What Every Comediante Mentor Should Know

WHAT EVERY COMEDIANTE MENTOR SHOULD KNOW LAURAL. VIDLER United States Military Academy My name is Laura Vidier. I am a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and am now an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the United States Military Academy at West Point. As the new cadet on the panel, I do not claim to know everything that a comediante should know. Nevertheless, as a relatively new PhD, I hope to provide some perspective on the current indoctrination process for comedia scholars and, hopefully , to remind you, our advisors and mentors, ofwhat new comediantes need and want. Ifyou'll humor me forjust a moment, I'd like to take you back to your early years as a comediante. Can you remember what it felt like the first time you read the Arte nuevo! Do you remember the first word you looked up in Covarrubias? Or the first comedia you saw in performance? How did you prepare your very first AHCT conference abstract? Or the first article you submitted to the Bulletin of the Comediantes! How do new comediantes learn these skills? Once they have been tackled, they no longer seem so daunting, but let me take this moment to remind you that, when first faced, they can seem as frightening as the ghost of Don Gonzalo de Ulloa. Everyone else seems to know exactly what to do. A fellow but older and wiser graduate student once told me that on the first day ofmy first year as a graduate student I looked like a deer in headlights. I am fairly certain that I was not the only one. While new comediantes will always face the fear ofthe unknown, there is much, I believe, that come169 !??BCom, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2004) diantes can do in order to facilitate the professionalization of the next generation of comedia scholars. We are not, after all, only in the profession ??comedia research, but also in the business ofteaching the skill of sound humanistic inquiry. As with anything else, mastery is accomplished through practice. With that in mind, I would like to address a few of the strategies which were most effective in my own development as a comediante and which I believe were responsible for the successful completion of my degree and subsequent job search. Comediantes would do well to emphasize from the very beginning, even at the undergraduate level, that intellectual production can and should be original and that much of the work done for classes has the potential to be presented at conferences and/or published in peerreviewed journals. This point may seem self-evident, but how many tenpage papers have you read on honor in the comedía! Or essays explaining how Fuenteovejuna follows the precepts ofthe Arte nuevo! These are obviously things that every comediante should know, and such essays do provide important writing exercises in the target language for undergraduates . However, I believe that it is ofthe utmost importance that an overt distinction be made between expository essays and research papers. Student competence should be balanced with creativity at all levels because it is the combination of knowledge and innovation that will reread and revise the comedia canon. Journal writing in upper-division classes can facilitate this process as it provides a non-threatening forum for student reaction to a text. Often, such writing produces the seed ofan idea which may then take root as the basis for a required research paper. More importantly, journals foster student confidence in their capacity for original thought—the foundation of a free-thinking society. The idea, however, must be consciously planted in the student's mind, because the natural reaction to "very important literature" is that there is only one correct interpretation and that someone else, one of us, has already figured that out. This misperception can take a long time to unlearn and can ultimately prevent undergraduates from attaining the desire and ability necessary to pursue graduate work. Further, iforiginal research is not encouraged until graduate school, quality production of articles and ponencias can be delayed, ultimately compromising employment opportunities for new comediantes. As a natural continuation ofthis process, it is ofthe utmost importance that comediantes keep their students up...