Aesthetics Of Failure: Dynamic Structure In The Plays Of Eugene Oneill; Author: Brietzke, Zander; Paperback

Author: Brietzke, Zander
Paperback; Photographs, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, I
277 pages
Published: May 2001
McFarland & Company, Inc.
ISBN: 0786409460

Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene ONeill the worlds 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 ONeill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of Americasfinest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how ONeills 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 ONeills plays are studied at the structural level, with attention paid to genre, language or dialogue, characters, space and timDespite the fact that O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, most of his works are not good. This work examines how O'Neill's failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments reflect his own theory that tragedy requires failure.