IN CLASS
Stylistics: Grammar as Performance Art
Even though
I’m an English
major, my eyes
glaze over just
like everyone
else’s when
words like
infinitive and
gerund and
preposition
appear on the
page. But the
genius of this
class was
that, somehow,
grammar became
something
everyone —
journalism
majors and
premed kids and
art majors —
got a kick out of.
Idifferent in Marianne Gingher’s
“Gram-o-Rama” class when I saw
knew things were going to be a little
kazoos listed on the syllabus.
Yes, there we all were — 16 of us,
mostly seniors — listening to the exuberant (and large-hearted and, really, divine)
Marianne tell us that we’re going to need
to bring kazoos to class. Like, those little
plastic things you hum into when you’re in
kindergarten to make a buzzing sound. We
soon found out why. One of our assignments was to investigate the musicality of
language by reciting a famous speech or
poem or nursery rhyme entirely through a
kazoo.
So, on a fall afternoon in one of those
rooms in Greenlaw that has way too many
desks and footwide slits for windows, at a
time when our fellow undergraduates were
bending over microscopes or scribbling
furiously in an economics lecture or trying
to remember how to conjugate verbs in
Portuguese, the 16 students in “
Gram-o-Rama” were reinterpreting the love scene
from Romeo and Juliet or Bill Clinton’s “I
did not have sexual relations with that
woman” speech or the “Charlie Bit My
Finger” clip from You Tube via kazoo.
The big joke behind the “
Gram-o-Rama” class (subtitled in the course directory “The Grammar Lesson as Performance
Art”) is that it’s impossible to describe —
on any given day, you could walk into our
classroom to find students speaking in gibberish, singing to the tune of the Winnie
the Pooh theme song, or re-enacting a
scene from Oedipus Rex. But, basically, the
class is an exercise in using grammar as
performance — we study grammar, we
write skits having to do with the grammar
lesson, we perform the skits in class, and,
then, we perform the best skits in a big
grammar show at the end of the semester.
Boring, right?
Actually, it wasn’t. Even though I’m an
English major, my eyes glaze over just like
everyone else’s when words like infinitive
and gerund and preposition appear on the
page. But the genius of this class was that,
somehow, grammar became something
CODEY JOHNSTON/THE DAILY TAR HEEL
everyone — journalism majors and
premed kids and art majors — got a kick
out of.
For each class, we were assigned a per-formance-oriented activity that applied to
a specific aspect of English grammar — the
passive voice, malapropisms, possessives,
misplaced modifiers. So, for instance, if we
learned about verbs and prepositions in
class, then the assignment would be for
everyone to write a performance piece that
used only verbs and prepositions. The
result, a piece on pop-up advertisements:
In a scene from
“America the
Bootyful: Tales of
Our Youth,” senior
Josephine Butler,
left, and junior Maria
Facelli perform a
musicalized speech
called “Charlie” to a
packed house in
Wilson Library at the
Stylistics’ Eighth
Annual Show, the
class’s climactic performance.
