The Shakespeare Association of America conference, Dallas, March 13-15, 2008
Image: John W. Waterhouse, Miranda - The Tempest (1916) (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Guest Post: Alan Galey (University of Alberta)
This year’s SAA conference was a standout in my experience, which so far includes most of the SAA meetings since 2002. Aside from offering an escape from the lingering winter in my home city of Edmonton (on roughly the same latitude as Moscow) for the warm hospitality of Texas, the conference had one of the strongest programs in years .
The SAA seminar format
More about program highlights below — first let me explain how the SAA format works, since it’s not just the typical collection of three-paper panels. The great majority of those presenting papers do so in pre-arranged seminars whose participants spend several months ahead of the conference sharing and giving feedback on research. Here’s a quick run-through for those who’ve never experienced the seminar format. In summer or early fall of each year the SAA Bulletin lists topics and blurbs for about 35 seminars or workshops. For example, this year I co-led, with Travis DeCook (Carleton U), a seminar on “Shakespearean Scripture: Biblical Contexts for Reception and Transmission,” and the year before I was a participant in Lukas Erne’s and Patrick Cheney’s excellent seminar on “Textual Cultures”. Leaders try to propose seminars that provoke thinking on a topic that matters — not necessarily Shakespeare-centered — but also to provide space for the full spectrum of critical approaches. Participants send in their top four seminar/workshop choices, learn of the result by email, then send an abstract to the rest of the group describing the paper they’ll write. As the conference itself draws closer, participants send their complete papers to each other (usually 12-15 pages), then write and receive comments on papers (often one writes two 1-page responses to designated papers, and receives two responses to one’s one paper).
So, by the time the seminar participants gather for a 2-hour discussion at the SAA conference, the dialogue is already well underway: everyone has already read many pages of each other’s research, shared and received in writing their thoughts on papers, and generally built up an atmosphere of collegiality. The face-to-face meeting allows them to continue the discussion in person, and to respond to questions and comments from auditors who attend the session. Very often the conversation keeps on going in hotel bars and nearby restaurants. (Workshops and seminars may depart from this approach depending on their leaders; for example, a seminar may have a designated respondent who doesn’t contribute a paper.) How this whole system worked in the days before email is beyond me — but I’m told it did.
Here’s why it works so well. The SAA seminar format takes the best aspects of the unscripted, improvisational moments of conferences — the question periods that follow papers; the informal conversations in hallways, lobbies, and restaurants; the serendipity of sharing a banquet table with a future collaborator; the subsequent building of relationships and sharing of material — and structures the SAA conference experience *around* these moments, which tend to happen only in the interstices of other formats. The SAA format also embodies a democratic, anti-elitist ethos that captures the essence of peer-review. Each seminar welcomes all comers, from grad students to senior scholars, from the brilliant to the dubious, and becomes a self-policing intellectual community on a small scale: everyone who does the work gets a hearing. Grad students and junior faculty will find themselves receiving feedback from the most senior people in the field, and having to articulate responses of their own to ideas they might not otherwise have considered. Good research tends to be awarded much more attention and engagement than one finds with a traditional 20-minute paper delivery; conversely, sub-par research usually receives the pointers it needs to improve. Grad students really benefit from this system, since they’re less distracted by the pressure to self-advertise they might otherwise feel in a formal paper presentation. SAA simply takes the good conversations at the heart of any worthwhile conference and multiplies them.
Trade-offs
Democracy is risky, and this format is vulnerable to abuse like any other. Occasionally papers will ignore or give only token attention to the seminar topic. In rare cases participants fail to take the response process seriously, and don’t reciprocate with the same generosity they’ve been shown by others. The self-policing nature of seminars usually deals with these problems by allocating attention to deserving papers, rewarding participation in good faith. A healthy collegiality remains the norm, backed up by the knowledge of a face-to-face meeting at the conference.
Another challenge of the format is that it affords no mechanism to advance-filter papers on conspiracy theories like the anti-Stratfordian authorship notion (i.e. that someone like Bacon or the Earl of Oxford covertly wrote the plays we attribute to Shakespeare), or the chestnut that Shakespeare had a direct hand in the translation of the King James Bible (this idea is fiction, literally, with its main source in Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining short story, “Proofs of Holy Writ”). This sounds like a bigger problem than it is, and SAA seminars are anything but inundated with papers that are out to lunch; in truth they’re a rare occurrence. But when these kinds of papers do show up, it becomes more than just a diplomatic challenge, it’s a test of the underlying ethos. At the SAA conference, more than anywhere else, I find myself reminded that the title “Shakespearean” does not automatically mean a literary critic, but equally can mean an actor/director/dramaturge, a high school teacher, a theatre historian, a creator of educational resources, a dance choreographer, a librarian, or simply a member of the public who likes Shakespeare. If it weren’t for the broad appeal of Shakespeare, there wouldn’t be an academic field to support conferences like this, and many of us wouldn’t have the careers we do if there wasn’t a cultural investment in keeping Shakespeare on the curriculum. The sometimes vexing aspects of Shakespeare studies, like anti-Stratfordianism, are byproducts of the same popularity that sustains us. Occasionally bumping elbows with opinions we’d otherwise dismiss is simply the price we pay for a democratic, merit-based approach to Shakespeare studies. It’s really a small price, and, by the looks of it, one happily paid by the large constituency of the SAA community. In this system the heavier price is paid by those who stay home for the wrong reasons.
Program highlights
SAA is not all seminars, however; paper panels and roundtables also make up a big part of the program. There were several panels and papers that stand out in my memory. The afternoon of Day 1 (Thursday, March 13th) offered a panel on “When Manuscripts Go to the Playhouses,” with papers by Susan Cerasano, James Purkis, and Paul Werstine. All three papers were wonderful explorations of the connections between early modern theatrical practice and bibliographical evidence, but I found my interest especially sparked by Cerasano’s paper on her archival research on Philip Henslowe. Unfortunately this panel session was in a schedule conflict with a field trip to a showing of rare books at the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University — so those like me with a book-history bent likely found themselves in a dilemma. (I chose to go to the panel my friends were on…) The day concluded with a well-attended opening reception at downtown Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, where I learned, among other things, that they brew good beer in Texas.
Day 2 began with the plenary session, “Urban Economies and the New Theater History,” and for me continued with a great panel on “Making Publics in Early Modern England” (connected to the MaPs project: http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca), with Kate McLuskie, Steven Mullaney, and Paul Yachnin. After lunch, Travis DeCook and I hosted a most enjoyable discussion with our seminar on the dual textual traditions of Shakespeare and the Bible. It was a real pleasure to finally meet the people with whom we’d been corresponding over the past several months, and to see the conversation unfold in its own way.
Day 3 ended up having an inadvertent theme of technology and material culture. It began bright and early with a meeting of those involved with the Internet Shakespeare Editions (http://ise.uvic.ca), where I mistook the decaf coffee pot for the real one, but otherwise enjoyed a stimulating discussion about scholarly editing — too often mistaken as a solitary, isolating pursuit; the meeting was a reminder of the value of editing’s communal aspects. Rushing off from the meeting, I was able to catch most of a session on “Unpredictable Histories: Cultural, Material, Recursive,” in which the papers collectively explored the cultural and material reception of Shakespeare — my kind of panel. Scott Maisano’s paper, “Prospero’s Monster: The Masculine Birth of Science Fiction in The Tempest,” deserves particular mention for its provocative discussion of automatons, who in literature tend to be gendered female and become objects of desire for their male creators. This line of argument led to a conclusion about The Tempest’s Miranda that, for me at least, opened up some unsettling new ways of thinking about that much-studied play. At one point there was an audible chuckle from the audience, who were clearly enjoying the unpacking of a compelling new reading of familiar material. I kept thinking of Seth Lerer’s book Error and the Academic Self, whose final chapter deals with philology and the classic SF film Forbidden Planet, loosely based on The Tempest. The technology theme then continued in a panel on “New Electronic Shakespeares: Digital Archives, Expanded Worlds,” which included two excellent presentations by Linda Charnes and Peter Donaldson. Charnes offered an engaging discussion of Second Life and the idea of virtual performances, contextualized with a healthy caveat about the pitfalls of the word “virtual.” Donaldson gave a most enjoyable presentation on the uses of digital video in YouTube and his new project on Shakespeare performance in Asia. (Readers can learn more about this project from Donaldson’s article in a forthcoming special issue of the British Shakespeare Association’s journal Shakespeare, edited by Ray Siemens and myself; pardon the shameless self-promotion…) At one point when Donaldson played a clip from the Kevin Kline film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience found itself entranced right along with Titania’s court at the sound of an old phonograph playing a Bellini opera. The final treat of the day was a roundtable discussion on Shakespeare and technology, organized by Wendy Beth Hyman and Jonathan Sawday. The content of this thoroughly enjoyable panel was not the usual blizzard of acronyms and PowerPoint that the topic tends to attract, but rather a series of short meditations on techne in its Aristotelian and Heideggerian senses. An interesting pattern I noticed in the papers was that nearly all of the five made recourse to the technology of the dictionary, deploying the etymologies of “petard,” “flash-in-the-pan,” “creature,” “automaton,” and “rapture” to show how language shapes our understanding of technology and machines.
Dallas was far and above one of the friendliest cities I’ve ever visited. I only wish I could have seen more of it. Next year: Washington D.C. and the Folger Shakespeare Library!
