page_title: Brander Matthews
section_title: Teaching
hierarchical_section_title: Brander Matthews / Teaching
caption_attribution_description: English: Brander Matthews.
context_page_description: James Brander Matthews was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study in the academic world. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own day.
context_section_description: Matthews' students knew him as a man well-versed in the history of drama and as knowledgeable about continental dramatists as he was about American and British playwrights. Long before they were fashionable, he championed playwrights who were regarded as too bold for American tastes, such as Hermann Sudermann, Arthur Pinero, and preeminently Henrik Ibsen, about whom he wrote frequently and eloquently. His students also knew him as an opinionated man with a somewhat conservative political bent.  Playwright S.N. Behrman, who studied with him in 1917, recalled in his memoirs, "One day I made the mistake of bringing into class a copy of [the liberal magazine] The New Republic.  I had, actually, a contribution in it.  Matthews looked at The New Republic and said, 'I am sorry to see you wasting your time on that stuff.'  As a staunch Republican and intimate of Theodore Roosevelt's, he had his duty to do."  He could also be "easy and anecdotal," Behrman acknowledged, and he was respected on campus as a man-of-the-world. He lived for the theater and made clear his belief that theater was a performance art, first and foremost, and that plays as literary texts should never be viewed in the same light. Yet in the classroom he was an exacting guide to stage craftsmanship.
  Other students recalled him as a teacher who elicited "mingled affection and impatience" and who conducted himself in a manner that never attempted to hide his privileged background, connections, and connoisseurship. His relations with Columbia colleagues were sometimes adversarial. His conservatism became more pronounced in his later years: he was adamant about not admitting women to his graduate courses and publicly expressed the opinion that women did not have the natural ability to be great playwrights. According to Mark Van Doren, he taught an "ancient" American literature elective that he refused to revise over the decades.  Not surprisingly, he was a natural target for the World War I-era generation of writers and activists.  Reviewing Matthews' autobiography in 1917, the radical critic and fellow Columbia graduate Randolph Bourne complained that for Matthews, "literature was a gesture of gentility and not a comprehension of life." In On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin characterized him as a "literary gentleman."
  Matthews taught a number of students who went on to have major careers in the theater, including playwright Behrman and drama critics Stark Young, Ludwig Lewisohn, and John Gassner.
caption: Brander Matthews.
exif: {}