Rewriting Literary History

Abstract

of the marginal status of drama the canon of American No doubt some of her telling facts will be news to many the profession. (No PMLA article since 1953!) But no student of the theatre will have any difficulty accepting her overall argument. When I was at the Yale School of Drama the mid-seventies, one in joke was a naturalization of Andre Gide's most famous putdown: Who is America's greatest playwright? Eugene O'Neill, alas. In our humor, we followed the taste of our Dean, Robert Brustein, who had definitively entitled his seminal essay on and of postwar theatrical anti-Americanism Why American Plays Are Not Literature. Although he eventually wrote defense of both O'Neill and much of the best theatrical literature of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, this 1959 article Brustein complained that the American dramatist was removed, if not completely cut off, from the mainstream of intellectual and literary discourse subject matter, writing style, associations, attitudes and ideas. But even if this were true of the playwrights of the fifties, it has certainly not always been the case; American drama between the world wars, to cite the most notable example, was at the heart of American social and intellectual life. Yet how rarely scholars and theorists outside the field of American theatre history include drama their studies and curricula. Perhaps, as Professor Smith suggests, the aesthetic assumptions of New Criticism were not wellsuited to the analysis of dramatic literature, but different modes of criticism now dominate the academic marketplace. Yet where are the feminist critics (and others) who, if not willing to champion our female playwrights, will at