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?