New Faculty Interview: John Parker

John Parker is joining the Department of English this fall.  A specialist in medieval and Renaissance drama, Professor Parker did his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and comes to us after teaching at Harvard University and Macalester College.  Parker spent the 2008-2009 academic year in Rome, having won the prestigious Rome Prize, conferred by the American Academy in Rome.  Graduate student Julia Fuller conducted this interview via e-mail with Professor Parker while he was in Rome this spring. 

How would you describe your approach to the study of medieval and Renaissance drama? Do you focus on a certain critical or theoretical methodology in your research? What aspects of the medieval and Renaissance time periods in relation to the dramatic genre interest you most?

I guess my first objective has been to approach medieval and Renaissance drama at the same time, one through the other — to set them on some kind of continuum, even if that continuum has to encompass powerful discontinuities.  I concentrate a lot on Biblical exegesis in both eras, which for me includes translations, sermons, theological debate, devotional poetry, etc — to say nothing of the drama itself.

From your dissertation onward, you seem to have a sustained interest in Christian theology and Marxism.  Is this indeed a cultural thread you still follow?

Christianity and Marx are both central.  I've never dealt with either in an exclusive or doctrinally pure way, however.  On my view there's no getting back to Marx, for example, without going through the rest of continental philosophy — above all the strains of it that would appear least compatible with his program, whether those are immediate predecessors like Kant and Hegel or later competitors: Freud/Lacan, Nietzsche/Foucault.  My sympathies tend to lie with anyone who tries to draw from or somehow balance all of these elements: e.g. Jameson, Zizek, the Frankfurt school.  Adorno is my great hero.

Why do you find medieval and Renaissance drama to be particularly open to this kind of analysis?

In a word, because of secularization — by which I mean both the evacuation of religious content and its uncanny persistence in potentially more powerful forms.  Continental philosophy, especially its Germanic varieties, has never really been able to relinquish or outgrow theology: its God is merely said to have "died" — same as Christianity's.  In Marx's terms, "the critique of religion is the premise of every critique."  On my view the same problem (of secularization) determines the shape of English drama, where the main disruption between medieval and modern is usually described as a shift from Christian drama to the secular (or historical or classicizing) drama of the Renaissance — even though a play like Richard II is not terribly less "Christian" (whatever that means) than the kind of drama you would have seen in Ricardian England.  It's sort of a bonus that English drama has an influence on the philosophy, too (via Shakespeare), so that everything together — Christian theology, English Drama, German theory — can form a kind of hermeneutic circle. 

How did you come to this as a starting point (if indeed it was the starting point) and how have you developed this line of criticism? Has it lead you into any new ideas or approaches to cultural criticism in medieval and Renaissance drama?

The fascination — and frustration — with Christianity comes from my upbringing.  As far as German philosophy goes, I was mainly just following the lead of two people on my dissertation committee, my advisor, Margreta de Grazia, and Peter Stallybrass.  I would not have gone down this path were it not for their example.  At the same time I didn't really understand what I was doing — in particular the centrality of drama to my project— until after I finished the diss and moved to Berlin.  The more I got into it there, the more I realized it was going to take 10 years, minimum, to get the concepts right and even then I was going to wind up writing a heavily Germanic book on theory and theology that might not be very welcome in an English department.  So at some point I figured, why not just crank out something fast on English drama up to Marlowe and instead of getting bogged down in Hegel, engage pre-modern theology directly?  A snap, right?  It took six years.

In your book The Aesthetics of Antichrist you appear to focus on the theatricality of Christianity and in turn the Christian and anti-Christian aspects of commercial or secular theater. What have you uncovered about the Antichrist's role in medieval Christianity and drama as well as Marlowe's plays? Could you elucidate your claim a bit more for me?

You've already got the gist of it.  Antichrist is a fake simulacrum of Christ whose evil paradoxically signals the imminent return of a radically different kind of savior (this one triumphant rather than crucified).  The essential thing, for me, is the reliance here on false equivalences — mimetic or theatrical representation above all, but money, too, in that Antichrist is thought to substitute cash for grace — so as to rectify or "redeem" historical disaster.  At bottom I mean to say that Christianity solves the problem of theodicy — the reality of suffering despite God's alleged goodness — more often than not by aestheticizing evil; and that the most popular forms of this aestheticization in the Middle Ages were (sometimes profitable) re-enactments: liturgical performance, vernacular drama, and so forth.  I don't think it's possible to account for the relation of Marlovian tragedy to Christian theology without grasping this longstanding religious appreciation for the power and fraudulence of representational and monetary equivalence.  Marlowe's greedy fakers achieve their power not despite Christianity but because of it.

You have some new work forthcoming. Can you describe it and how it relates to any of your past research and publications?

I have two essays forthcoming, both of which grow out of the book or, maybe better said, which try to address some central issues I didn't have the space or finesse to fit in.  Since I'm constantly harping on the fundamental theatricality of Christianity I needed to say something about the terminology of "personae," which early Christians borrowed pretty knowingly from classical theater (where the actors wore masks, called "personae") in order to describe their understanding of God's nature over and against the Jewish conception or that of other, more strictly monotheistic Christian sects.  This was a novel and ingenious solution to a number of scriptural cruxes but it creates a lot of problems for theology that don't go away.

Second essay has to do with the obsessive animosity in medieval drama studies against "evolution." Simply ask yourself what other groups today, other than scholars of Christian drama, trumpet their opposition to "Darwinian thinking" and you'll see the scope of the problem.  I argue that E.K. Chambers — the traditional whipping-boy for introducing "Darwin" into medieval drama studies — was equally influenced by Nietzsche and that this dual lineage is something the field should embrace rather than piously castigate.

What project did you win The Rome Prize for? Has being in Rome shed any new light on your work?

I won it for a book-project, coming along but still in its infancy, on Seneca.  The first part compares his drama, in particular its handling of violence, with the gospels and liturgy.  The second traces the Christianization of Seneca through the adaptation of his drama by Prudentius, a series of forged letters between him and Paul, and various appreciations of his philosophy by the Fathers.  The third part will argue that later vernacular plays of Christian martyrdom should be seen as both nostalgic for Roman spectacles of violence and as a precursor to the Renaissance "revival" of Seneca.  A final section will deal with that revival in Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, and probably Webster. 

I've always been deeply interested in the debts that Christian writers owe to pagan literature (starting with the writers of scripture); so being in Rome, where the appropriation of antiquity by the Church is pretty much advertised on every street corner, has given me a shockingly more concrete picture than I had before.  I used to be more or less indifferent to architecture and painting — no longer.

What will you be teaching in the fall? How would you describe your teaching style?

I'll be teaching the Beowulf to Milton lecture course, plus then in the spring a grad class on the secularization of drama (Med to Ren), and an undergrad seminar on non-Shakespearean drama.  Everything I'll be teaching is a version of classes I've taught before elsewhere.  My style depends a lot on the setting (seminar vs. lecture) and on the particular group of students.  I suppose a common element could be described as improvisation, in the musical sense of the term.  I don't read when I lecture and, in seminar, I don't much dictate the direction of a conversation beyond giving the reading assignment and asking pointed questions.