Louis Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing”

The final term paper for this course, due May 5 by 4:30 PM, will consist of an 8-15 page, double-spaced, carefully documented, technically clean and well-argued paper on either 1) a carefully constructed topic of your own choosing or 2) a topic that arises out of your encounter with one of the five essays that I've put on reserve especially for this assignment (excerpts of which are on the back of this page). Note: I will not accept electronic copies of your essays except by prior agreement.

If you choose option #1 you must come see me with a written proposal of your topic so that we can talk it through and so that I'm satisfied the argument is sound and manageable. Ideally, I'd like you to talk about more than one play in your essay, though there may be cases where it makes sense to focus on only one play. You must focus on a play or plays that we have studied this semester.

If you choose option #2, you should, first, read through the excerpts on the bottom of this page to get a sense of which essay you'd like to use as your “springboard.” Then access that essay on e-reserve (links directly to each essay are included below), read through the entire essay, and then construct a topic that addresses the issues raised in the essay as they relate to certain of the plays we studied this semester (ideally you will work on two or three of those plays). There is a lot of good stuff in those essays, and some of the issues will be quite familiar to you. But remember that the point of this assignment is to focus in on a particular argument—and you will need to construct that argument (based on the ideas of the essay you choose). You need go no further in your research than the essay and plays you choose to focus on, but you are certainly welcome to do more research if you wish and if your argument calls for it. By all means come see me to talk about your papers or send your questions to me via e-mail. I expect to be in every day between now and the 5th of May.

Plagiarism being the issue it is now with the proliferation of material on the web, I am going to insist that you very carefully document (cite in your paper and include in your bibliography) all the material you use to construct your argument. And please don't be tempted to plagiarize—we have some very sophisticated tools now at our disposal to find plagiarism, and we almost always do find it. I will show absolutely no mercy if I find anyone plagiarizing.

Essay Excerpts and E-reserve Links

Louis Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing”

If we can detect a “point of view” in the corpus of Shakespeare's plays, if they can be said to champion the special interest of a particular group, it is precisely that of the theatrical professionals. The “meta-dramatic” and “meta-theatrical” dimensions of Shakespeare's plays are currently exercising the ingenuity of a great many academic Shakespearean critics. I suggest that the significance of such artistic reflexivity needs to be seen in historical perspective, in the context of a dialectic between Shakespeare's profession and his society.
Click here for link to Montrose.

Two things follow from this: first, that tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy; second, that comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself. (65)
Click here for link to Frye.

Masculinity is inherently anxious: according to this argument, anxiety is not a secondary effect of masculinity, not simply an unpleasant aberration from what we might hypothetically understand as normative. Instead, I argue that masculine anxiety is a necessary and inevitable condition that operates on at least two significant levels: it reveals the fissures and contradictions of patriarchal systems and, at the same time, it paradoxically enables and drives patriarchy's reproduction and continuation of itself. (2)
Click here for link to Breitenberg.

To play with mimesis [imitation] is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.
Click here for link to Irigaray.

In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the `ideas' of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to the action (however perverse) that he does perform. This ideology talks of actions: I shall talk of action inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports' club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc. (297-98)
Click here for link to Althusser.