CFP: ACTR Tyranny of Documents second call]

[Luella Massey]

Apologies for Cross- Posting and please disseminate to your lists

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A PANEL AT THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF
THE ASSOCIATION FOR CANADIAN THEATRE RESEARCH

 

*(Return of) The Tyranny of Documents: *
*The Theatre Historian as Film Noir Detective*


This is the return engagement for a panel first organized for the 2006 
ACTR conference, this year in Saskatoon 26-29 May.  Proposals are 
invited that examine one document--and one only--that has been 
particularly troublesome to the researcher.  The emphasis should be on 
the work of the historian as detective in the archive, and on the 
difficult balance sought between respect for documentary evidence, the 
need to generate significance from it, and the natural-but-dangerous 
tendency to smooth out the rough edges of evidence. 

 

This call is looking for *ten-minute* explorations of one document along 
*'microhistorical' *lines (outlined below).  It welcomes proposals from 
scholars early in their careers, and from seasoned veterans; the area of 
research is not restricted.  Please send proposals of no more than 250 
words, along with a brief biography, to Stephen Johnson at the 
University of Toronto (stephen.johnson at utoronto.ca 
<mailto:stephen.johnson at utoronto.ca>).  Copy in the body of the email, 
please.

 

Deadline for submission is *the first of March*.  The organizer welcomes 
any and all questions in advance of submitting a proposal.

 

*Premise of the Panel--Microhistory: *
The problems and pitfalls of writing theatre history in the 21st century 
were usefully discussed by Tom Postlewait in 'Writing History Today' 
(/Theatre Survey/ Nov 2000); he suggests that practitioners of theatre 
history look closely at the 'microhistorical' direction in historical 
research, as particularly well-suited to the discipline.  Microhistory 
tends toward the micro-scopic examination of the individual event and 
document, in an effort to tease out of minimum evidence a complex set of 
relationships; in his phrase, this is history 'in the Chekhovian mode.'  
More particularly, microhistory values what its practitioners call the 
'opaque document' or 'the exceptional normal'--in fact, suggesting that 
the most irritating documents are the most valuable precisely because 
they are 'opaque.'  It is the joke we don't 'get' that exposes the 
cracks in our own preconceptions of a society; our effort to understand 
it, with any luck, enriches our understanding. 

 

This is all well and good; but theatre historians are particularly 
inclined by necessity to make much of little, and there are dangers.  
The documentary evidence--in particular for such an ephemeral art as 
theatre--can be so 'opaque' as to be incomprehensible, and the patterns 
among them so apparently arbitrary that there can be no resolution.  
Microhistory may favour the ironic-but-humanistic mode of Chekhov, but 
in our darker moments in the archive, this gives way to Beckett, and 
interpretation fails.  If the historian is a detective, the model is, 
sometimes, less Hercule Poirot than Mike Hammer in the film /Kiss Me, 
Deadly/--who can’t begin to realize the implications of the mystery he’s 
trying to solve, but who can’t stop himself from following the clues.

 

See Postlewait's article for reference (available on line).  Also 'On 
Microhistory,' by Giovanni Levi, in /New Perspectives on Historical 
Writing/, ed. Peter Burke (Polity 91), 93-113; and the very useful 
'Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know About It,' by Carlo Ginzburg 
(/Critical Inquiry/ 20:1 Autumn 93), 10-35 (available on line).