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TABLE OF CONTENTS |
DOING SHAW NOW: A Call to Action ☼ |
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INTRODUCTION:
It’s not as
though writing or reading a work on or by Shaw is not “doing Shaw,” but here we
mean to put the emphasis on actions at least partly outside of or in addition
to that. Although very well-read, Shaw
himself was exasperated with the lack of meaningful action outside the world of
books, and in his plays he sometimes seemed to favor characters who used books
mostly to throw at other people’s heads, so to speak, and in his witticisms he
said things like “Those who can do, those who cannot teach” because he saw
education being used as a substitute for doing. But he himself admitted to being didactic
and so must have thought of the way he
taught as a way of “doing” as well. How
do we imitate that? How do we “do”
Shaw, teach or present Shaw, in a way he would have liked, in a way that leads
to responsible, critical, progressive citizen action instead of to escapist
bookishness?
Shaw of
course sometimes worked and wrote politically, i.e,
more directly, for the transformation of society into something more sane,
just, and equitable, but most of his life was dedicated to the more indirect literary-dramatic
way of presenting his case. Thus
paramount among Shaw’s own actions was the producing of his plays, which
inevitably led to the instructing of critics on how to understand his plays and
in general to offering advice on how to read and talk about all his works. In all the ways one might “do” Shaw—teaching
Shaw, acting Shaw, criticizing Shaw, and discussing Shaw—he wished for the
connection he was always driving at between literature and life to be clearly
understood and acted on. How can we
make that more likely to happen?
To begin with, the categories above in the
Table of Contents, which are developed more fully below, aim at encouraging and
informing the kind of action Shaw wished for.
Each of these segments will be under the leadership of an ISS member,
who of course would like to see contributions from others and who invites
interaction.
1.) TEACHING
SHAW top
This
segment currently has three parts.
First, there are already available a
number of teaching
editions of Shaw’s plays that provide useful background material along
with the text of a play for anyone involved in the learning process. Among books still in print, for instance,
Leonard Conolly has published with Broadview Press a teaching edition of Mrs. Warren’s Profession (http://www.broadviewpress.com/home.php?cat=59&sort=title&sort_direction=0&
page=3), and among the Methuen New Mermaids are Arms and the Man, Major
Barbara, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan (http://www.bloomsburyacademicusa.com/
Methuen_Drama_Catalog_for_web_2011.pdf, p. 13). A more general resource is The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard
Shaw by Christopher Innes, which is available at http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item1153404/?site_locale=en_US.
Secondly, Christopher Wixson has submitted to the the
Modern Language Association a proposal for a single volume of essays that would
fit into the MLA
Approaches to Teaching Literature series. He has a growing list of other ISS members
who have expressed an interest in contributing to this book, but he would be
delighted to hear from you with ideas and contributions, so write to him at Christopher Wixson
<cmwixson@eiu.edu>.
Thirdly, an invitation to ISS members
to contribute to testimony about successful teaching of Shaw in today’s classrooms
has already gone out, and it is expected that eventually we will be able to
send you to a page or a blog or a wiki where good ideas, ideas that have worked
for someone, can be considered and maybe discussed. We want to fire up students in the
classroom, and the best way to do that is to get teachers fired up with good
ideas for teaching. Julie Sparks is collecting material for this exercise,
so stay tuned for further development, and please write to her at julie.sparks@hotmail.com if you have questions or
contributions to offer.
2.) THE ORION SHAW PROJECT top
A teaching project already underway is
one that our colleague Kay Li is working on at York U. in Toronto with many
other people, the ISS included. It’s
part of what’s called the Sagittarius-ORION Literature
Digitizing Projects. The ORION Shaw website has an
open access part available anywhere in the world and a restricted access part
confined to Canada only. There is a lot
of information on Shaw and his milieu in the open access part. The restricted access part is developing along the lines of an interactive
website that can be used in Ontario schools whose libraries and classrooms are
hooked up to this system. The reason for
different levels of access is because Shaw’s works are already in public domain
in Canada, and, for copyright reasons, the restricted part of the website will
not be accessible to non-Canadians until Shaw’s works go into public domain in
the rest of the world in 2020. But it’s
a great start and may serve as a model of how to get Shaw more considered and
taught in classrooms and thus his lessons better learned. To watch its development, go to http://shaw.yorku.ca to see the current
website, but it is being gradually migrated in a revised form to a more
powerful server at http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca.
3.) ACTING
SHAW top
At the recent Guelph Shaw Conference,
there were several suggestions about how to develop this segment, which would
be designed to assist those actively involved in the teaching of acting and the
producing of Shaw plays. An example
would be the posting of illustrations
from previous productions that one could use for acting and staging classes. There are rumors that Denis Johnston is
considering doing a book of “Shavian Scenes & Monologues,” which might or
might not be an ISS project, but until that’s more definite, we are still
looking for someone to lead in developing this segment for the ISS website,
perhaps in a linked wiki.
4.) CRITICIZING THE CRITICS top
Shaw called the first section of his
preface to Major Barbara “First Aid
to Critics” to suggest that his critics seemed so disabled in their thought
processes that they needed medical attention, especially to cure their habitual
jumping to conclusions with an injection of facts. Since
the mistaken notions about his plays that plagued Shaw in his day are still
with us today, we decided to challenge the notion that critics are incapable of
learning by encouraging ISS members, under the leadership of Larry Switzky of the U. of Toronto, to respond to reviews that
obviously lean too heavily on cliché thinking, hopefully in numbers significant
enough to wake the critics up. Larry
has begun this project by listing a number of standard objections lazy critics
have made to Shaw’s plays over the years, objections which are clearly
contradicted by the facts, and he invites you to send your responses to reviews
to him as well as to the critics so that we might use them as templates for
future criticizing of the critics. If
interested in this, please move to http://www.shawsociety.org/First-Aid-to-Critics.htm.
5.) DISCUSSING
SHAW top
All of the above categories involve “discussing”
Shaw, in one way or another, but what this segment focuses on first is the
opportunity we have to discuss Shaw more spontaneously among ourselves,
collectively or one-on-one, by using the Shaw blog called “GBS,” which has been sitting there mostly
unused for all too long. It’s at http://gbs.shawsociety.org, and all you
have to do to register for this is to click on the message labeled “Invitation
to Shaw Talk,” which will take you to a page that gives you some blanks to fill
in and an opportunity to respond with a message reply and to be an ongoing
participant by finishing the rest of the form with your email address and the
rest. Just check “Subscribe to this
blog” and “Remember me,” and then hit “Submit.”
It’s easy, and what I most like about it is that you can conduct
conversations among yourselves without the webmaster needing to be a part of it
if he doesn’t want to. So, please, go
ahead, sign up.
But in today’s age of social media blogging
is just a place to start in “discussing
Shaw” online, for there are many opportunities for broadcasting to a
wider audience that we might pursue.
There would undoubtedly be considerable value in having an ISS Facebook
page and Twitter account, etc., in which, for example, Shaw witticisms that
have bearing on the week's/day's political happenings could be sent out, or you
could send invitations to events, publicize new works about Shaw, link to
productions, post videos, etc. (Jean Reynolds is looking into both
possibilities, but she welcomes help, so email her at ballroom16@aol.com). Podcasts in which some of the more eminent
Shavians were interviewed, and their interviews archived, might be of use, or
the ISS could convene e-events, live chats/discussions, lectures, readings
etc. These and other uses of “high
tech” would do much to
raise Shaw’s visibility. What is
needed here is for several tech-savvy young people (older is fine if the
tech-savvy is there) to volunteer and form a team. We await your “call,” whether Skyped, tweeted, texted, blogged, or just plain old
emailed. “Grail Mail,” as we call
letters that actually appear in a post box, would be welcomed as well, although
we’d probably be too stunned to open it.
Let’s
conclude here by contemplating what Shaw would have “done” with and to today’s
media. After you come out of your
meditation, “do” something.
Webmaster: RFD (dietrich@usf.edu)
. I found
online (http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/ quotes.HTM) a quotation attributed to Shaw without source,
"To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching," which I’ll
take as an antidote to the more familiar quotation above.