At the Intersections of Mode, Genre, and Media: A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama

Melodrama has never yet been a term of praise, though its derogatory status has not stopped it from being broadly applied to print and playhouse, across live and film, video, and digitally recorded performances screened at drive-ins, shopping malls, or art-house cinemas, to nondramatic art forms such as novels and paintings, and even to other forms of social or political life susceptible to cultural and rhetorical analysis. We think we know what we mean when we use the term to describe exaggerated emotional manipulation, but slight definitional pressure reveals enormous variation. When theater historians tell the story of melodrama’s emergence in the wake of the French Revolution, they identify a modern, multimedia genre of drama featuring the integration into the plays themselves of music, dance, and pantomime—performance elements usually kept discreet—where they serve to amplify and diversify the play’s expressive capacities. Recent film criticism, by contrast, tends to treat melodrama as a mode that includes silent film and classic woman’s film, as well as aspects of westerns, buddy movies, and almost any other kind of narrative film. Apart from a recent suggestion that mode exists below, rather than above, genre—that is to say, that it works closer to the scene of human production—little attention has been paid to the relations between these categories.¹

As either mode or genre, however, melodrama has been persistently associated with modernity, whether this is the modernity of cinematic technology or that of subjectivity ushered in by the French Revolution.² Lauren Berlant has recently proposed that the contemporary films of precarity—those, that is, that dramatize “the impact of neo-liberalism on the everyday life of the formerly protected classes”—be understood as postmelodramatic because they explore what comes after the coimplication of the sentimental and liberalism in the fantasy of “the good life.”³ Berlant treats melodrama less as a mode than as an ideologeme, and, as such, a periodizing tool, though its double status as both historical genre and transhistorical mode of representation makes this use somewhat tricky. We don’t need to decide whether our own moment is postmelodramatic to observe that perhaps the moonlit contours of melodrama are edging into visibility as the sun of modernist aesthetics sets. As one of the great disavoweds of modernism, under whose aegis we have been operating and to whose longevity even the by now more than twenty-year-old heralds of postmodernism themselves paradoxically attest, melodrama may have something to tell us about the status of such categories as media, mode, and genre as they contribute to standards of realism, as well as about modernist aesthetics.

The role melodrama has played in the modern organization of literary and nonliterary forms and styles has yet to be fully theorized and described, in part because some of the most sophisticated work on it has taken place in different disciplines. The essays assembled in this issue of Criticism were written for an interdisciplinary workshop, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose goals were to study melodrama in its historical emergence, as well as at other moments, including our own as a way to explore the terms media, mode, and genre, and their interrelations. Contributors each ruminate on texts of their choice and treat melodrama more or less explicitly as a mode, a genre, and/or a critical tool. To introduce what these essays do, I describe what the concept melodrama has been and can be used for. The goal is not to define melodrama for once and for all, nor to police its future uses but rather to see how it functioned as a multimedia genre in its moment of emergence, to identify its contributions as a mode to representation, and to examine its usefulness as a tool to enrich our critical practices.

Melo-drame: the term was first used to signify dramatic speech accompanied by music but quickly came to signify dramatic performances that included dance and pantomime elements, in addition to the musical accompaniment of speech, as well as song...