Question 5 - Kelsey Villarino

The first act of the play "Oleanna" by David Mamet, shows a very introverted Carol struggling to find her voice while speaking with her very educated professor, John. She can't finish her sentences, never seems to know quite how to word her argument, and is very clearly intimidated by John's knowledge of speech and vocabulary. However, seeing how his mind operates and understanding his viewpoint on higher education transforms Carol in the second act. She now uses her earlier repressed knowledge "as a tool with which to fight back against the dominant group that shapes the cultural world of the working class". While she may have seemed timid before, she now has all the confidence in the world in order to rip apart John's life. She assumes the dominant role now that she has tricked him with trusting her innocence.

Question 4

     The barriers that language creates between social classes can cause conflict in a way that the lower class can feel oppressed by not understanding what the upper class is stating. When people use large vocabularies to speak and the audience is not their own it can make the listener feel angry and oppressed.
      In Oleana this becomes evident right away when Carol is trying to speak to her professor and keeps repeating, " I don't understand".  She says this multiple times and you can see the professors patience wear thin. The professor tries to explain his thoughts over and over to Carol who just doesn't seem to understand what he is saying. The professor's language is that of an educated man and Carol's education level is obviously not up to his. This makes John look like the burgeiose and Carol a proleteriat.
        I think that John doesn't realize that he is using this elite jargon and it's not really brought to his attention until Carol states that she simply doesn't understand what he is saying. Johns words are to broad and advance for her to understand and she feels incompetent. Her feeling incompetent makes her angry and frustrated because she wants so badly to grasp the ideas John is trying to explain. I think that language can easily be used to put down people especially educated peoples vocabulary because when big words are used and less educated people don't understand it gives them a sense of power or superiority.  I know when people speak with a vocabulary that I don't understand I often wonder does this person think they are better than me that they have to use this language. Wouldn't it be easier to speak to in normal everyday talk?? And you see this happen as Carol slowly breaks down Johns wall of superiority and he levels with her.

Question # 5 I find this one to be rather true, on the basis that Carol and John always seem to be bickering at one another for the most part it is Carol. Because John has such a higher understanding of language so in that form he is dominating Carol and the majority of his students. “form of domination” – a tool of power in the hands of those in power, created by those in power, etc. This is very clear throughout Oleanna, because she is intimidated by his use of language. As quoted from " Language and its Discontents" language may be deployed to reinforce consensus and to shore up forms of domination by debasing the meanings of words, displacing our attention from the important to the trivial, or covering up with a smokescreen of obscurantisms that aim to deny and distance. Language is given to us in a variety of ways whether it be tv,music,movies, media, government, military. Language is a bondage used by those in power.

Erika - Blog 1

4. In the play "Oleanna" Carol first plays a hopeless student. She acts as if she doesn't understand the language that John uses, even though her level of knowledge isn't as far as we all thought at the beginning. At the end we all realize that she was using her class as a excuse to not being knowledgeable. Someone who is a proletariat would be oppressed by the language that the professor used, personally it took me a while to sink everything he said and to fully understand some of the words he was saying. I don't think he did it purposely, as a matter of fact he didn't know the power that his words had in this case. He thought every single word he said was understandable ( which it was for carol but probably wouldn't be for the majority of the proletariat community). This shows just how conscious the Bourgeoise are about other problems in the world that don't include them. John, like other bourgeoisie, liked his job because he was in control, and his students had to follow his rules which made him feel in total power just like any other bourgeoisie in the marxist social society.

8. I definitely agree with Showalter about the extremes of the characters. At the beginning of the play i was annoyed and wasn't in anyones team. I wasn't sure which social class the writer of Oleanna was for. I knew John was the Bourgeoisie and Carol the proletariat from the very beginning but i sided with neither of them. The perspectives were presented in a balanced manner but in this case i feel like the movie was made to make a point which i couldn't find since both these characters were so flawed. The movie was entertaining i can give it that, at the end i was happy John lost his mind and Carol got a beating, but i didn't find any strong points that helped me side with either the Bourgeoisie or the Proletariat.

Adrian Camiro, blog post 1 "Oleanna"

Question number 4

The main act on Oleanna is a conflict between a  upper middle class teacher (John), and a lo middle class (Carol). In this conflict language has an important role because the characters in the play can't communicate clear to each other because of the difference on their languages, we can hear on repetitive occasions  that Carol says to John "I don't understand, I can't understand". We can take John's  jargon as  elitist and exclusionist that brings him some kind of power because not everybody can understand it, and gives him a feeling of superiority.

When carol talks about "her group", she  says that they have been  oppressed for a long time and that they are tired of being left. We could interpret this as her saying that her class (that could be the proletarian) feel oppressed by the burgoise system, and also they feel oppressed by the language of the dominant educated elite.

Oleanna in Language - Jamal Clark

Question 5: As I read in Oleanna, in Act One the character Carol acts as a student who is troubled in not understanding the book and the entirety of the course. John, however, is the professor and although he is trying to help her understand by talking about his personal experiences before later on the act when he makes a proposal to change her grade to an A, restarting the course. In this act, Carol keeps expressing on how she doesn't understand John or the terms or "jargon" that is being used. Carol also stated to John "I come from a different social... a different economic..." (Mamet, 8) and in that she identifies herself with the lower class. In relation to the class system, it is known that the lower class has a hard time with the upper class in relation to language. John represents that as he speaks to Carol throughout the entirety of the play, but in his way to have her understand him, he would say a word he would use in his vernacular and then say a synonym that is simpler for her to understand. So, from this standpoint, John as seen as the upper class, elitist with power not only due to his status, but his use of language. With it, his personal identity is wrapped up in his personal power that is blinding him from Carol. In this, it is evident that Carol clearly does not have her own power and John has it and maintains it...however, Carol writes down everything that John says and basically uses it against him in Act 3.

By Act 3, Carol's personality has changed due to her possible influence by her Group, and with it: her personality. She evidently melded herself into what her Group is about and she adopts the very language that John uses and decides to use it against him. In the consulted report, she claimed everything that John has done and documented it as "fact". Now, in my honest opinion when it came to the accusation of rape that Carol said that John tried to do, I believe that in that moment she had gained herself personal power over the situation and, ultimately, over John. At this point, John has lost his chance at the tenure; the new house he was to buy; his job and is going to jail as the end result. His use of language as I noticed in Oleanna was still similar, but detached and started to degrade into anger and rage towards her.

The process in which this occurred in Oleanna was (in my opinion) compelling. In how her identity changed from a student to a formalized member of her Group, aimed to bring down John, and John from being a professor living a upper middle class lifestyle personally and in the university whose use of language alone proved that he had a power and lost himself in his identity, eventually lead him to having losing everything that he had gained, thus realizing that his identity is gone along with it...resulting into utter rage and loathing towards Carol.

In regards to Marxist theory, in how your social being can create one's consciousness, that concept is shown quite well in Oleanna and this also shows to me that language alone has its strength, but when coupled with social status and a collective group, it weighs heavy like a strong, abusive weapon.

Denai Adams Blog 1

Question 1

Reflection theory is displayed in a number of ways throughout the play. For example, Carol is originally displayed as a very innocent, nervous, grade oriented young women who claims to need extra help understanding John's class. At one point in the play she states that teachers how power over the children because one bad grade could prevent them from being able to get into a university. This play also makes it seem as if Carol's attitude to tenure is that it is all about power, and that John feels invincible due to the offer of this power, even though the papers have yet to be signed. Toward the end, Carol demonstrates obvious feminist techniques to completely rid John of his career. In my opinion it seemed as though the power completely flipped, showing that  teachers do not have as much power as they may think. One student is not only able to prevent John from getting tenure, but she also makes sure he loses his job all together. Ultimately, she is able to push him so far that he loses his freedom, while she guarantees he goes to jail. I feel it was critical that Carol's character used sexual harassment in the manner that she did because it created a largely dominate position for her. Since the claims were false (for the most part) she shows that a female can manipulate herself into power simply because she is seen as innocent and incapable of such wrongdoings.

     I feel, based on Oleanna, that the author might have grown up experiencing economic hardships, and therefore understands the extra struggle it takes to reach the top. This could similarly mean that the author could have been very much like John's character, in the sense that he grew up not understanding school and now strives to help others understand. However, that could have made the author very critical of the educational system, and that is why he puts a negative connotation on both tenure and false sexual harassment claims.

Blog 1-Jess

Question 4

In regards to John's “jargon” I felt that he used college level words, nothing too complicated. Instead of making me feel sorry for her, Carol made me angry because she didn't know what the teacher was talking about, ever. College isn't something everyone HAS to do. She didn't have to go to college, but if you are going to go you should educated enough to be in the classes that you are taking.

Each type of class requires a specific type of language. For example if you are taking and intro biology class you are going to be learning words that are really only used in biology. Your teacher is going to use these words because that is a really good way for you to learn them.

I don't know if there is an “elitist” language. People who are higher educated tend to use a larger vocabulary, but again if you are in college expect to be spoken to in a college appropriate vocabulary or ask what the word means THE FIRST TIME it is used.

Blog #1 - Tyler C.

Question 4:  The social class conflict in Oleanna is difficult to analyze because it's hard to pinpoint what exactly Carol's intentions were from the very beginning.  From the short class discussion we had on Thursday, it seemed that most people assumed that Carol had already intended to revolt and bring John down from the beginning.  If this is the case, then the conflict arises from Carol's group feeling that their social class is being exploited and treated unfairly by John and those like him in his upper social class.  However, if initially Carol genuinely did want to see him to talk about her grade, then the conflict that arose afterwards resulted from misunderstanding or misinterpretation from both parties based on their social class perspectives.

I do think that John's use of specialized language did contribute to the conflict, but I don't think it was intended to be elitist.  From Carol's perspective, I could see how it could be interpreted as a tool of oppression or exclusion, but to say that was John's intent is too presumptuous.  To me, it just seemed like that was the type of language John was most comfortable using since he seemed perfectly fine with explaining what he meant (he never belittled her for not knowing what he was talking about.)  It's frustrating to analyze, because Carol (presumably) came to this university to learn, yet when John uses vocabulary and language she doesn't understand she views it as him trying to hold a position of power rather than an opportunity to learn.  So, in my opinion, because John did not intend to use his language for elitist or exclusionary purposes, viewing it in that fashion as Carol did is a one-sided misinterpretation.

Question 8:  I have to agree with Showalter.  I really don't think that Mamet provided a balanced perspective since it's too easy to take John's side in the conflict and view Carol's actions as being mostly malicious.  

John did do many things wrong, such as manhandling her inappropriately, appearing self-absorbed at times, and arguably not using his position of power to the best that he could.  However, it's hard to see many of John's actions as anything but good-intentioned, especially in the first act.  This might be due to the lack of contextual information outside of the office setting which the entire play took place.  Carol did note a few remarks John made towards female classmates (something like "Don't you look fetching?") but without more of that outside information, it's difficult to see John and Carol as equally abusive.  The most balanced argument I can think of is that John simply misunderstood Carol's social background, which caused him to act in a way that made Carol misinterpret the intention of his actions and use of language.  But even then, I can't say that John deserved what he got just because of a misunderstanding.  

Dekoekkoek Blog 1

1.  To be honest, I don’t see a strong connection between the characters of Oleanna and the real world.  The dialogue is interesting, and so is the conflict created between the two characters, but is all highly artificial, primarily because Oleanna’s character and her actions are so devious and unbelievable.  I do believe that there are real criticisms to be made of “higher education,” but I’m not sure that the play addresses them.  The primary goal of Oleanna is to overthrow the professor from his position of power, and institute her “group’s” agenda.  In other words, Oleanna wants to control the curriculum of the school.  My question would be, why would you even go to school in the first place if you felt your teachers were wrong, needed to be torn down, and the curriculum replaced with your superior ideas?  Oleanna, at least in her own mind, doesn’t need a teacher.  She accuses her professor in once instance saying “You are not god.”  But she might just as well have said “I am god” since she felt perfectly comfortable putting her books and her ideas in place of his.  In other words, she didn’t ever actually have a problem with the social power and authority of his position as a teacher.  She merely wanted it for herself.

The play doesn’t seem to do a good job to me of reflecting the position of a lower-class or socially divergent student, simply because her character is so maliciously devious and manipulative.  Oleanna is totally unlikeable as a character, and I don’t think she reflects at all underprivileged or social outliers at all.  At least, none of the ones that I know would want to be associated with her!

I understand that we could view the professor as the “bourgeoisie”, and Oleanna as the “proletariat”, but isn’t the fact that she is attending what appears to be a prestigious school actually mark her as a member of the bourgeoisie class, or at least a future bourgeoisie in training?  I don’t actually see a theme of exploitation in Oleanna, other than perhaps the text-book aspect.  The modern cartel system of text-books (twenty editions with no real changes to content) and price gouging is definitely a system of exploitation against American students and the families who food the bill.

I’m not really sure what the author’s worldview is just from watching this one work, because he never judges either of his characters, but rather steps back and let’s you decide for yourself who you hate more.  I wonder if maybe the point of his work was less about social commentary than it was about the art of creating strong emotional reactions in his audience?

2.  In the beginning of Oleanna the professor clearly is in the position of power.  I would argue that his powerful is legitimate though, since he presumably is teaching a subject that he is an expert on, while his students are not.  Also, his students are perfectly free to not attend his class and pay for his services (it is a private college), so his authority, while real, is not coercive in any way, and presumably, his students are voluntarily submitting to his authority.  Oleanna, after filing her complaint has the upper hand for the rest of the play, and actually has her final victory over the professor when he loses his temper and hits her.  The difference is that her hegemony was gained through deceit and manipulation.  She attempted coercion near the end when she made a list of her demands to her professor and offered to rescind her fraudulent complaint against him if he agreed to her hegemony.  I would argue then that her hegemony was complete at that moment, but that it was also illegitimate since it rested on fraud, lies, and coercion.  This brings up interesting questions about what makes authority and power legitimate or illegitimate.  What is ironic, is that if we do view Oleanna’s character as the revolting proletariat and John as the overthrown bourgeoisie, her successful revolution is no real success at all since she is clearly just as much or more of a tyrant than the professor that she accuses of just those flaws.  In other words, it brings up the question, whose tyranny is worse, the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, or the tyranny of the proletariat once he has taken the power formerly exercised by the other?

4.  I do believe that social conflict is very real, but the conflict in Oleanna is so artificial, and the character of Oleanna so unbelievable that I don’t see it as a good reflection of real-world social issues.  I found Oleanna’s constant nagging of the professor about his language to be quite annoying since I saw it as an attack on knowledge and on the beauty of the English language.  My personal perspective is that if you have a poor vocabulary and don’t understand the language being used, it is your problem, not the speaker’s.  I love the English language and I love words, and I think it is offensive to ask someone to dumb down their speech.  Oleanna seemed to take it as a personal insult that John used a large vocabulary instead of taking it as an opportunity to better herself and increase her knowledge.  I found this attack on the beauty of language disturbing.  John’s jargon could be viewed as elitist, but we should change that by helping everyone to speak beautifully regardless of social class.  Why let the elites have a monopoly on the command of the English language?  It definitely could exclude some people from the conversation, but then maybe they should be in a less advanced class?  It does afford him power as well, the power that comes from knowledge, but again the question is whether that power is legitimate or not.

5.  Oleanna in the early part of the play basically lies about not understanding her professors vocabulary, and accuses him of “strutting and posturing”, but we later find that she is actually quite eloquent herself.  So her whole objection to his use of large words was actually just a sinister ploy to fool him into thinking that she was inferior to him and needed his help.  It is interesting to watch her use of language transform throughout the play as she increases in power.  In a sense, she ends the play becoming what she claimed to hate (the eloquent exerciser of power), while John is left stuttering and muddled in his speech, with his final words being nothing more than a dazed “Oh God.”

6.  I really wonder as I said before if the play is more about the art of evoking powerful responses.  If it is a cautionary tale meant to warn professors and teachers, it fails, since John is an unusually foolish teacher, and Oleanna is a unusually sinister student.  As I mentioned before, I find it hard to really pull any real world lessons out of this play since I find both of the characters, but particularly Oleanna to be totally unbelievable.  I wonder if perhaps the scholar Richard Badenhausen was just being opportunistic by weighing in on a contemporarily faddish play (Oleanna) that was all the buzz at the time?  I find it personally difficult to engage in a conversation about social lessons taught by the play since I see it more as a artistic and powerful work of fantasy designed to evoke strong emotions, than as a educational work of social commentary.

7.  Now that is interesting analysis!  That is one lesson we could take from the play; how a person can use false accusations to destroy another person and remove them from a position of power.  Curry quotes the definition of sexual harassment as "Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting the individual; or such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.”  I think his argument that Oleanna is really about false allegations is totally accurate since John’s behavior never met the definition of sexual harassment.

8.  I completely agree with Showalter’s assessment!  Neither character is very likeable, and Oleanna is especially unlikeable and unrealistic just because of her attitude and her lies.  Showalter basically says that Mamet fails to deal with the issue of sexual harassment since the play is really about false accusations of harassment.  I think if I was a feminist I’d be more than a bit annoyed at being represented by Oleanna’s character and would voice the same objections!

Important Marxist concepts (and examples from Oleanna that illustrate them)

1. Ideology: Ideologies are the changing ideas, values, and feelings through which individuals experience their societies.They present the dominant ideas and values as the beliefs of society as a whole, thus preventing individuals from seeing how society actually functions. Literature, as a cultural production, is a form of ideology, one that legitimizes the power of the ruling class. In the eighteenth century, for example, literature was used by the English upper classes both to express and transmit the dominant value systems to the lower classes.”

2. Hegemony: is a pretty complex concept, but . . . it’s a form of power, influence, and (often hidden)coercion that “[. . . ] does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own”, according to Raymond Williams a preeminent Marxist theorist (his “Marxism and Literature” is one of the additional pieces of Marxist theory I posted for you in BB.)

Keep in mind that a Marxist believes that no one/no group “owns” power; it’s out there, circulating, until someone grabs it, and it’s slippery, too – one might have easily get it and even more easily lose it, and thus the need for it to be “renewed . . . altered”, etc. 

Consider John’s recognition of hegemony operating in his feud with Carol: he says, “is it not always at those points that we consider ourselves least assailable that we are the most vulnerable?” )

Hegemony is both dynamic and “. . . it attempts to neutralize opposition – ‘the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate [alternatives and opposition]’" (also Williams). Hegemony is also “the necessary condition for a successful overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and its allies”.

If you consider Carol part of the proletariat group and John as a part of the bourgeoisie who exercises social and educational hegemony, we see how this condition is operating prior to the a major shift in power dynamics.

According to another major Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, “hegemony, therefore, is a process by which "educative pressure [is] applied to single individuals so as to obtain their consent and their collaboration, turning necessity and coercion into 'freedom' . . .." The "freedom" produced by instruments of the ruling class thus molds the "free" subject to the needs of an economic base, "the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production." Essentially, this is a condition/process whereby people can be manipulated and controlled so long as they are made to feel/believe that they’re free. Hegemony is further described by Gramsci as “"the "'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group [i.e. the ruling class – in Gramsci's Western Europe, the bourgeoisie]; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. For Gramsci, hegemony is exercised primarily through the superstructure. This is an important distinction as we move to the . . .

3. Superstructure: according to Williams in “Marxism and Literature”:

1. "(a) legal and political forms which express existing real relations of production;
2. (b) forms of consciousness which express a particular class view of the world;
3. (c) a process in which, over a whole range of activities, men [sic] become conscious of a fundamental economic conflict and fight it out.

A simpler definition of superstructure: “all human institutions and ideologies . . . including all social and legal institutions, all political and educational systems, all religions, and all art. These ideologies and institutions develop as a direct result of the economic means of production, not the other way around.” (this comes from Charles Bressler, who wrote the introduction to theory text I use regularly with my students). How do you think the superstructure works with regard to higher education?

4. Economic base: the economic means of production in a given society (a Marxist would suggest that the economic base of a capitalist system is exploitative and designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

An elite university (or any college, really), the kind at which John teaches and Carol attends, has an economic base; the mighty budget controls the organization of everything: the tenure John is on the verge of getting, the tuition that Carol likely has paid for her through grants and scholarships, etc.)John, of course, hopes to attain tenure primarily for the economic value – as he admits, “I have an interest in the status quo” (as opposed to wanting tenure purely for altruistic reasons).

5. Proletariat: from the good ol’ Manifesto: "the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live".

Can you see how Carol might be a symbolic representation of the proletariat position?

Lenin himself articulated the proletariat "As the only consistently revolutionary class of contemporary society, [the proletariat] must be the leader in the struggle of the whole people for a fully democratic revolution, in the struggle of all the working and exploited people against the oppressors and exploiters.”

 Obviously, Carol, then, is the visible face of her group, which is working toward unseating John, who’s obviously the exploiter (from Carol’s point of view, of course).

From Bressler: “Consciously and unconsciously, the ruling class forces its ideology on the working class or the proletariat, also called the wage slaves. In effect, the bourgeoisie develops and controls the superstructure. In such a system, the rich become richer, and the poor become poorer and increasingly more oppressed. The bourgeoisie’s ideology effectively works to perpetuate the system upon which it was founded. By controlling material [economic] relationships, the bourgeoisie controls a society’s ideology” (emphasis mine).

What do you need to believe or at least acknowledge to do Marxist literary analysis?

1.    That reality is understandable and definable (in other words, its not some abstract idea or something one can define in lots of different ways) and that our reality (our place in society, position in our family, economic reality, etc.) shapes our consciousness (this is the exact opposite of capitalist ideology, which suggests the individual can transcend their reality and make their own consciousness (reality). You should look closely at character backgrounds, their jobs, their familial indoctrination/reality, their social class.

2.    Accordingly, our social and particularly economic realities very much shape our beliefs and values (as opposed to freely defining our beliefs and values).

3.    That a class-based society is necessarily exploitative (some group of people must be exploited others; these exploiters are exploited by those richer and more powerful than they are, etc. etc.) A capitalist society absolutely requires “wage slaves” – workers in low-level service positions that offer no opportunity for advancement or cultural capital (many literary analyses examine and explain where exploitation is occurring in which situations and articulate the consequences of said exploitation.

4.    “As an approach to literary analysis, Marxism’s methodology is a dynamic process that maintains that a proper critique (proper defined as that which aggress with socialistic or Marxist beliefs) of a text cannot exist in isolation from the cultural situation in which the text involved” (Bressler). A text, then, cannot be divorced from its historical reality, the culture into which it was written, the dominant values and assumptions of the culture of the text’s “birth”. For example, the play Oleanna cannot be considered outside the early 1990s’ social and political dramas (like the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill sexual harassment case, new and morphing policies on sexual harassment in the workplace, etc.)

5.    The writer cannot write “outside” his or her consciousness/reality. By necessity, the literary text will reflect the author’s (maybe implicitly, but it will be there) economic and social realities, his/her lived experience. While that writer may explicitly support OR reject a particular value, practice, or assumption, their own experience heavily colors such support or critique (even if the author actively tries to write outside personal reality and experience). Thus, David Mamet, writing Oleanna, is revealing his views, his beliefs, his assumptions (in some way or another).

6.    “Whatever method the critic chooses, a Marxist approach exposes the dominant class, demonstrates how the bourgeoisie’s ideology controls and oppresses the working class, and highlights elements of society most affected by such oppression” (Bressler).

Oleanna Trailer and Other Vignettes

Also, Julia Stiles talks about playing Carol, then

actors Julian Sands, Rose McGowan, Chris Noth, Robert Loggia, 

and a few others react to the play. 

Lastly, a scene from Broadway, with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles.

Blog Post 1 (due by Sat. 9/29)

You CAN elect to write an extended answer to one of these questions as your 10-paragraph paper. If you are considering doing so, I'd answer that question here to get a head start/develop part of your paper via your blog response.

Each time you blog, you are responsible for answering one or two questions (thoroughly and thoughtfully) and responding to at least two peer posts. Your responses to others' posts should help further develop the conversation, extend/explore ideas introduced, and/or ask the writer critical questions about his/her response in order to extend said conversation.) 

Question 1: Marxist theorist Georg Luka´cs, a Russian formalist, believed that “a detailed analysis of symbols, images, and other literary devices would reveal class conflict and expose the direct relationship between the economic base and the superstructure reflected in art. [This is] known as reflection theory. This approach to literary analysis declares that a text directly reflects a society’s consciousness . . . For these theorists, literature is a part of the superstructure and directly reflects the economic base. By giving a text a close reading, these critics believe they can reveal the reality of a text and the author’s Weltanschauung, or worldview. It is the critic’s job to show how the characters within the text are typical of their historical, socioeconomic setting and the author’s worldview.”

Using the general idea of reflection theory, explain how the characters in Oleanna reflect real-world (and American) ideas, problems, concerns, beliefs (for example, how does the play reveal anxieties about higher education? The tenure system? How does the play reflect concerns about sexual harassment in the workplace (its use as a “tool” to advance versus genuine accusation)? What does the play establish about students coming from a working class, or as Carol says, “a different social, a different economic” place and who endure “prejudices” that can be “economic” and “sexual” (among other things)? Basically, how does the play reflect the position of a lower-class student whose economic and sexual positions/preferences are outside the dominant ideal? What does the play establish about exploitation in the classroom that might mirror what can and does happen to students and professors? Etc. etc. What do you think the author’s worldview might look like based purely on Oleanna?

Question 2, which corresponds directly to definition 2 (hegemony): How, specifically, is hegemony exercised in Oleanna? Where does it begin to fail? “Unlike Luka´cs and his followers who assert that the superstructure reflects the economic base, the Italian Antonio Gramsci  . . . declares that a complex relationship exists between the base and the superstructure. How, Gramsci asks, is the bourgeoisie able to control and maintain its dominance over the proletariat? His answer: the bourgeoisie establish and maintain what he calls hegemony, which is the assumptions, values, and meanings that shape meaning and define reality for the majority of people in a given culture. . . . This shaping of a people’s ideologies is, according to Gramsci, a kind of deception whereby the majority of people forget about or abandon their own interests and desires and accept the dominant values and beliefs as their own.” How does hegemony control Carol and/or John’s assumptions, values, and meanings? (John actually explores this question implicitly when he notes that going to college became, “after the war,” a trend for those who were already part of or “aspiring to the new vast middle class”, that people have accepted a college education as a given good and a necessity but “have ceased to ask: what is it good for?” Effectively, they’ve accepted the dominant assumption that college is a must, even if it isn’t particularly necessary or important to one’s actual desires.)

Question 4: What kind of social class conflicts does the text reveal? That is, what sort of conflict will likely arise when a member of the working class and the middle/upper middle class collide? (An example from Oleanna: Carol confronts John again and again about his language, or jargon, consistently asking him to define his terms. John uses academic jargon without even noticing he’s doing so; his complicated lexicon is so internalized that he seemingly doesn’t notice that he may be excluding students by failing to explain terms. Thus, the class conflict at hand involves the use of specialized language, usually acquired only via a college education, versus the use of the vernacular (everyday, ordinary language). Is John’s jargon elitist? Exclusionist? Does it afford him a particular kind of power? Would Carol or someone like her (since we know that, ultimately, she understands John just fine) be considered oppressed by the language of the dominant educated elite? Another possibility: the “group’s” ideology versus John’s/ideology of the university.)

***Several of the articles I posted deal particularly with language and power in Oleanna.

Question 5: According to the author of the scholarly article “PC Powerplay: Language and Representation in Oleanna”, The inhabitants of Mamet's plays
find their identity, and thus their personal power, through language.”  Explain this process as you see it happening in the play. If you choose this question please read and quote from my essay titled “Language and Its Discontents” and Connections to Oleanna”. (Mine is grouped with the other critical essays in BB).

Question 6: Scholar Richard Badenhausen (“The Modern Academy Raging in the Dark: Misreading Mamet's Political Incorrectness in Oleanna"), acknowledges that “In discussing the 1992 debut of David Mamet's Oleanna, audiences and critics tended to highlight two features of the play: its indictment of political correctness on college campuses in America and its treatment of sexual harassment, an issue made more potent then by the just-concluded October, 1991, Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.¹ Both of these timely themes allowed spectators of varied political persuasions to take up the cause of the Left or Right via the play's two characters, characters polarized not only in their gender, but physically, generationally, and educationally.”

However, he argues that, “Oleanna ultimately explores the perils of inferior teaching and the subsequent misreadings that necessarily follow in a pedagogical environment that tacitly reinforces (instead of collapsing or bridging) hierarchical differences amongst its participants. In fact, this is more a play about teaching, reading, and understanding: how to do those things well and the consequences of doing them poorly. As such, Oleanna offers an ominous commentary on education in America and more particularly functions as a dire warning both to and about those doing the educating.”

Do you agree with his reading? Is the play a cautionary tale meant to warn both would-be and current students and professors? Do you disagree? Be sure to use clear textual examples to support your answer.

Question 7: J.K Curry (“David Mamet's Oleanna as Commentary on Sexual Harassment in the Academy”) asserts that "The problem with Oleanna is that it is not really, or not primarily, about sexual harassment at all but  rather about false allegations. Or, perhaps more accurately, about exaggerated or distorted claims of harassment, for John actually has said or done many of the things in Carol's report, though in slightly different context. The work obscures the issue of sexual harassment by suggesting that sexual harassment is really a ploy of militant feminists to disempower and destroy whilte, middle-class, male academics." (The article as a whole offers a Marxist/feminist analysis of the play.)

Do you agree with Curry? If so, how and where does the play argue that sexual harassment is simply a tool of disempowerment meant to destroy those with more power and cultural cache (white educated males being a major such group)? Be sure to quote directly from the article.

Question 8: In well known feminist theorist Elaine Showalter’s indictment of Oleanna ("Acts of Violence: David Mamet and the Language of Men"), “In making his female protagonist a dishonest, androgynous zealot, and his male protagonist a devoted husband and father who defends freedom of thought, Mamet does not exactly wrestle with the moral complexities of sexual harassment. What he has written is a polarizing play about a false accusation of sexual harassment, and that would be fair enough--false accusations of harassment, rape and child abuse indeed occur--if he were not claiming to present a balanced, Rashomon-like case. The disturbing questions about power, gender and paranoia raised in Oleanna cannot be resolved with an irrational act of violence.

Essentially, Showalter is saying that the characters are drawn so extremely that the play doesn’t accomplish what Mamet suggested it should (he tells us that, no matter who’s side your on, you’re “wrong”, which suggests their perspectives are presented fairly and in a balanced manner). What do you think?

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