The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics

New Historicism and American Theater History: Toward an Interdisciplinary Paradigm for Scholarship

New Toward an Historicism and Interdisciplinary American Theater Paradigm for Scholarship History BRUCE A. McCONACHIE In the March 1989 issue of the American Quarterly, four scholars discuss academia's "malign neglect" of the field of American theater and drama. Despite finding that critics outside the United States continue to view American plays of the last forty years "as a major, probably the major world drama," C. W. E. Bigsby comments that departments of English, theater, and American studies in this country rarely treat our theater with a similar level of seriousness. As Susan Harris Smith notes, the "generic hegemony" of poetry and narrative fiction in literary studies excludes or marginalizes drama, particularly American drama. She traces this practice-evident in course syllabi, standard anthologies, and general literary histories-to several factors, among them: Puritan suspicions of theatrical representation, the tendency of the discipline to elevate English and continental plays at the expense of American drama, and academic dislike of authors who aspire to popularity or political influence . To this list, Joyce Flynn adds our cultural distrust of artistic forms that depend upon group rather than individual processes for production and reception. Flynn also cites the institutional shortcomings of most theater departments; oriented toward production rather than research, they are often inhospitable places for the pursuit of wide-ranging scholarship . Finally, Michael Cadden comments that many scholars foolishly 266 The Academic Institution view drama as "an unwholesomely compromised form of literature" since it must "traffic with commerce" to succeed. Smith concludes, and Bigsby, Flynn, and Cadden implicitly agree, that an examination of American dramatic theater "should not be limited to outdated, aesthetic proscriptions of canonical 'correctness,' but should enrich the literary [and historical] record by replacing American drama in its larger cultural context."! Examining American theater in its cultural-historical context makes excellent sense. Few scholars working in the field today, however, grasp the potential theoretical approaches, the relevant social-historical scholarship , and the symbolic and rhetorical inducements of American drama for its historical contemporaries to handle the interdisciplinary demands of such a task. Most historians in theater programs know the relevant plays and their immediate theatrical context, but lack theoretical sophistication and knowledge of recent scholarship in social history. Critics of American drama in English departments are generally more up-to-date in theoretical issues as they apply to "major" plays, but have not needed to learn much theatrical or social history. Scholars in programs of American studies and similar interdisciplinary fields probably know more than their theater or English colleagues about social history and cultural theory, but few of them have studied American theater history or even read many plays. A glance at the published scholarship and the titles of papers delivered at major conferences over the last few years confirms these general observations. The lack of an appropriate forum within which committed scholars might share their insights and concerns further hampers the integration of these disparate fields. Although several journals accept articles which fuse the scholarly interests of two of these three related fields, their essays rarely synthesize insights drawn from American theater history, dramatic criticism, and cultural studies. Likewise, many scholars of American theater and drama attend two of the conventions of major associations which serve these three fields (the American Society for Theatre Research, Modern Language Association, and American Studies Association), but few attend all three. The proliferation of publications and panels actually dissipates efforts to focus on the interdisciplinary promise of scholarship in the subject. New Historicism and Theater History : 267 I believe that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to open up the ideological assumptions, formal categories, and historiographical conventions that have dominated the writing of American theater history. The New Historicism offers scholars in English, theater, and American studies a general framework within which a new paradigm for the interdisciplinary study of the American theatrical past can emerge. Traditional American theater and drama scholars have tended to accept uncritically the notion that individualism, democracy, and progress characterized the "American way" and that the American theater has embodied and reflected these attributes. Assuming as well that theatrical art transcended politics and commerce, these scholars constructed histories that presumed and celebrated a single, unified tradition bereft of major internal contradictions, a natural "evolution" tending toward the realistic theater of the twentieth century. Although contemporary scholars have corrected some of the shortcomings of this point of view-especially its denial of the cultural plurality of...