Performing Theory: Synthesizing Creative and Analytical Impulses In The Women’s Literature Classroom

It is safe to say that I became a professor of Literature in spite of literary criticism. Like many of my current students, as an undergraduate I was flummoxed by the writing of Jacques Derrida, György Lukács, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In fact, in my junior year, I remember vowing that I would never pursue a Ph.D. in English because I did not love theory. Over time, I realized that there are many ways to be an English professor and that not all of my peers are fascinated by literary criticism. I also came to appreciate the wide range of texts that are considered “theory,” from Jacques Lacan’s Écrits to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera. A critical turning point for me occurred during my first year in graduate school, when I read Barbara Christian’s 1987 article “The Race For Theory.” Her critique of the ways in which theoretical texts can eclipse primary ones resonated strongly with me. Christian writes, “Critics are no longer concerned with literature but with other critics’ texts, for the critic yearning for attention has displaced the writer and has conceived of herself or himself as the center” (67). Though Christian was responding to a moment in the late 1980s and early 1990s in academia during which theoretical discourse was especially fetishized, I could nevertheless relate to her frustration when, as a student in graduate seminars in the early 2000s, I often felt that we hovered above the novel, poem, play, or short story at hand, discussing what others had written about the text instead of the text itself.

My evolving relationship to literary criticism has informed my teaching of an undergraduate upper-division literature class at San Francisco State University. Titled “Women and Literature,” this course fulfills the criticism and theory requirement for English majors at my institution. Although students write several analytical essays throughout the term, the final assignment is a creative project in which each student chooses a favorite theorist from the women critics we have read and writes a monologue from that theorist’s perspective as if she had attended the course for the past 16 weeks. Using excerpts from that critic’s work as well as quotations from the four primary works we have read, students write a first-person monologue and then perform it for the class during the final weeks of the semester. They also submit a short reflection on the process of writing the monologue. Below are the instructions for the three-part assignment as they appear in the course syllabus:

1. 1. MONOLOGUE SCRIPT (100 points): You will write a 2-3-page typed, double-spaced monologue from the perspective of ONE of the theorists we have read in the class. You should discuss what you think your theorist would have learned this term if she had been a student in English 614. What insights, connections, and/ or questions would your chosen theorist have? You may (in fact, you should) be creative, but your choices in terms of content and language should be informed by your theorist’s ideology and writing style. You should include at least two direct quotations from a text by your theorist and at least 4 direct quotations from 4 other texts we have read this semester.

2. 2. MONOLOGUE PERFORMANCE (100 points): You will perform your monologue for the rest of the class (3-5 minutes). You need not memorize your monologue, but you should be very comfortable with your lines. Feel free to bring props, costumes, or other visual aids that might enhance your performance.

3. 3. SHORT REFLECTION (100 points): You will write a 2-page reflection on the experience of writing your monologue. Some questions to consider are: What were the challenges of this project? What did you learn from this project? How did it help you to review what you have learned in 614? How did it enhance your understanding of the authors and ideas studied this term? How was this project a more/less/equally productive way of wrapping up the semester than...