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Textual Harassment: Teaching Drama to Interrogate Reading Michael Vanden Heuvel We know of no system that functions perfectly, without losses, flights, wear and tear, error, accidents, opacity . . . [and] the distance from equality, from perfect agreement, is history. —Michael Serres The ongoing struggle to justify the teaching of dramatic literature within English and Theatre Departments has been further complicated in recent years by the emergence of various forms of interdisciplinary theory which, on the surface, seem to reduce dramatic texts to purely linguistic structures. However, a closer examination of recent theory reveals that it is deeply implicated in the processes and rhetorics of performance and theatricality. Indeed, the most potentially progressive applications of the new theory might well be found in the teaching of drama, so long as instructors are not bound to conventional reading practices which privilege the "literary" qualities of the dramatic text over its theatrical nature. A number of recent critics, in fact, have argued that conventional forms of reading have become so naturalized in literature classes that we have lost sight of the possibility that alternative modes of sense making may exist (Atkins and Johnson; Ulmer; Kecht). Their research opens up new possibilities for the teaching of reading and suggests that instead of finding ways to make drama "fit" into orthodox literature curricula and pedagogy, we might explore how the teaching of drama could be used to interrogate conventional reading practices. Dramatic literature, owing to its semiotic differences from fiction, poetry, and expository writing, may present literature teachers with a vehicle for critiquing the assumptions upon which traditional reading methodologies are based. With the addition of certain principles from theory, this critique might even offer an opportunity for a positive and extensive transformation of the reading practices we teach. Teachers, whether they acknowledge it or not, are always already theorists (McCormick 111). Through generations of humanistic tradition and years of institutional apprenticeship and conditioning, most college literature in159 160 Michael Vanden Heuvel structors have had inscribed within themselves what Robert Scholes labels a "professional unconscious," which prompts them to teach what seems like an obvious, common sense paradigm of reading (4). Scholes argues that this widely-accepted discursive framework often promotes the teaching of some version of what theorists call an "aesthetic of presence." This phrase defines an orthodox conception of literature as a shadowing forth of some ideal truth or knowledge that lies somewhere behind or before the literary representation of it, which is then communicated to an autonomous perceiving subject (Sayre 4). Literature teachers have traditionally called this occluded, timeless knowledge the author's "vision" or "worldview," even "genius," and have taught students what seems like the natural consequence of such aesthetic logic—that is, that the best literature is that which comes nearest to expressing its author's meaning in its purest, most "present" form. What teachers have sometimes been less conscious of, and what is rarely taught students, is that this seemingly natural mode of reading posits, and resides within, its own ideological space. This space reproduces a certain framework for interpreting the texts, literary and non-verbal, that make up the student's world. However, that space is no longer stable. As a culture we certainly have become less resistant to the notion that many observations are theory-laden, that is, founded on socially-constructed discursive formations, ideological paradigms, and tacit subject positions that are never absolutely objective. Educators have learned to be skeptical regarding any notion of reason that purports to narrate an absolute truth or normative practice by denying its own contingent desires and historical construction. As a result, teachers today inevitably work within fields of knowledge where claims to objectivity are being overturned in favor of forms of knowledge that recognize the constructed nature of their own truth claims and methodologies. What recent theory asks us to consider self-consciously is the question: "How do we teach in an atmosphere where difference and contradiction—that is, the necessary absence contained in texts—is at least part of the fabric of meaning?" More to the point of this essay, how can the teaching of drama in literature courses help foreground this question productively and allow teachers to acknowledge Gerald Graff...

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