One day the day will come when the day will not come :: Essays Papers

One day the day will come when the day will not come We who have come from everywhere on this globe for a conversation on teaching comedia in the 21st century are testimonies of a fulfilled modern promise of traversing space and time with rapidity. Perhaps we will meet again for another conversation in the next century, once again, fulfilling, yet another promise of arriving from everywhere, but converging nowhere in real-time and in cyberspace. Then we will not have to cross space and time that serve as markers and measures of our experience because the space as expansion and the time as liner succession will cease to be. The necessity of today’s conversation on comedia in the next millennium presupposes a newness, a change and an end to the old ways. The newness of the next millennium assumes a supreme and inevitable reign of technology in every aspect of research and pedagogy. Thus we seem to be preparing for this promised event caught between two emotions: a desire to master technology and an anxiety of failure. However, if we think the next century only in terms of technologized pedagogy and scholarship, we are not thinking sufficiently the significance of the end of old and coming of the new. We lack, as finite beings, the prophetic vision of foreseeing the future, yet as beings of reason we can contemplate about the end. What is coming to an end is comedia itself. By this statement we do not intend announce the disappearance of comedia as an object of scholarly pursuit, but an end of an age with whose inauguration comedia emerged as an expression of cultural activity of a people, as a medium of communication, as a means of entertainment and above all as a spectacle. The age of representation, whose convulsive birth is captured by comedia in all its complexities and contradictions, is reaching its end. The Spanish comedia stood at that crucial juncture of epistemic break wherein the old age came to an end and a new modern period was inaugurated. Today, at the threshold of the third millennium we experience the same fate, the conclusion of the modern age and the coming of a yet unknown and unnamed age. The beginnings and ends, in their manifestations, differ in extreme, however we should not be dissuaded from thinking the sameness that founds both the events by the visible extremities.