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FIRST YEAR SEMINAR SECTION 24

THEATER AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Theater is a mirror for society to see and experience itself without commercial interruptions! Watching a good play often forces us to think, sometimes makes us weep, and hopefully helps us to laugh at ourselves. This seminar will investigate how theater can be used to help communities talk about difficult issues regarding race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, economic status, religion and politics.

Contemporary playwrights Moises Kaufman, Anna Deveare Smith and Tony Kushner explore controversial issues that ignite in all of us wonder, rage, confusion and a desire for activism. How do these topics relate to each other and to the world of theater? How can we use the theater to bring us together as a college community, a nation and a global village?

The point of this class is to put this theory into action. Is it true? Does theater really bring people together in a unique way that offers the possibility and promise to connect with "the other"?

• ELIZA WEB: the Library's online web-based catalog
• ONLINE DATABASES/INDEXES
• ELECTRONIC JOURNALS AND NEWSPAPERS
• SEARCH ENGINES AND WEBSITES

Using hyperlinks, each ELIZA WEB bibliographic record provides direct links to additional information by Author, Subject, Call number and Series titles. ELIZA WEB also contains bibliographic records that directly link to external websites and electronic journals and newspapers--for example, look at ELIZA WEB records for HIV Insite and New York times on the web. Notice that you can click on the hyperlinks and go directly to the websites.

SUBJECT SEARCHING IN ELIZA WEB

NOTE! SUBJECT HEADING searches require the vocabulary of the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Examples:
Theater and society United States
African American theater
Gay theater
Gay students
Gay teenagers
Gay youth
Lesbian students
Lesbian teenagers
Lesbian youth
Homosexuality and education
Hispanic American theater
African Americans Relations with Jews
African Americans Race identity
Jews Identity
Gender identity
Hate crimes
Homophobia

Personal names are also searchable as subject headings (last name first).

Examples:
Kushner, Tony
Smith, Anna Deveare
Shepard, Matthew

KEYWORD SEARCHING IN ELIZA WEB

At the main menu of ELIZA WEB there is an option for KeyWORDsearching.

KeyWORD searching does NOT require the vocabulary of the Library of Congress Subject Headings and expands your search to include words in titles and contents notes as well as subject headings. KeyWORD searching also allows use of boolean operators:

• AND--to limit or narrow a search
  For example, search:
  sex and drama and identity
  queer and politics and identity
  (NOTE! If you had tried to search the word queer as a Subject, you would get no results, since the Library of Congress has not established any headings for Queer Studies, etc., although the term has become very familiar in the gay vernacular. When you search queer as a KeyWORD, notice that the word is located in titles and contents.)
• OR--to broaden a search
  For example, search:
  hate crimes or homophobia or xenophobia
  (hate crimes or homophobia) and education
  (NOTE! If you combine an "OR" search with an "AND" search, the "OR" words must be in parentheses.)
• NOT--to exclude a word from a search
  For example, search:
  hate crimes not (gay or gays or lesbian or lesbians)
  

Another powerful tool of KeyWORD searching is truncation, where an * (asterisk) sign is used to create a word root. For example, if you search the word root sex*, you will retrieve the words: sex, sexism, sexist, sexual, sexuality, sexualities. Using truncation, the previous not search could have been keyed: hate crimes not (gay* or lesbian*)

Connect to ELIZA WEB now

Or, as a BONUS!, click here for a list of feature films and documentaries on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. themes owned by the Wallace Library: BONUS VIDEOS

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OVID is a commercial supplier of databases for various disciplines. The following OVID databases will be useful for finding articles on theater and social change and on the works, performers and writers included in your syllabus:

• MLA International Bibliography
  Produced by the Modern Language Association of America, the MLA International Bibliography indexes critical scholarship on literature, langauge, film, linguistics and folklore. Coverage includes journal articles, book articles, dissertations, etc. The database includes records indexed from 1963 to the present date.
• Wilson Humanities Abstracts
  Wilson Humanities Abstracts indexes over 350 English language periodicals covering a wide spectrum of disciplines, including language and literature, literary and political criticism, folklore, journalism and communication, music, the performing arts and film. Coverage is 1984 to the present.
• Wilson Readers Guide Abstracts
  Wilson Readers Guide Abstracts indexes popular English language periodicals. Coverage is 1983 to the present.

The OVID databases use either $ (dollar sign) or : (colon) to truncate words.

INFO TRAC is a commercial supplier of several databases, with a large portion of full text articles. For this course, the most useful INFO TRAC databases are:

• Expanded Academic ASAP
  Expanded Academic Index offers cross-discipline access to articles in scholarly journals, news magazines and newspapers. Coverage is 1980 to the present.
• General Reference Center Gold
  General Reference Center Gold also is cross-discipline, but more focused on "popular" information sources. Coverage is 1980 to the present.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism
  Critical essays on contemporary authors.

INFO TRAC uses the * (asterisk sign) to truncate words.

LITERATURE ONLINE (LION) contains the full text of more than 349,000 works of English and American poetry, drama, prose and fiction, in addition to the texts of several reference resources. LION also provides access to the "Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)," 1920 to the present, with links from ABELL bibliographic records to the full text of articles from 117 literature journals.

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The Library currently provides access to more than 4100 electronic journals and newspapers. ELIZA WEB provides full bibliographic records for electronic journals, including direct links to their websites. Because electronic journals vary in terms of retrospective coverage and because many journals are available in more than one format (paper, microform, electronic), it is important to carefully read the LIB HAS information for each journal title, which tells you exactly what issues are available in what format(s) for what years. Detailed instructions for accessing electronic journals are available from ELIZA WEB's main menu under: Search Hints for Periodicals and Electronic Journals.

Electronic journals also are available from the Electronic Resources page of the Library's website.

The Library also has subscriptions to electronic journal collections. The four collections which might be useful for your seminar are:

• LEXIS NEXIS ACADEMIC
  LexisNexis Academic is a full text database of American and foreign newspapers, journals, legal materials and more. Detailed instructions for searching LexisNexis are provided in the Help Guide created by the Library Reference Department.
• ETHNIC NEWS WATCH
  Ethnic News Watch provides full text access to more than 200 newspapers, magazines and journals from ethnic, minority and native presses. The database is searchable in English and Spanish. Coverage is 1990 to the present.
• GENDER WATCH
  Gender Watch provides full text access to a database of books, newsletters, reports, newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals representing gender issues, with emphasis on women's studies. The database contains articles from over 190 publications. Coverage is partial for the 1970's and 80's with more complete coverage from 1990 to the present.
• PROJECT MUSE
  Project Muse provides full text access to more than 200 scholarly journals, with excellent representation of the arts and humanities.

ProQuest Company"s Information and Learning Unit completed its digitation project of the New York Times in 2002. Coverage is from 1851 to the present, divided into two files: 1851-1999 and 1999 to the present.

• Connect to: New York Times 1999+
• Connect to: New York Times 1851-1999

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• GOOGLE
  Google provides a basic and advanced search form. The advanced form permits language, domain and other limits.
  I did an advanced search "with all of the words": Matthew Shepard Yankel Rosenbaum hate crime. (Yankel Rosenbaum was the young Hasidic Jew stabbed to death in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, shortly after a car, driven by a Jew accidentally struck and killed a Black child, Gavin Cato. These incidents sparked three days of racially charged rioting that inspired Anna Deavere Smith's drama, Fires in the Mirror.) I was surprised to notice that the top results of this search actually were from conservative points of view, promoting hand guns, negative on hate crime legislation and critical of media coverage of hate crimes. It is extremely important to critically evaluate the context as well as the content of your information. The first result is an article from National Review Online, The Hate-Crime Myth. At the top of the page is the slogan: America's premier conservative website. The author of the article is Deroy Murdock. I did some Google searching for background information on him and found a brief biography on the website of Young America's Foundation. Young America's Foundation is a conservative organization that "is committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values. " The third result is an article from FrontPage Magazine.com, The Media's Hogwash on Hate Crimes. At the end of the article, read the brief bio blurb on the author, Tanya Metaksa. FrontPage Magazine.com is a publication of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
• YAHOO
  Yahoo provides a basic and advanced search form. I did a quick Yahoo advanced search requiring "all of these words" in "any part of the page": Roy Cohn Tony Kushner. Among other relevant results, was a lengthy annotation on Angels in America from NYU's Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
  
  Yahoo also provides an option for category or subject searching. From the Yahoo homepage, follow the string:
  • SOCIETY AND CULTURE
  • CULTURES AND GROUPS
  • LESBIANS, GAYS AND BISEXUALS
  • YOUTH (under Top Categories)
    
    or
  • ISSUES AND CAUSES (under Additional Categories)
    • HATE CRIMES
    • MATTHEW SHEPARD
      (where there are links to fourteen websites on the Matthew Shepard murder)

• HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN (HRC)
• GAY, LESBIAN AND STRAIGHT EDUCATION NETWORK (GLSEN)
• PARENTS, FAMILIES AND FRIENDS OF LESBIANS AND GAYS (PFLAG)

(Or, in YAHOO, you could follow the string: SOCIETY AND CULTURE > CULTURES AND GROUPS > LESBIANS, GAYS AND BISEXUALS > ORGANIZATIONS.)

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