Eugene O'Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics

Eugene O'Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics PDF Author: Thierry Dubost
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476635684
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
 The plays of Eugene O'Neill testify to his continued search for new dramatic strategies. The author explores the Nobel Prize winner's attempts at creating a new Modern play. He shows how, moving away from melodrama or "the problem play," O'Neill revisited the classical frames of drama and reinvented theater aesthetics by resorting to masks, the chorus, acoustics, silence or immobility for the creation of his dramatic works.

Eugene O'Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics

Eugene O'Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics PDF Author: Thierry Dubost
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476635684
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
 The plays of Eugene O'Neill testify to his continued search for new dramatic strategies. The author explores the Nobel Prize winner's attempts at creating a new Modern play. He shows how, moving away from melodrama or "the problem play," O'Neill revisited the classical frames of drama and reinvented theater aesthetics by resorting to masks, the chorus, acoustics, silence or immobility for the creation of his dramatic works.

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre PDF Author: Jeremy Killian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000546136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Through a close re-examination of Eugene O’Neill’s oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O’Neill’s vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more “rational” one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O’Neill’s work, this book argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy’s impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O’Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy’s merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism

The Cambridge History of American Modernism PDF Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108808026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 948

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

The Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure PDF Author: Zander Brietzke
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene O'Neill the "world's worst great playwright" and Brooks Atkinson called him "a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama." These descriptions of the man can also be used to describe his work. Despite the fact that O'Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of America's finest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how O'Neill's failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments are reflections of his own theory that tragedy requires failure, a theory that is evident in his work. Conflicts in O'Neill's plays are studied at the structural level, with attention paid to genre, language or dialogue, characters, space and time elements, and action. Included is information about O'Neill's life and a chronological listing of all of his 50 plays with basic details such as production history, principal characters, dramatic action, and a brief commentary.

The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252811
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A critical edition of O’Neill’s most complex and difficult play, designed for student readers and performers This critical edition of Eugene O’Neill’s most complex and difficult play helps students and performers meet the work’s demanding cultural literacy. William Davies King provides an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; extensive notes on the language used in the play, and its many musical and literary allusions; as well as numerous insightful illustrations. He also gives biographical details about the actual people the characters are based on, along with the performance history of the play, to help students and theatrical artists engage with this labyrinthine work.

Vows, Veils, and Masks

Vows, Veils, and Masks PDF Author: Beth Wynstra
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389034
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Vows, Veils, and Masks offers a bold and timely approach to the plays of Eugene O’Neill with its attention to the engagements, weddings, and marriages so crucial to the tragic action in O’Neill’s works. Specifically, the book examines the culturally sanctioned traditions and gender roles that underscored marital life in the early twentieth century, and that still haunt and define love and partnership in the modern age. Weaving in artifacts like advice columns, advertisements, theatrical reviews, and even the lived experiences of the actors who brought O’Neill’s wife characters to life, Beth Wynstra points to new ways of seeing and empathizing with those who are betrothed and new possibilities for reading marriage in literary and dramatic works. She suggests that the various ways women were, and still are, expected to divert from their true ambitions, desires, and selves in the service of appropriate wifely behavior is a detrimental performance and one at the crux of O’Neill’s marital tragedies. This book invites more inclusive and nuanced ways of thinking about the choices married characters must make and the roles they play, both on and off the stage.

The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill

The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill PDF Author: Kurt Eisen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474238424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018 The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his work. It includes a study of all his major plays-The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms-besides numerous other full length and one act dramas. Eugene O'Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet O'Neill's theatrical instincts were always shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while remaining rooted in its past. Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work: his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American 'pipe dreams' and the allure of success. The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology of the writer's life and times.

The O'Neill

The O'Neill PDF Author: Jeffrey Sweet
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300195575
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"At the O'Neill, we were all engaged with full-hearted passion in sometimes the silliest of exercises, and all in service of finding that wiggly, elusive creature, a new play."—Meryl Streep "I would not be who or where I am today without the O'Neill."—Michael Douglas As the old ways of the commercial theater were dying and American playwriting was in crisis, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center arose as a midwife to new plays and musicals, introducing some of the most exciting talents of our time (including August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, and Christopher Durang) and developing works that went on to win Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards. Along the way, it collaborated with then-unknown performers (like Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Courtney Vance, and Angela Bassett) and inspired Robert Redford in his creation of the Sundance Institute. This is the story of a theatrical laboratory, a place that transformed American theater, film, and television.

Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays

Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays PDF Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137043938
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

Eugene O'Neill and the Emergence of American Drama

Eugene O'Neill and the Emergence of American Drama PDF Author: Marc Maufort
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051831085
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description