ABSTRACT
It is one of the curiosities of American Studies courses in universities that they place so little emphasis on drama and theatre, perhaps because in most American universities they exist in separate, and sometimes mutually hostile, departments, one dealing in texts and the other in performance. Poetry and the novel are seen as central, along with literary theory. There is a concern with gender studies and ethnic studies, those component elements of a contested American identity. Yet little attention is given to the most public of the arts (privately created but publicly consumed), a present-tense art with a history of registering shifts in the psychological, social, political subsoil.
