Pedagogy ReWritten: Multi-disciplinary Performance Project Comes to U of T

This past fall, an innovative new course was offered in the Department of English & Drama, a lively collaboration which blended traditional literary analysis with student-led research creation; explored embodiment and movement in community; and inspired conversations on the complexities of bringing biography and archival gaps into the undergraduate literature classroom.

ENG366: Melville and Hawthorne ReWritten was organized by Professor Melissa Gniadek, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, in partnership with Tom Truss and Matthew Cumbie, co-creators of the ReWritten performance project, which weaves together dance, music, visual art, projection, and text, and reimagines an intergenerational queer love story.

ReWritten inscribes alternative possibilities, glimpsing at a queer history that too often gets erased. — from the ReWritten Program Note

The course focused on the intimate relationship between nineteenth-century American writers Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne – a rather mysterious, niche area that’s been studied in various ways by scholars over the years.

“On a basic level, the course introduced students to the concept of queer nineteenth-century American literature and, in a very focused way, to two canonical American writers,” Gniadek explains. But it did so in unconventional ways.

Melville and Hawthorne’s relationship is one of the most famous – and mythologized – relationships in nineteenth-century American literature. The two met at a literary gathering on August 5, 1850, a hike and picnic at Monument Mountain in the Berkshires, a popular rural region in western Massachusetts.

So the story goes, an unexpected thunderstorm forced them to take shelter, and by the hike’s end the two had become fast friends. One month later, Melville moved his family to a farm in the Berkshires not far from where Hawthorne lived with his family. The two immersed themselves in reading each other’s work and navigated the challenges of the writing life as they lived their everyday lives in proximity to each other for a brief period. They spent time at each other’s homes. In fact, Hawthorne would stay at Melville’s house when he was unable to make it back to his own, sleeping in a small bedroom attached to Melville’s writing studio. They wrote each other long letters when they were apart, and when Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851 he dedicated it to Hawthorne.

It was an intense friendship – both intellectually and emotionally – that has led many scholars to question the nature of their relationship. However, we don’t really know what happened and only 11 of their letters have been found. Of those, only one is from Hawthorne to Melville, with a postscript from Hawthorne’s wife. 

What happened to Hawthorne’s letters? Were they lost? Destroyed? 

And if so, why?

“There has long been a kind of scholarly play with the gaps in the archive, and ongoing research creation engagement with their relationship,” says Gniadek, who grew up in the Berkshires and is intimately familiar with stories and places surrounding their friendship.

Each year, people commemorate the pair’s meeting by retracing their hike up Monument Mountain, and visitors can tour Arrowhead, Melville’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Gniadek was back home visiting family one summer when she first attended a ReWritten performance at Arrowhead. The performers skillfully used the spaces across the property to reflect on the acts of reading and writing, archival gaps and hidden histories, the intimacy at the heart of the period’s literature, and the very nature of Melville and Hawthorne’s relationship. 

What makes a classic a classic is that there’s still something about it today that rings true. It’s about want. It’s about desperation. It’s about longing. It’s about these iconic human conditions that somehow ring true for people. — Tom Truss

ReWritten has taken many forms over the years. It involves community-based workshops, site-specific summer performances, university visits, conference talks, and participation in scholarly communities.

The creative team is made up of award-winning educators, dancers, musicians, and lighting and projection designers from across the United States. They also work with an advisor, a scholar and dramaturg from Colby College who studies queer nineteenth-century American Literature.   

A few weeks after the performance at Arrowhead, Gniadek met Truss and Cumbie at an event, and she proposed bringing the project to U of T; she wanted to build a course on Melville and Hawthorne that took the ReWritten project as its inspiration.

“As someone who thinks about literature and place, literature in place, a lot, this became a small way to bring some attention to places that motivate my thinking here where I teach,” says Gniadek. “I may not be able to bring students and colleagues to Arrowhead or Mount Greylock, but those places make appearances in the performance. It was important to me to bring a piece of western Massachusetts here for a hot minute.”

It would be two years before they could bring it to U of T. 

“The most daunting thing about something like this isn’t the idea of it,” Gniadek reflects. “The ideas are fun. The teaching is fun. The hardest thing is logistics – and finances are a huge part of that.” 

The artist residency and events tied to the course were supported by The Centre for the Study of the United States Bissell-Heyd Research Fellowship, the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, and the UTM and St. George Departments of English. Gniadek also received funding from the Office of the Vice-Principal, Research and Innovation’s Outreach, Conference and Colloquia Fund.

“It’s a huge boon to have these funding opportunities, because they enable you to entertain creative ideas,” says Gniadek. “Rather than just putting the idea back in the box, you feel like you’re able to do what you’re supposed to do as a faculty member, to come up with ideas and implement them.”

I research and write about Melville’s work in particular in a variety of contexts, from his writing about the Pacific and Oceanic worlds to, more recently, how trees and wood appear in his texts and what we can learn about global resource extraction from this. When you think about Melville, you’re never far from thinking about Hawthorne, and so my deep professional and personal investments in these authors and their writing inform this course. – Melissa Gniadek

And when the course ran this past fall, ENG366 was everything they’d hoped it would be.

Students explored the texts and questions at the heart of the ReWritten project, immersed themselves in the letters, and dove into close readings of gender and sexuality in selected works of Melville and Hawthorne. Relying on Truss and Cumbie’s experience as dance educators, Gniadek – who has a background in dance herself – also built movement into the course. 

“Thinking about movement became a way to think about acts of noticing and precision that are central to thinking and writing about literature,” she says. “Our feelings about literature and stories matter, and our embodied relationships to literature and stories matter.”

“The reading and writing and thinking that we do doesn’t happen outside of our bodies. Melville and Hawthorne knew this.”

In the final week of the course, the creative team came to U of T. Truss and Cumbie worked with UTM students in class and ran a movement workshop at the Jackman Humanities Institute. They guided participants to use movement to think about the words and stories, to embody what they were exploring in the texts.

“To bring my ideas from my mind into and through my body helped me understand how I felt about their writing in a new and different way,” says Sara Pejcinovska, a 5th year English major in the course. “In one of the exercises, we had to imagine what Melville and Hawthorne's style of writing would feel like in a movement. It really allowed me to process what I had learned about them throughout the semester.”

Students said that disrupting the traditional literature classroom by meeting in a rehearsal studio and moving helped them to not only connect with each other as a community, but with the material and its impact both physically and emotionally – something Truss and Cumbie know well.

“When we move our bodies in relationship to each other and to an idea, it helps us practice being together in ways that can help us to understand something differently, or to understand something in a more felt and profound way,” says Cumbie, who was thrilled to see students' enthusiasm for the material.

When we move our bodies in relationship to each other and to an idea, it helps us practice being together in ways that can help us understand something differently, or in a more felt and profound way. — Matthew Cumbie

“Working with Melissa has been such a gift,” he adds. “Her excitement to expand how we think about coming to know something, how we practice researching and being together in that research – I feel like it has opened a lot of room for us. She’s been a true partner in this.” 

Truss agrees. “It takes innovation and courage to acknowledge the body in an academic institution, to rearrange that paradigm of how to learn – and what kind of learning is important. And it reminds me how important these stories are, of the power of a good piece of art: a good story, a good piece of music, that goes beyond the skin and hits muscle, bone, body.”

At the end of the week, the ReWritten team performed for both the class and the larger community in the MiST Theatre, and many students brought their family and friends. This would be the show’s final residency before its premiere next month at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

“Watching the performance together felt like a full-circle moment,” Pejcinovska shares. “I was able to reflect on what I’d learned in class and connect it to what I was watching.” 

Now that the course has wrapped up, Gniadek is thinking through how the experience will impact her future pedagogical practice.

“The framing academic questions that I started off with were motivators,” she says. “And though I don’t quite know where this is going yet, the intersection of movement and textual analysis is something I’m going to continue to think about, and how that can be brought into future courses in different ways.”

Acknowledgement:

Generous thanks to the ReWritten Creative Team: Rudy Ramirez, Director and dramaturg; Sarah Chapin, Production Management and Stage Manager; Roma Flowers, Projection Designer; Christine Nilles, Costume Designer; Summer Kodama, Composer; Jeremy Winchester, Set and Lighting Designer; Alex Aleksandrov, Assistant Lighting Designer; Katherine Stubbs, Dramaturg and scholar; Larry Burke, Cinematography; Diane Samuel, Visual Art and consultant