“…learning is much closer to invention than to verification…The modes of academic writing now taught in school tend to be positioned on the side of the already known rather than on the side of wanting to find out […] and hence discourage learning how to learn.” -Gregory Ulmer (Heuretics)
“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.” --Arthur Miller
Drama, as a form, is strange. Time and space limit drama in ways that are different than other literary forms; unlike the novel or film, its structure is determined by (1) a requisite physical space, namely the apparatus of the theater and (2) by how long the audience is willing to watch a performance. On the one hand, these conditions reflect a unique set of constraints, for drama is a text which is bound to more than the space of a page. But perhaps the most curious aspect of the genre is that despite occupying a physical space and a designated amount of time, drama cannot be held; unlike film or other mediums where one is able to rewind, pause, fast-forward and so on, dramatic performances are, for the most part, continuous and forward-moving, and once a play ends, it is impossible to recreate the exact same conditions of that performance twice —i.e. cadence, inflection, choreography, even audience. Thus, the script, the theater, and the determined length of the performance serve only as a blueprint; they set up a framework, but what occurs within the space of that framework is essentially fluid, always changing. Thus, the conditions of drama create a unique tension—while the physical space and the space of the script create boundaries for what can and cannot occur, the performance that takes place within that space make it a text that is, essentially, without a singular, stable form.
We also see this paradox reflected in drama’s thematic structure. It would seem that the fundamental argument of all drama is that nothing is transparent. Drama approaches reality with the assumption that life is mysterious, which is why, arguably, in each plot, control slips away from the protagonist. We begin with a character who says “I’ve got it” –meaning, someone who believes he or she possesses a whole series of possibilities or solutions—only to soon realize that this is not the case at all. Why? Because life is revealed as one of contingency, without reliable probabilities; the world of drama is one of surprise.
Thus, dramatic action is open to a series of reversals and failures, and it winds up in a place radically different from where it started. The result is that the protagonist begins to accept that nothing is predetermined, and thus constantly second guesses his own assumptions about the world around him. We see this, for example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Hamlet constantly doubts his assumptions about his father’s death. Ultimately, however, Hamlet resigns that “the readiness is all” (4.2.237). In other words, outcomes or consequences which might occur cannot be calculated or foreknown, only embraced with readiness.
Of course, along with each protagonist, every drama also has an antagonist, who insists on control, on that story being that story, and he is unscrupulous to this fact. So, what you get in drama is also a conflict of experience. Whereas the protagonist lives with contingencies and creates the possibility for growth, the antagonist never realizes this, or, rather, realizes it too late.
What this project seeks to do is to advocate that, as writing instructors, we approach our classrooms as sites of drama and our roles in those classrooms and our students as protagonists. By using the term “protagonist,” I do not wish to imply that the aim of this thesis is to heroically save the fields of rhetoric and composition. Quite the contrary—my thesis will argue that these fields do not require any saving at all; that by giving up our antagonistic will toward mastery—the desire to find the precise ”key” to a/effective writing pedagogy—we might instead be able to open up the field to the possibilities that come out of impreciseness, out of failure, out of not knowing. And by seeing our students as protagonists, we might better be able to help them give up their insistence that what they bring to the classroom—a set of values, experiences, ideas of what writing is and is not—need not be what they leave with. We must, like the protagonist of a drama, occupy a space predicated on contingencies, refusals, blockings. And most importantly, we must take away all expectations of what we as instructors will bring to the classroom, and like Hamlet resign ourselves to the idea that in the composition classroom, the readiness really is all.
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