Educating Rita and Oleanna

Abstract

Educating Rita ¹ provides a kind of archetype of the resilient learner from which the rest of this book radiates. David Mamet’s 1993 play Oleanna ² features in this chapter because it represents the opposite— it offers a deferred reading of resilience through a negative image. Oleanna is an apophatic reading of resilience. Given the theoretical commitment of the study to deconstruction, it is necessary to examine both in order to understand how resilience is performed. This initial analysis is deliberately intended to be fairly straightforward. The point here is not to effect a sophisticated reading of the texts for sake of literary criticism. Rather, it is to explore the texts to see what they yield in terms of developing an early framework regarding the performance of resilience that might then be applied to the final literary text examined-Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.