Why Modern Plays Are Not Culture: Disciplinary Blind Spots

Why Modem Plays Are Not Culture: Disciplinary Blind Spots' SHANNON JACKSON "(The] lack of communication with the other disciplines gives the drama a peculiar insularity0" - Robert Bruslein, "Why American Plays Are Not Literature" 245 "I learned something from analysing drama which seemed to me effective not only as a way of seeing certain aspects of society but as a way of getting through to some of the fundamental conventions L with1which we group as [aJ society itself. These. in their turn, make some of the problems of drama quite newly active." - Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatized Society" 20 My title is taken, with significant modification, from the same essay in which Robert Brustein chastised "the drama" for not being interdisciplinary. In that piece, "Why American Plays Are Not Literature," Brustein made clear that something called "literature" was the discipline with which drama most needed contact. Not only was it, in Brustein's view, the only discipline with which the drama needed contact, but its models of value were those to which all drama should aspire. Condemning the fact that American dramatists almost never sought representation in "the literary periodicals," his 1959 use of the term "interdisciplinary" was thus a way of rationalizing a formula for the culturallegitimation of the drama, American and otherwise. My second epigraph is from a drama scholar who was Brustein's contemporary, if also, at some level, his antithesis. Before and between renowned texts such as Culture alld Society and Keywords, Raymond Williams published a series of books in the field of drama - Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, Drama in Use, Modem Tragedy, and a revised Drama from Ibsell to Brecht - a "set" that he considered a formative "critical study" of the dramatic form (Foreword n.pag.). Robert Brustein and Raymond Williams published some of their most Model'll Drama, 44 (Spring 2001) 31 32 SHANNON JACKSON widely read studies of drama in the fifties and sixties, in two different countries and in intellectual environments that bore a vexed if interdependent connection to each other. Both began their intellectual lives as drama scholars, and both would go on to become "cultural critics" of sorts. However, while both would take up the question of whether or not "plays" were "culture," their answers differed significantly - a difference that depended on varying notions of the term "culture." For Brustein, the cultural denoted a realm of artistic preserve and artistic excellence, free from what he would later call the sociologizing of aesthetics. Williams's name and thought, on the other hand, would become synonymous with another cultural project - the project of "cultural studies." As someone who figures prominently and repeatedly in the origin narratives of this movement, Williams thus helped to advance the theories, politics, and methodologies whose "sociology" Brustein would later condemn . How "the drama" could serve as point of entry to two very different relations to "the cultural" is one of the concerns of this essay. It seems useful to ask such a question in light of a number of other debates currently at issue in the field(s) of drama, theatre, and performance studies. Certainly, the journal Modern Drama has redefined itself and re-signified the terms of its title in part as a response to such debates - many of which tum on the question of drama's relation to traditional concepts of culture, as well as to newer methods of cultural critique. Of course, questions, debates, and ad hoc conversation about the future of- and interrelationsbetween - various components of our field are often subject to severe reduction. In some circles, scholars of performance studies and self-labeled "progressive" theatre studies claim a particular kinship with cultural studies. This means promoting an approach to performance that unsettles divisions between high and low; that advocates a radically contextual and socially grounded analysis; that takes seriously feminist , antiracist, and intercultural critiques of identity and globalization; that deploys cutting-edge interdisciplinary methodologies; and that links scholarship to modes of praxis outside the academy. To claim a kinship with cultural studies and thus to assert one's "newness," in tum, tends to recast other orientations as "old" and as antithetical to a cultural studies project. Such identifications can have the...