Abstract
While "positivism and playtexts" is the old-fashioned mixture that still drives most undergraduate theatre history courses, and while an inability to think about fissures, gaps, evidence, documentation, hegemony, rhetoric, theory, invisibility, othering, silencing, genealogies, the cultural situatedness of literature, and the self-centeredness of most claims to the "universal" collectively remains a gaping hole in the training of most theatre majors (not to mention the thinking of many theatre practitioners), the fact remains that even graduate programs aspiring to and achieving innovation in history depend on students coming in with the sort of "background" or "knowledge" delivered in the very problemantic package of positivism and playtexts. Add to this the fact that the theatre history survey may be the only history course of any sort that a theatre major takes, and the dilemma becomes even thornier.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 21-27 |
Journal | Theatre Topics |
State | Published - Mar 2007 |