"A Terrible Art of Sharp-Shooting at the Audience": Teaching the Shock of Modernist Drama via the Play of Ideas

Abstract

abstract:One of the hardest things to convey to present-day readers of modernist drama is the power it had to shock turn-of-the-century audiences. Defining shock as a "structure of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that was pursued in especially teachable ways by the modernist "play of ideas," this essay shares a set of pedagogical strategies for helping students to feel this shock while also reflecting on the political implications of an art committed to shock. Among these teaching strategies are two attempts to set this "terrible art" (G. B. Shaw) in new, revealing contexts: (1) comparing the modernist theater to non-theatrical practices that attach ideas to structures of feeling besides shock, and (2) pairing modernist plays that "shock" their audience in pursuit of a feminist politics with contemporary plays that "destroy the audience" (Young Jean Lee) in pursuit of an anti-racist politics. The result is not to lionize shock as a universal ideal, but to explore it as a tactic—useful in some settings, harmful in others; always distributing its benefits and its costs unevenly.