ideas means understanding that the present is not something we should embrace. We must not embrace it because the terms of discussion about how to proceed from this moment in time into the future are permeated through and through with a logical positivist rationality that would like to move in a straight line from this moment of crisis to a future moment of normality and stability. As historians and historiographers, surely we recognize that this rectilinear march is fraught with complications and that, at the very least, we should stage a conceptual and practical sit-in to slow the march into the future. To do this, however, would require that we take time to articulate the problem and that, of course, we slow down the works, thus making us visible as part of the problem, which we are, whether we like it or not.
I’d like to continue with this line of thought, but I also want to summon several new figures in order to present a rambunctious collection of ideas through which to think this problem of Use and Uselessness. First: Andrew White, founding member of Lookingglass Theare Company and keynote speaker at MATC this year. In his keynote address, White proposed that we all infuse our work with more play. I conjure this sentiment here because, in addition to the utter seriousness Adorno brings to this discussion, I believe we can think our uselessness as theatre historians and historiographers through the practice of play. Playing around with such weighty matters as the future of our discipline seems utterly irresponsible and, for that very reason, completely necessary. How might we reframe our task away from the act of defending our position and conserving space for ourselves toward, instead, the act of play? Play requires the endless production of ideas—something White displayed through his demonstration of the game “Yes it is.” What is theatre historiography? It is a practice of uncovering the conditions that make possible certain understanding of Nationality in a specific time and place. Yes it is. It is a conscious deconstruction of the concept of the archive as the repository of all knowledge. Yes it is. It is a discipline that acknowledges the fictional dimension of all historical narrative and that proliferates the narrative of history with its own brand of (hopefully self-reflexive) fiction. Yes it is. It is a mode of living. Yes it is. It is a challenge to the discourse on usefulness insofar as it reveals the structures that have obfuscated specific people and events whose usefulness was once in question. Yes it is.
Next: Georges Bataille and Stuart McLean. In his 1933 essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” Bataille asserts the following:
Every time the meaning of a discussion depends upon the fundamental value of the word useful – in other words, every time the essential question touching on the life of human societies is raised, no matter who intervenes and what opinions are expressed – it is possible to affirm that the debate is necessarily warped and that the fundamental question is eluded.
How does usefulness warp the debate? For starters, the notion of usefulness usually presupposes a finite number of ways in which something can become useful, thereby ruling out an array of other, possibly silly, possibly frightening, proposals. McLean, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota, offered this quotation in his manifesto titled, “WHAT IS THE UNIVERSITY FOR? A STORY FROM THE DREAMTIME OF A POSSIBLE FUTURE” performed at the Beneath the University — The Commons conference a few years ago. In that Manifesto, McLean argues that the question “What is the University for?” makes no more sense than the questions “What is a comet for?” and “What is a dragonfly for?” He makes this point in order to challenge the very terms with which we find ourselves discussing the future of the university.
Instead of those questions, McLean departs from the path most taken and imagines a completely “other” university, one that “occupy a status somewhere between a ritual theater and a blue-sky research laboratory for the self-production of social life as an open-ended project of collective poesis.” “The university as I envision it,” he writes, “would still have its Institutes for Advanced Study but they would be more numerous and various, more open and much weirder – animals, plants and supernatural (or other) beings as visiting professors, perhaps?” Recognizing his fanciful imaginings as off-the-chart, McLean advocates for his irrational vision precisely because it does not intersect with the conversation on how to make ourselves useful but, rather, allows the possibility of a new future.
As we process the information gathered at the recent MATC conference and reflect on Nathans’s response to the theatre history symposium, I’d like us to include the concept of uselessness in the picture. We can imagine our function within the university without capitulating to the current order of things, and we can do this by playing with the existing order. Last week in my theatre history class we studied Dada, a group from whom we can take our cue. The Cabaret Voltaire was, in one way, a salon of the irrational and the nonsensical. It was, at the same time, the site from which we can learn that nonsense is often the index of the sensible. That is, a playful invocation of our useless position within the University can reveal the methods used to construct the discourse that requires us to prove our value to the system. If we work to make ourselves valuable and useful, then I think we will have labored in vain.
Path 2: De Witt’s Catalogue
To develop a critique of melodrama and to encourage a self-reflexive practice of historical inquiry amongst my students, I want to return to melodrama when study the Black Arts Movement. To do this, I will share the story of my discovery of De Witt’s catalogue of “Ethiopian and Comic Drama,” along with the research that I am currently compiling, in order to unpack the abuses of melodramatic acting. Despite his curmudgeonly attitude and his dated study of the genre, Lacey provides a starting point for this critique. “Strictly speaking, “ he writes, “there are no characters in melodrama, there are only types, easily recognized and constantly recurring, such as the villain, the hero, the ‘persecuted innocent’ and the clown or ‘niais’. There are also, besides these four principles, two other prevailing types, the ‘accomplice’ and the faithful friend’” (20-1). From here, one need only look to the cast list of Pixérécourt’s Christopher Columbus in order to see the problem of these “types.” How did French actors play the “Savages” encountered by Columbus? What gestures and facial expressions did the acting manuals suggest for playing non-French roles? Along with the knowledge that melodrama was used to foster a nationalistic pride in the European countries where it emerged comes the knowledge that national identity relies on the formulation of the Other against which to cement its traits.
The popularity of the “Ethiopian” type in America during the eighteenth century attested to the racist ideology undergirding the American project of nation building. De Witt’s catalogue offers ample evidence that black people, though not exclusively, filled the subject position of Other to counter-balance the white male subject position engineered as dominant. There’s no need to rehearse the scholarship on this topic here, especially because I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I would like to share my findings on the “Ethiopian” type. I would also like to ask for assistance in compiling source material on the “Ethiopian” farce or sketch from those who are more active in this field of study. Or, if you have knowledge of melodrama acting manuals, I would love to learn more about that as well.
In “‘The Trouble Begins at Eight’: Mark Twain, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Unsettling Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy” (American Literary Realism vol. 41 No 3 (Spring 2009): 232-248), Sharon D. McCoy tells us that, “In the stage parlance of the day, ‘nigger,’ ‘Ethiopian,’ or even ‘negro’ (uncapitalized) referred not to actual African American performers but to white blackface performers. ‘Colored’ referred to African Americans” (240). John William Mahar offers similar information in Behind the burnt cork mask: early blackface minstrelsy and Antebellum and American Popular Culture (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Thus, the long list of play titles in De Witt’s catalogue refer to plays of the minstrel tradition, though not all of them featured blacked-up white performers exclusively. As Mahar states, “it is not clear how many of the characters actually appeared in blackface in any particular skit because the ‘Cast of Characters’ sections of the published Ethiopian sketches rarely indicate whether all the characters blacked up or only those with identifiable African American roles” (157). He points out that, “The sketches were also adaptable to various ethnic groups through slight changes in costuming or dialect,” meaning that these plays also mocked the French, Irish, and Dutch members of New York City’s populace.
Completely by accident, then, I have come across a list of plays that feature disparaging representations of black people and other members of the immigrant population in America paired with Jerrold’s text of Black-Eyed Susan. It seems reasonable to assume that the type characters created in the melodramatic form pioneered by Pixérécourt and then exported to Britain influenced the types portrayed in minstrel plays, and, therefore, that the melodrama form infiltrated the American imagination via racist depictions of the Other. By rehearsing this history with my students, I hope they will find a foothold in the work produced by the Black Arts Movement, which sought to destroy the image of black people created through this European theatrical tradition.
In recent years, when teaching works by black artists, I have discovered that students have little to no understanding of the history behind depictions such as Sambo or Aunt Jemima. Due to the structure of the theatre curriculum, students rarely take classes in Cultural Studies or American Studies where they might encounter materials like Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions and a culturally-specific critique of aesthetic form. As such, teaching material from the Black Arts Movement and more contemporary artists such as Suzan-Lori Parks or Aishah Rahman has proven difficult. The fortuitous, though disturbing, discovery of De Witt’s catalogue has provided me with new material that might help to connect two seemingly distinct plays such as Baraka’s Dutchman and Pixérécourt’s Dog of Montargis, thereby strengthening the critical historiographical methodology I want to teach in my class.
Path 1: The Dog of Montargis
I entered Pixérécourt’s play with the help of three sources: Alexander Lacey’s Pixerécourt and the French Romantic Drama (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1928), Louis James’s “Taking Melodrama Seriously: Theatre, and Nineteenth-Century Studies” (History Workshop no. 3 (Spring 1977): 151-158), and Marvin Carlson’s “The Golden Age of the Boulevard” (The Drama Review: TDR vol. 18 no. 1, Popular Entertainments (March 1974): 25-33). The Dog of Montargis seems to epitomize the genre with its transparent struggle between Aubri (the hero) and Macaire (the villain), its depiction of virtuous love in the amorous coupling of the mute Florio and the young Lucille, and its crew of type characters such as Blaise (the niais who provides local color) and, of course, Dragon, Aubri’s faithful canine friend without whom Macaire would surely get away with his vile deeds.
With that ensemble, the play may appear completely ridiculous for students. But wait! Before we pass judgment, we should watch the trailer for Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse (http://www.youtube.com/v/B7lf9HgFAwQ) and ponder how precisely melodrama has infused popular culture with its simple yet effective depiction of an ordered world in which everyone can tell right from wrong and good from evil.
Carlson tells us that the genre emerged from the feuds between Audinot and Nicolet on the Boulevard du Temple at the end of the eighteenth century when France was reeling from the Reign of Terror and preparing for the reign of Napoleon. While extremely popular, the melodrama had to compete against an eclectic assortment of entertainments, from tightrope walkers and dancing elephants to children drinking boiling oil and Daguerre’s diorama (Carlson 26. 30). To do so, it combined tableaux mouvant, musical leitmotif, horror-provoking scenarios of injustice, and stage spectacle such as erupting volcanoes and floods with high-grade pathos in order to tug at the hearts of its audiences.
Scholars cannot dispute the popularity of the genre, but they can belittle the means with which it attracted its audience. For me, Lacey’s vociferous dismissal of the “plebian” melodrama provides a great introduction to the detractors of melodrama: “[O]ne may say that the Revolution forced ‘le drame bourgeois’ to find refuge on the boulevards, there to surrender itself to a process of transfusion, as it were, but means of which it yielded up its life-blood to its more plebeian descendant, the melodrama” (19). His book charts the success of Pixérécourt as an innovative writer, entrepreneur, designer, and producer, but repeatedly paints the public for which Pixérécourt created his plays as downright stupid. On the topic of melodramatic violence, for example, he writes, “Physical conflict is, moreover, a means always ready to the hand of the dramatist, and especially the second-rate dramatist, by which he can create a sort of emotional response, particularly in the minds of the less cultured of spectators” (9). I found in these types of statements an opportunity to stop and reflect on the historical effects that may have produced this affinity for violence. I gave students a sheet of several comments by Lacey and asked them to first unpack the subtext of Lacey’s commentary and then to theorize why melodrama may have staged violence for its throngs of spectators. The students had little trouble realizing that after the French Revolution violence on stage would help audiences to process the violence in the streets.
To move beyond text to the embodied dimension of melodramatic acting, I turned to James who asks us to think through the contemporary manifestations of kitsch melodrama (think soap operas) back to the time before last-minute reprieves from death and the stock characters were made into conventions. James endeavors to take melodrama seriously, and he picks up that task by discussing the specificity of the melodramatic acting vocabulary:
Despair is not expressed as horror, pride is different from contempt. Moreover, the movements are dynamic. Gestures move through a spectrum of intensifying emotion; performers react to each other as if each produced a magnetic field. The whole has a rhythm—the music is of central importance—closer to ballet and opera than to modern acting: Dickens wrote that watching melodrama was like opera to a deaf observer. It flows towards significant tableau, it shatters a mood abruptly in a style closely related to the violent juxtaposition of feelings deliberately produced by Eisenstein with “montage.” (James 154)
Building on this description of the acting, I invited student to act the scene in The Dog of Montargis that contains this stage direction: “FLORIO answers by the most expressive pantomime that it is not gratitude but love, the most passionate, that he feels for LUCILLE.” It was, to say the least, difficult, but everyone laughed as the students failed to embody the enormous emotional weight of that stage direction.
I wanted to access the embodied dimension along with the historical context of melodrama in order to illustrate how the genre worked hard to fabricate affective belonging in its audiences. Charles Nodier, the nineteenth-century poet and critic, spells out this affective production in some detail in his introduction to Pixérécourt’s Théâtre Choisi:
What is certain is that in the circumstances in which it arose, melodrama was a necessity. The entire people had just enacted in the streets and on the public squares the greatest drama of all history. Everyone had been an actor in this bloody play, everyone either a soldier or a revolutionary or an outlaw….And make no mistake about it! Melodrama was not something to take lightly! It was the morality of the revolution! (cit. Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas, trans. and ed. Marvin Carlson and Daniel Gerould [New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, 2002] xv.)
He continues to praise Pixérécourt’s plays for diminishing crime on the streets of Paris and for imparting to its audience a spiritual clarity: “I say this because I have seen them, in the absence of religious worship, take the place of the silent pulpit, and bring, in an attractive form that never failed of its effect, serious and valuable lessons to the soul of the spectators” (xi-xii). Interestingly, even across the Channel in England where people suffered to rebuild after the onslaught of Napoleon, the melodrama, a French import, served the same purpose as a tool for nation building and spiritual repair.
Having never encountered Pixérécourt’s work prior to this semester, I was intrigued by James’s challenge to take melodrama seriously. I presented selections from all these documents I’ve mentioned to my students and I asked them to take up that challenge with me. The result was a fascinating discussion of the migration of the melodramatic form from the days of Pixérécourt to our own. Interestingly, the University of Minnesota Show Boat has delved into the repertoire of nineteenth-century melodramas for its recent productions, and students were well aware of this. I’d like to end my tour of this path by sharing one of my student’s comments that was emailed to me after our class:
I was just thinking that the reason melodrama seems to stay relevant even today is because of the fact that it attempts to portray ordinary life in a more fantastical way. At a time when the real world has so much trouble and all fiction attempts to take people even further from the truth of their lives, melodrama tends to bring people back to reality in a way that other forms of entertainment don’t. This isn’t to say that melodrama portrays real life; it just shows the normal elements of the everyday in a much more exaggerated way. Since the first melodramatic play, I feel most popular theatre since has at least a little portion of melodrama in it, so we must acknowledge that melodrama, though not the best type of theatre, has a huge effect on how we view theatre today.
Melodrama: A Forking Path
Before commencing this academic year, I decided to populate my syllabus with plays I have never read. One of my favorite occupations, reading, has suffered a tremendous blow at the hands of my teaching schedule (as John Fletcher told me would be the case). I figured I would force myself to read new plays and some secondary source material by teaching individual works and historical periods about which I knew either nothing or very little. (I imagine all of this sounds familiar to you as you read this.) Melodrama as a genre was something I knew almost nothing about. Somehow, after four years at New York University and five years at the University of Minnesota, I came into contact with melodrama only twice. The first time was as a TA in Theatre History when we read Black-Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold. The second time was during a graduate seminar on historiography when we encountered secondary source material about the infamously successful adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (here, I’m thinking specifically of Sadiyah Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th-c. America). In both cases, the material was presented as a stepping-stone to the larger concern of historiographical methodology. We didn’t dwell on melodrama proper; rather, we framed melodrama within larger issues of, on the one hand, appropriating revolutionary ideas into the nation-building project and, on the other, the connection between archive and repertoire.
I decided to confront my foggy memory and dearth of knowledge on the subject of nineteenth-century melodrama this semester, but time constraints forced me to split the difference. I would dedicate a week to melodrama, asking my students to read Black-Eyed Susan and something else, something I had yet to discover. With the plan in place I began to look for titles. After numerous searches I located Rene Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844), the so-called “father” of French melodrama, a name I had never come across before. Digging deeper, I found that Daniel Gerould and Marvin Carlson had collaborated as editors on a volume of four works by Pixérécourt. Then I did the math: the “father” of French melodrama + two respected scholars in the field = something I need to look into. I got Gerould’s and Carlson’s book and decided immediately to place The Dog of Montargis on my syllabus.
A play featuring a dog. Perfect. What historiographical challenge awaits me within the pages of this story about Aubri and his faithful companion? Before I had the opportunity to answer that question, I received my copy of Black-Eyed Susan from Inter-library Loan. The book was actually a bound collection of photocopies of the original text published by Clinton T. De Witt in 1854. Looking closely at the first page, I became greatly disturbed. There I found an advertisement for the catalogue of “De Witt’s Ethiopian and Comic Drama,” featuring such titles as Bobolino, the Black Bandit, Dutchman’s Ghost, Noble Savage, Ethi’n Sketch, and roughly ninety more, all grouped under the subheadings of farce or comedy. Suddenly, the historiographical challenge of the Dog of Montargis seemed less important. Should I present this accidental discovery of De Witt’s catalogue to the students? If so, how should I do it? I delved into our library’s databases and indexes to learn more about the “Ethiopian farce” and De Witt, but I found next to nothing. Time was running out because our week of melodrama was rapidly approaching.
To make everything more complicated, I had been receiving pressure from students to lighten the reading load. My current students, as well as numerous comments on my evaluations from last semester, insisted that I made the class too hard and that there was too much reading and writing, especially for a course not classified as writing intensive. Looking over my syllabus, the melodrama week seemed the appropriate time to decrease the amount of reading from two plays to one. Which reading do I eliminate? Black-Eyed Susan? I was already familiar with that play, but this new discovery of De Witt’s catalogue presented a great challenge in terms of linking melodrama to the development of modern racism and discourse on the Other. Do I ditch The Dog of Montargis? It seems like a downright silly play, but I was curious about what lay beneath the silly exterior and I wanted to learn more about the origins (in the Benjaminian sense of the word) of melodrama since I knew nothing about it. Faced with this forking path, I had to choose a direction.
Ultimately, I decided to teach The Dog of Montargis, but I would utilize the discovery of De Witt’s catalogue during our exploration of the Black Arts Movement later in Week Twelve. By covering the historical emergence of melodrama via Pixérécourt, I could lay out some fundamental attributes of the genre. Later in the semester, I could return to melodrama as, on the one hand, a pedagogical strategy for re-visiting ideas and, on the other hand, a way of excavating the historical sediment of the stereotyped movements and images seized upon by the Black Arts Movement. In my next two blogs, I’d like to offer a brief tour of both paths opened by my inquiry into melodrama. The first will visit the ideas I discovered upon meeting Pixérécourt, the second will offer my findings on Ethiopian farces that will eventually culminate in a lesson plan for my class on the Black Arts Movement.
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