An Interview with Professor Shonni Enelow on her new book, a discourse on method
Shonni Enelow and David Levine’s book is published by 53rd State Press
By Peter Krause
Fordham English Professor Shonni Enelow discusses her new book, Discourse on Method forthcoming November 2020, the value of collaboration, and the history of method acting in an interview transcribed below. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
PK: Thank you for being with us today, Shonni. I wonder if you might begin by telling us a little bit about yourself.
SE: Sure. I am an associate professor of English here at Fordham and also the current co-director of the Comparative Literature program. I actually have a somewhat nontraditional academic history. I have a BFA in theatre from the Tisch School of the Arts [at NYU], where I studied acting, directing, and playwriting before I went on to get my Ph.D. in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania. So, I have a background in theater practice in addition to my training as a literary scholar. Those two pieces really inform all of my work, which is about performance across media and the history of American acting, as well as its impacts on literary production of various kinds.
PK: This dual role as both academic and performer is very apparent in your books. I’m sure I’m reciting a cliché when I say this. Regarding your current project, Discourse on Method, you’ll be happy to know that no one has leaked it online. I did my due diligence and tried to find it online, but it’s nowhere.
SE: (Laughs) Oh, good!
PK: Discourse on Method, which comes out in November of 2020, is a text that you’ve co-authored with David Levine. I know in my own classes whenever I ask students to collaborate on projects there is always a bit of unease on their part. Collaboration can be tough. I wonder if you might speak a little bit about this.
SE: David teaches at Harvard but he is an artist, not a scholar. So, I think we were able to avoid the kinds of complications that sometimes occur when co-authoring a work. We have different interests and different skillsets and we’re doing different things in the book, so that all felt pretty seamless. I went to theater school and there is no better place to learn to collaborate with other people. For me, collaboration has always felt really good. I really like to do it. It’s a chance to bring the more isolating work of scholarship into a more social mode. I encourage everyone to work on a scholarly or artistic project with others if they can.
Professor Shonni Enelow
PK: I wonder if you might tell us a little about the project and then comment on any similarities or differences when compared to your past book, Method Acting and Its Discontents: American Psycho-drama, which was a single author project.
SE: Sure. My first book, which is an academic monograph, was a revision of my dissertation about method acting and American drama. In that book I was really doing two things concurrently. First, I was offering a new understanding of American method acting and its role in twentieth century American culture. Second, I was offering a new way to read some seminal mid-century plays through the questions that method-acting raises and considers in its theories and practices. That book was organized around case-studies of particular plays and included literary close reading in addition to historical and cultural analyses of method acting is its most piquant historical moment in the late fifties and early sixties.
After that book was published I was doing various public-facing work and public writing and I met David Levine, whose work I had followed for a number of years. David is a conceptual and performance artist who makes various kinds of projects, a lot of which live in galleries but use actors. For a long time David had been thinking about method acting and the history of method acting. He had done various amazing projects. To give you an example, one was called Habit, which was presented first at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and then here in New York City. In a large hanger-like space he built a three-dimensional house that was meant to look like an apartment. In this space he had actors performing on a loop a realist play that he had commissioned for the exhibition. So, he had actors performing this play that was meant to be a straight-ahead American realist drama on a loop in this constructed environment. He has for a long time been interested in raising questions about spectatorship and performance as work and the history of American realist performance.
David and I began talking and collaborating in a lot of ways. One of the first ways that we collaborated was when he invited me to give a talk at an installation that he was doing in Toronto at a project space called TPW. He had installed a show called Bystanders that included some visual artifacts, but the center of the exhibition was a performance by a series of actors doing a monologue. It was a fantastic exhibition and a really interesting monologue. Afterwards, we hatched a plan to create a book together that would include both the text of David’s monologue and an essay by me inspired by the crazy outtakes of my first book. They are meant to reflect on one another in ways big and small. They are both broadly about the dark heart of American acting and Lee Strasberg in particular.
So, that’s how we came to create this book together. It’s an art book, not an academic book. It was put out by a small press, 53rd State Press, which publishes a lot of performance and theater texts. It includes many images from David’s exhibition. In addition, at its center is a hand drawn conspiracy map that David and I drew. This map is a conspiratorial, counter-factual theory of the twentieth century, but also a revisionary way of thinking about the intersection of method acting and all of these other wild twentieth century phenomena. For example, it includes The Black Panthers, Dustin Hoffman, The Weathermen, Hanoi Jane, Jon Voight, Norman Mailer - all of these figures of mid-twentieth century culture in a manic context.
The hand drawn conspiracy map made by Enelow and Levine for their new book
PK: Fascinating. I’m intrigued! We have a glimpse of that map here, but I guess we have to buy the book to see the whole thing.
You’ve said two things that have struck me and that may resonate with other students, both undergraduate and graduate, as well. One, you said that your first book was an offshoot of your dissertation. You also mentioned that your second work was the product of the so-called “scraps” of your first work. To an academic, this is thrilling. We all have those bits and pieces and false starts. I wonder if you might speak more about that transition from haphazard academic projects to more polished professional projects.
SE: For me, those two things have always gone together. I’ve always been a person who has done creative or otherwise non-academic writing. However, I think of my academic criticism and my more popular writing as two separate activities. I’m always interested in communicating to different audiences. There is one way that we write for an audience of fellow scholars and then there is a very different way that we write for people who are interested in theater more generally. For me, it has always felt really important to keep a foot in the broader world of cultural exchange that is not limited to the university. When we’re immersed in a topic we all produce emotional, crazy, and manic writing. I think that writing can be really fascinating, even if it doesn’t always belong in our academic projects. This particular project was fun for me because it enabled me to channel my obsession in a less contained way.
PK: This is good to hear, especially for a young academic. The things that we are super passionate about do live at the margins of our more mainstream or canonical work, and that’s okay.
I wonder if we might pivot for a moment to talk about method acting. I know that Fordham theater students may laugh when I say this, but before I went to your website and read some of your past articles—which I highly recommend that others do!—I only knew the surface level clichés about method acting. Daniel Day Lewis and Christian Bale came to mind, so it was interesting to learn more from your past work. In an article for Criterion in 2018 entitled “When Actors Do Double Duty” you mention that method acting is often associated with “hysterical behavior.” In another article for Film Comment entitled “The Great Recession” you discuss the repression and release at the heart of method acting. I wonder if you might say more about the public perception of method acting versus the actuality.
SE: Actually, I’m really interested in those public, surface-level understandings. In my first book a lot of what I do often is toggle back and forth between the ways that method acting is talked about in culture, both in the mid-twentieth century and today, and what the practitioners and the theorists thought they were doing. You can’t understand method acting without understanding both. Those pop conceptions are actually really fascinating in their own right, in part because they reveal those nodal points of anxiety and desire that method acting evokes.
PK: In your past works there is a sense that the distinction between high and low culture is perhaps less important than we think. In “The Great Recession” you focus on Jennifer Lawrence in both The Hunger Games and Winter’s Bone. At least for me, The Hunger Games is more pop culture and Winter’s Bone is more serious, but I was struck by how you viewed them through the same lens. I’m not sure if there’s question in there, but I must say that it reminds me in my own scholarship not always to apply a high/low understanding.
SE: I think I came of age in a moment in literary studies, and in academia more generally, that was not interested in those kinds of distinctions. Rather, the trend was more interested in different formations of culture and in different audiences. Of course, there are hierarchies that are embodied in audience formation and in theories of value, for sure. But, for me, especially as a scholar of performance, those distinctions are not as interesting as the commonalities in the ways that actors are performing behavior.
PK: Do you have a favorite portion of the book?
SE: I really love David’s monologue that closes out the book. Beyond that, I suppose something that I’ll say is that the two halves of the book—David’s monologue and my essay—are really meant to reflect on each other in a lot of ways. Thinking about that as you are reading might give readers a richer experience.
PK: Shonni, thank you so much again for spending some time with us today. We’ll look forward to the book coming out in November.
SE: It was my pleasure.