4 - Did She Jump or Was She Pushed? American Drama in the University Curriculum

Summary

What is the cultural value of American drama and how does that valuation correlate to the place of American drama in the nation's university curriculum? To begin an answer that informs my study and critique of the curricular placement of American drama, I suggest the relevance of an approach that analyzes comparatively drama's material relations with other forms of cultural enterprise. In his sociological study of art, literature, and aesthetics, The Field of Production (1993), Pierre Bourdieu, basing his assessment on late-nineteenth-century French culture, establishes a cultural hierarchy predicated on two valuations, economic and symbolic. Using an economic valuation, Bourdieu ascertains that drama was above the novel and poetry because it secured large profits, provided by a bourgeois and relatively restricted audience, for very few theatres. On the other hand, this credit was countered by the discredit that accrued as audiences grew. Nonetheless, he argues, “the theatre, which directly experiences the immediate sanction of the bourgeois public, with its values and conformisms, can earn the institutionalized consecration of academics and official honours, as well as money” (51). Not only is Bourdieu writing about French theatre, he is also equating theatre and drama, which, in American culture and curriculum, are largely separate institutions. Nonetheless, Bourdieu's demonstration of the factors involved in arriving at cultural value are pertinent to the problematic position of American drama in its social and academic contexts; because dramatic literature is the basis for theatrical performance it suffers the taint of economic success (when it is successful) but in American culture, and certainly in academe, reaps few of the benefits.