Habitual Perception Research Articles

“Let Me Tell You a Story”: Teacher Lore and Pre-Service Teachers

Pre-service teachers on the verge of beginning their careers in the classroom find themselves looking for new and challenging ways of looking at the task set squarely before them; namely, they benefit from a new perspective on the familiar topics of teaching and learning. Using teacher lore in a methods course offers students a number of benefits that might not be addressed through other, more traditional avenues of study. Teacher narratives both provoke and challenge the habitual perceptions that pre-service teachers tend to have just as they enter the classroom. Teacher stories help students to see explicitly the connection between what they believe about good pedagogy and what they have experienced as students in the years leading up to the start of their teaching careers. Teacher lore also increases the chances for empathetic teaching, as well as reflective practice. And finally, using teacher lore affords students the chance to see the richness and complexity of teaching and holds forth the opportunity to hasten their own maturity as young classroom teachers.

“As True as Troilus,” “As False as Cressid”: Tradition, Text, and the Implicated Reader

“AS TRUE AS TROILUS,” “AS FALSE AS CRESSID” : TRADITION, TEXT, AND THE IMPLICATED READER PAUL G A U D E T University of Western Ontario And generally let every student of nature take this as a rule, that what­ ever his mind seizes upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in sus­ picion. . . . (Bacon, “Aphorism LVIII” ) A .t the approximate centre of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a symbolic moment in which three characters anticipate their legendary defi­ nitions. The swearing of oaths (m.ii) can be seen as a ritualized moment, a focal point that activates typological characterization. It elevates and au­ thenticates the audience’s collective consciousness and mythic inheritances.1 The epithets voiced by Troilus and Cressida — that in future all “True swains” shall be named “As true as Troilus” and all false maids “As false as Cressid” — confirm their identities within a patriarchal dialectic that opposes masculine truth to feminine duplicity. To make sense of this mo­ ment in traditional terms, however, is to confront a crucial paradox and self-contradiction within both the play and its critical reception. On one hand, critics cite a technique of “reiterated reductions to nonsense” (Colie 333) and regard the play as breaking all expectations — literary, linguistic, generic, theatrical, political, philosophical (the list could go on). Simulta­ neously, they contradict themselves by exempting the oath-swearing from the play’s general destabilization. Why should this dramatic moment be the only one to valorize received ideas and confirm audience expectations? This curious exemption elides the sexual politics of orthodox criticism while at the same time exposing them. It also suppresses the role of trans­ ference in interpretation by objectifying the reader/spectator as a passive and neutral recipient. By seeing Cressida as conforming type, Shakespeare’s audience could (and still can) retain confidence in the legitimacy and relia­ bility of tradition and, by extension, in the demonstrable rightness of their own habitual perceptions and judgments. Thus, while the play seems over­ whelming in its attack on tradition, it paradoxically allows its audience a self-protective strategy of containment based on those aspects of tradition that are predicated on feminine depravity. However, to read Cressida as a symbol of infidelity, to blame her in order to counter the subversive threat of the play’s nihilism, is an act of masculine scapegoating. In short, it is English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 2, June 1990 masculinist ideology — within the play and in the critical re-production of its meaning — that persistently stabilizes textual meaning by reifying, fixing Cressida. To accept the objectification of Cressida as faithless whore is to enter into a complicit and usually unacknowledged relationship with the constructed fictions of male presence in the play. Troilus, Pandarus, Ulysses, Thersites , Diomedes, all judge; and each assumes the singular rightness of his way of viewing, his vision — untroubled, declarative, reductive, and of­ ten self-righteous. There is no questioning of methods, or motives, or the positioning of judgments. A more self-scrutinizing reading practice would determine meaning differently. It would focus on a doubleness in Cressida that masculine judgment denies — she is both constructed object and in­ terrogative (and interrogating) subject. It would stress the alterability of a playscript and the sensory dimensions, textually undefined, by which each performance constitutes its meaning. In speculating on the textualization of Cressida within the play and in critical discourse, it might observe that any (re)interpretation, (re)animation of Cressida can serve as a self-reflexive metaphor for (re)interpreting the play/text. Finally, it would have to take into account the ideological displacements of feminism.2 Although my impulse in proposing a divergent reading practice is to resist the customary reduction of Cressida to a convenient misogynist epithet, I cannot escape my inscription in the play as male spectator, my implication in several forms of voyeurism. As a man, I am implicated in misogynist reading practices and the pornographic potential of the male gaze; as a reader of Troilus and Cressida, I am implicated in the sexual and political positions of male spectators within the play; as a spectator in the theatre, I am placed in another...

Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama

Bertolt Brecht's theory and practice have had a strong influence on the British theatre, dating from the first visit of the Berliner Ensemble in 1956 and the English publication in 1964 of John Willett's compilation of the theoretical writings, Brecht On Theatre. Political theatre practice in England had benefited from the socialist movement as well as the impact of the Beveridge Report on the arts. Following Beveridge's mandated university grants, educated working-class men and women had found their theatrical voices in playwrights such as Shelagh Delaney, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker. The continuing search for a political form and technique led to Brecht who, in shaping a dramaturgy specifically suited to social critique, provided a path beyond social realism to the epic theatre. Brechtian techniques provided a methodology for embedding a materialist critique within the theatrical medium. Political theatre requires the ability to isolate and manifest certain ideas and relationships that make ideology visible, in contrast with the styles of realism and naturalism, wherein ideology is hidden or covert. Brecht's theorization of the social gest, epic structure, and alienation effect provides the means to reveal material relations as the basis of social reality, to foreground and examine ideologically-determined beliefs and unconscious habitual perceptions, and to make visible those signs inscribed on the body which distinguish social behavior in relation to class, gender, and history. For feminists, Brechtian techniques offer a way to examine the material conditions of gender behavior (how they are internalized, opposed, and changed) and their interaction with other socio-political factors such as class.