I feel compelled to agree with Scholar Richard Badenhausen
(“The Modern Academy Raging in the Dark: Misreading Mamet's Political
Incorrectness in Oleanna"), when he 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..” Political
correctness on college campuses was an important topic, since there’s this ‘fine
line’ of political correctness that administrators can’t cross but the
professor in Oleanna most certainly did. The treatment of sexual harassment being
a very important topic that was brought up in Oleanna as well, where again
there is a fine line you shouldn’t cross, and again John did. “ characters polarized not only in their
gender, but physically, generationally, and educationally.” I agree with
Richard Badenhausen here as well, you couldn’t have a found a more demographically
polarized cast, unless the student was also a minority.
It was important to make these contradicting
traits and touch on such highly controversial issues or else it would not have
been as easy to explore “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.” And you see this time and time again, with ample context amplifying
the shortcomings of the system at hand with the constant interruptions, the crossings
of the ‘political correctedness’ and ‘sexual harassment’ lines, and their overall
miscommunication due to pedagogical jargon.
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