Why We Don't Get No Respect and What We Are Doing About It; Or, The Rapprochement of Body and Mind and the Return of Comedia Studies

WHY WE DON'T GET NO RESPECT AND WHAT WE ARE DOING ABOUT IT; OR, THE RAPPROCHEMENT OF BODYAND MIND AND THE RETURN OF COMEDIA STUDIES CATHERINE CONNOR (SWIETLICKI) University ofVermont At the core of what we comediantes hope to revive in this "Back to Basics" session on "What Every Comediante Should Know," is our role as scholar/teachers. Although most ofus teach and research in prose and poetry to one extent or another, in our capacity as theater and drama specialists we have been the Rodney Dangerfields of Golden Age studies. That situation developed, in part, because comediantes have to know everything; we have to do it all. Versus specialists in the Quixote or the baroque poets, we have to know all about poetry and narrative, dramatic genres and their histories, biography, bibliography, paleography, critical theory, readership, spectatorship, censorship, and other aspects ofliterary history as well as the histories ofintellectual and popular cultures, theater architecture, performance and production practices, costuming, dance, and many more visual-oral-aural or phenomenologically oriented aspects ofperformance studies. In short, we can get "spread a little thin" because our work is so necessarily diverse and dispersed. At the same time, this is an enormous advantage and the reason why I believe our field is poised for a renaissance based on doing what we do best. We are the only field of genre studies to deal in the most direct way with the real and material world. Early modern theater—overwhelmingly written to be per153 154BCom, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2004) formed—is the medium and the message; it is dramatic text in the context ofhuman bodies and human presence interacting to make meanings. After a period of about twenty years in the seventies and into the nineties in which we were surfing with or drifting away from successive waves of French literary criticism, we have come to float and to swim again. Things started to turn around for us when we started devoting more time to performance and performance history and saw that our special leadership in Golden Ages studies comes from our unique position straddling both the textual- and the performance-centered worlds, by connecting head and body matters. At about the same time, another body-focused approach—mainly of Judith Butler and of Foucault—showed us a more discursive way of looking at social performance. We have come to surpass , however, the limitations of Butler's dead-end version of performativity precisely because we know that the body does not perform as an automaton within the hegemonic orders. Today's comediantes can use all the arguments about performance as social construction of the body and self, but we can also see how individual performances have particular meanings for performers and spectators that resist the rigid meanings of the discursive system. Unlike Butler—who doesn't study the material reality oftheater as a multimedia and polysémie experience—we analyze real bodies in performance, bodies connected to minds and to all the rich intellectual and cultural information that we work with every day as comedia specialists. I would like to contribute to this panel by calling attention to the very real advantage we have in doing everything about bodies and everything about minds and the interrelationship of the two. I offer the audience a handout with a few core bibliographical items pertinent to this body/mind approach and to our realizing the richness of our position straddling the textual- and the performance-centered worlds. Two main developments in this engaging process strengthen our position. First I will mention what I call the body/mind rapprochement in theater studies, and then I will turn briefly to the embodied cognitive revolution that has wide implications for anyone studying literature, culture, and particularly theater. The rapprochement taking place in theater and drama studies—between the worlds of text and stage—has been described particularly well in the recent publications ofStanton Garner, Jr. He sees that we have been stuck in a critical gap between phenomenology and semiotics, i.e., between the subjectivity ofa certain selfand the selfas an object lost in the discursive Connor155 system. Garner's approach to theatrical space as a "non-Cartesian [...] phenomenal...