Post world-war II/ pop culture and the Beat generation 


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Post world-war II/ pop culture and the Beat generation



The «tranquilized fifties», as Robert Lowell called them, introduced a new climate of conformity and consensus, an age of materialism, liberalism, new-found affluence, and retreat from issues of public concern. Yet the war had left its traumas, and McCarthyism, in politics, or the emergence, in popular culture, of a new Science-Fiction preying on the fears instigated by history, rapidly revealed a lurking sentiment of fear and of paranoia: Americans were suddenly waking up to a post-atomic world. In this new era where history had demonstrated that it could, as it were, surpass fiction itself, many writers subscribed to forms of extreme realism, confining themselves to an unsettling journalistic record of American life (Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote). Novels dealing with the war, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, would soon show the absurdity of history, which becomes in these texts a stage of lunacy and pain. And novels dealing with the condition of post-World War II America, such as Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, read like a fall from innocence.

In the face of this tension between apparent tranquility and lurking traumas, dissent grew stronger and took the form of an alternative culture — that of rock’n’roll and hallucinogenic drugs — amplified by a political revolt after the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and intensified with the Vietnam War.

At the avant-garde of literary protest was the Beat Generation, a remarkable social phenomenon which rose to prominence in the 1950s in America. Along with a reference to jazz, «beat», a term coined by Jack Kerouac, also refers to the «beaten» condition of the outsider, a Romantic stance cherished by this generation, placing them peripherically alongside the dispossessed or the insane, and allowing them to criticize the normal, «square» society. It finally refers also to beatitude and expresses the pursuit of what Ginsberg called «visionary consciousness». Ginsberg’s work, very much in the «American Grain» of Whitman, Williams, and Dos Passos, achieves a combination of the mystical and the material, the prophetic and the intimate, the comic and the serious, in the belief that a new language will promote a new vision and a new society.

 

“New journalism”: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer - Journalism that is characterized by the reporter's subjective interpretations and often features fictional dramatized elements to emphasize personal involvement.

Poetry: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady

Fiction: J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut

 

POSTMODERNISM

The 1960s were a time of reflection and rebelliousness in the fields of culture and art, with the development of movements promoting a counter-culture. They were also a time of great concern with the renewal of art forms, a question already posed by modernist artists at the beginning of the century. Faced with an ever increasing challenge to experiment and break with what was becoming a tradition of refusing traditional modes of expression, John Barth in 1967 wondered whether literature had not reached its point of exhaustion, in a provocative essay entitled “The Literature of Exhaustion”. The answer however was a new surge of creativity, that fell under the broad label of post-modernism: a playful approach to writing fiction and poetry filled with a sense of artificiality, of self-consciousness, marked by a tendency to turn literature around to examine itself, its processes, its tricks and tools. This was also a response to a society where discourses made up for a loss of the sense of an absolute truth or point of reference, replaced by the great political, social, historical, moral narratives explored by Jean-François Lyotard, a society more and more contaminated by fictions and virtual realities. Pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, self-consciousness, the exposure of the tools of fiction, together with a great awareness of language, characterize postmodernist fiction in the works of John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Don DeLillo, William Gass, Robert Coover.

 

 

33. Послевоенная литература: К.Воннегут.

 

Post World War II literature sort of continues the themes (or “a theme”) of disillusionment that began in the "Lost Generation" Post WWI writers. American literature becomes increasingly more regional post 1920s – the center of American literature shifts from the East to the Midwest and the South. By mid-century, American literature was becoming increasingly more urban. World War II had enormous impact on American writing, as did many of the other events of mid and late twentieth-century America (explosion of the Atomic bomb in 1945, the emergence of television as a cultural force, the invention and growing dominance of computers, the McCarthyism of the 50s, the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s). The literature that emerges from the experience of World War II is distinctly different from that of WWI – and yet it also seems to be aligned with the themes of dissillusionment that began with the "Lost Generation" (if WWII is considered the "Greatest Generation"); however, it shows a nation that was united and confident in its powers to endure and to lead – transitioned to a new enlightened period of the experience gained; or so it seems.

The period in time from the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw to the publication of some of the most popular works in American history. The last few of the more realistic Modernists along with the wildly Romantic Beatniks largely dominated the period, while the direct respondents to America's involvement in World War II contributed in their notable influence.

 

Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become the most influential novelist in America in the decades following World War II. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow painted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters peopling it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

 

From J.D. Salinger 's Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye to Sylvia Plath 's The Bell Jar, America's madness was placed to the forefront of the nation's literary expression. Émigré Authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with Lolita, forged on with the theme, and, at almost the same time, the Beatniks took a concerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors.

 

The poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," largely born of a circle of intellects formed in New York City around Columbia University and established more officially some time later in San Francisco, came of age. The term, Beat, referred, all at the same time, to the countercultural rhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding the conservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in new forms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy, and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg set the tone of the movement in his poem Howl a Whitmanesque work that began: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." At the same time, his good friend Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' rollicking, spontaneous, and vagrant life-style in, among many other works, his masterful and most popular novel On the Road.

 

Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer 's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). MacBird, written by Barbara Garson, was another well-received work exposing the absurdity of war.

 

In contrast, John Updike showcased what could be called the more idyllic side of American life, approaching it from a quiet, but subversive writing style. His 1960 book Rabbit, Run broke new ground on its release by its characterization and detail of the American middle class. It is also credited as one of the first novels to ever use the present tense in its narration.

 

Ralph Ellison 's 1953 novel Invisible Man was instantly recognized as among the most powerful and sensational works of the immediate post-war years. The story of a black man in the urban north, the novel laid bare the often repressed racial tension still prevailing in the nation while also succeeding as an existential character study. Flannery O'Connor also explored and developed the theme of 'the South' in American literature that was dear to Mark Twain and other leading authors of American literary history (Everything That Rises Must Converge 1965).

Sci-fiction

Metafiction

 

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)

Following the war, Vonnegut began publishing fiction about the dangers of technology, but since his work contained elements of fantasy, he was quickly labeled a science fiction writer, and his works were not taken seriously. Vonnegut’s first published novel, Player Piano, depicts a fictional city called Ilium in which the people have surrendered all control of their lives to a computer named, ironically enough, EPICAC, after a substance that induces vomiting. The Sirens of Titan (1959) takes place on several different planets, including a thoroughly militarized Mars, where the inhabitants are controlled electronically. Although obvious sci-fi venues, the super-real settings of Vonneguts fictional worlds serve primarily as a metaphor for modern society, which Vonnegut views as absurd to the point of being surreal, as well as a world peopled by the hapless human beings who struggle against both their environments and themselves.

 

NOTE:

In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany, and forced to work in a factory that manufactured food supplements for pregnant women. Allied bombers attacked the city on the night of February 13, 1945, setting off a firestorm that burned up the oxygen and killed nearly all of the city’s residents within hours. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived because they slept in a meat locker three stories belowground. When they went outside the following morning, they found themselves among few people left alive in a city that had burned to the ground.

While writing these early books, Vonnegut kept trying to work on a novel about the bombing of Dresden. Finally, in 1967, he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, thinking that he has been transported to a planet where time no longer exists. Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the War in Vietnam, and antiwar protestors saw the author as a hero and a powerful spokesperson.

 

 

The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Mother Night (1961)

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (1969)

Bluebeard (1987)

 

 

34. Экзистенциализм и тема молодежи в романах Дж. Сэлинджера «Над пропастью во ржи» и в романе Х. Ли «Убить пересмешника».

Surrealism expresses the unconscious through vivid dreamlike imagery, and much poetry by women and ethnic minorities. Though superficially distinct, surrealists, feminists, and minorities appear to share a sense of alienation from white, male, mainstream literature. In 1960s surrealism and existentialism become domesticated in America under the stress of the Vietnam conflict.

 

Existentialism emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

 

 

J.D. Salinger (1919-)

A harbinger of things to come in the 1960s, J.D. Salinger has portrayed attempts to drop out of society. Born in New York City, he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), centered on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. 
When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher in the rye," misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of young children cannot see where they are running as they play their games. He is the only big person there. "I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." The fall over the cliff is equated with the loss of childhood and (especially sexual) innocence -- a persistent theme of the era. Other works by this reclusive, spare writer include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963), a collection of stories from The New Yorker. Since the appearance of one story in 1965, Salinger -- who lives in New Hampshire -- has been absent from the American literary scene.

 

35. Литература битников: Дж.Керруак, Т.Вульф. Новый журнализм: Х.Томпсон.

the Beat Movement­­­the impact of WWII, the cold war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the assassination of Kennedy and of Martin Luther King; the idea of life as a big joke or an absurdity; the more disintegrating and fragmentary world; more estranged and despondent people; Allen Ginsberg, the “Howl”, the manifesto of the Beat Movement.

Beat Poets

The "Beat" poets emerged in the 1950s. Most of the important Beats (beatniks) migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast, gaining their initial national recognition in California. Major Beat writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the "Beat" literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City. His fiction was much influenced by the loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. 
Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes "beatniks" wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues (1959), and volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.

 

Большое влияние на американскую литературу 50 -70-х гг. годов оказала философия экзистенциализма. Проблема отчуждения человека легла в основу идеологии и эстетики поколения так называемых «битников». В 50-х гг. в Сан-Франциско образовалась группа молодой интеллигенции, которая назвала себя «разбитым поколением» - битниками. Битники восприняли близко к сердцу такие явления, как послевоенная депрессия, «холодная война», угроза атомной катастрофы. Битники фиксировали состояние отчужденности человеческой личности от современного им общества, и это, естественно, выливалось в форму протеста. Представители этого молодежного движения давали почувствовать, что их современники-американцы живут на развалинах цивилизации. Бунт против истеблишмента стал для них своеобразной формой межличностного общения, и это роднило их идеологию с экзистенциализмом Камю и Сартра. Знаковой фигурой среди писателей-битников стал Джек Керуак. Манифестом писателей-битников стал его роман «На дороге» (1950).

 

“New journalism”: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer - Journalism that is characterized by the reporter's subjective interpretations and often features fictional dramatized elements to emphasize personal involvement.

 

36. Творчество Дж.Апдайка

John Updike (1932-)

John Updike is regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) -- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s. 
Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays. 


 

37. Творчество Дж.Барта

POSTMODERNISM

John Barth (1930-) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist (post–World War II era) quality of his work.

 

The Floating Opera (1956)

The End of the Road (1958)

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

 

1) According to Barth language is material. Because somehow we don’t want to be reminded that a story is in material container. But Barth invites a reader to do this.

2) Narrative has a form. It can be constructed, built. It’s like a craft project.

So the stories are a craft that get built of a material of language.

3) Form is both endless and closed. It is both repetitious and endlessly filled with possibility, because when you read this you get to know that a beginning is repeated over and over again. It gives you that feeling of possibility. But it’s also boring. It doesn’t tell us anything. John Barth runs a certain kind of risk into his story collection, it’s the rusk of difficulty.

Some stories are conscientiously boringly metafictional. The sound like all those stories we have about somebody writing a story about themselves, about themselves writing a story and etc. And it’s all about that endless regress.

4) Language is also unpredictable.

So the language can be separated from people.

 

38. Творчество Дж.Гарднера

 

John Gardner (1933 – 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is perhaps most noted for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.

A prolific and popular novelist, Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative techniques -- such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting stories -- to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization (particularly his sympathetic portraits of ordinary people) and colorful style. Major works include The Resurrection (1966), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light (1976), and Mickelson's Ghosts (1982).

 

 

39. Массовая литература рубежа 20-21в. Творчество Б.И.Эллиса, Ч.Паланика

Popular culture is concept that came into existence as a result of turbulent changes brought into society by the industrial revolution. A cheap form of entertainment aimed at mass audience, which, instead of reviving the bygone cultural traditions, quietly started forming standardized opinions of its consumers.

Blank generation (=a new beat generation = lost generation???)

Consumerism

Bret Easton Ellis (1964-)

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) features a very characteristic figure in US popular culture-- the serial killer--and, formally, it mixes popular genres and the language of different media. Mass culture is inextricably linked to the concept of seriality since talk shows, daily news, advertisements, pop music and magazines, among other mass culture products, are consumed in a serial and repetitive way. They rely on a structure known to the audience, which results in feelings both of reassurance and anticipation. In American Psycho mass culture references constantly appear and serve as a linking structure to the sixty short chapters into which the book is divided. As part of this seriality we find the consumerist patterns followed by the main character, a serial killer called Patrick Bateman, who consumes in all possible ways: buying, eating and destroying. The three forms of consumption are produced in series, the text thus building a close link between the seriality of the serial killer and the seriality of mass culture, a link that may account for the interest aroused by the figure of the serial killer in Western societies, and especially in US society.

Bret Easton Ellis's most controversial and representative work is American Psycho (1991), a novel which clearly illustrates this influence of mass culture in blank fiction literature. American Psycho's subject- matter is taken from popular literature. Its main character is a rich white heterosexual yuppie called Patrick Bateman. Although Bateman seems to be a successful man perfectly integrated in society, he is actually a sexist, racist, and xenophobic serial killer. Bateman himself narrates all the events portrayed in the novel, deploying the same flat tone to describe both his daily routine and his horrific killings. In a narration overcharged with details we learn of his favourite television talk shows, magazines, films, cosmetic products and preferred ways of torturing people.

Charles «Chuck» Palahniuk (1962-)

 

Flight Club (1995)

Survivor (1999)

Invisible Monsters (2000)

Choke (2001)

Palahniuk‘s books are commonly read also by people who do not usually read books. Attracting such a wide body of readers, he has become a controversial figure as various kinds of readers constantly argue about true nature of his writing – ―for some, his work represents mere shock literature, deviant and aggressive with adolescent sensibility. For others, Palahniuk‘s fiction speaks great truths about the nature of their lives.

Transgressive Fiction

Genre of fiction in which characters feel limited by the expectations and norms of society. The protagonists seek ways to break from those boundaries past the limit of social acceptability, which often leads to them appearing mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. Most books of the genre explore taboo subjects such as drugs, violence, sex, incest, crime, pedophilia, or highly dysfunctional family relationships.

Inspired by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and his openly satirical approach, they provide social criticism in a manner that is accessible and attractive to the audience, using the writing techniques similar to the ones used famously by the authors like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac.

 

40. Драматургия США 20 века: Ю. О’Нил, Т. Уильямс, Э. Олби.

 

TH-CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA

A merican drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So did the "star system," in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions. 
During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like). Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original forms and expressions.

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Eugene O'Neill is the great figure of American theater. His numerous plays combine enormous technical originality with freshness of vision and emotional depth. O'Neill's earliest dramas concern the working class and poor; later works explore subjective realms, such as obsessions and sex, and underscore his reading in Freud and his anguished attempt to come to terms with his dead mother, father, and brother. His play Desire Under the Elms (1924) recreates the passions hidden within one family; The Great God Brown (1926) uncovers the unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman; and Strange Interlude (1928), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the tangled loves of one woman. These powerful plays reveal different personalities reverting to primitive emotions or confusion under intense stress. 
O'Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and dominance within families in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), based on the classical Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles. His later plays include the acknowledged masterpieces The Iceman Cometh (1946), a stark work on the theme of death, and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956) - - a powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night. This work was part of a cycle of plays O'Neill was working on at the time of his death. 
O'Neill redefined the theater by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes (Strange Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning Becomes Electra takes nine hours to perform); using masks such as those found in Asian and ancient Greek theater; introducing Shakespearean monologues and Greek choruses; and producing special effects through lighting and sound. He is generally acknowledged to have been America's foremost dramatist. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature -- the first American playwright to be so honored.

Tennessee Williams ( Thomas Lanier Williams III) (1911 – 1983)

Williams established himself as a recognized playwright in the wake of World War II, during which Modernist deconstructions of literature were flourishing. In late 1947, Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire premiered, securing his position as a major American playwright. Streetcar served as a somewhat monumental contribution to American theater: following a Modernistic trend, in which the laws and conventions of literature are bent and questioned, Streetcar eschewed a generic restriction, and served simply to reflect American habits and motivations.

An eloquently symbolic poet of the theater, Williams is noted for his scenes of high dramatic tension and for his brilliant, often lyrical dialogue. Williams is perhaps most successful in his portraits of the hypersensitive and lonely Southern woman, such as Blanche in Streetcar, clutching at life, particularly at her memories of a grand past that no longer exists.

Though Streetcar is Williams’ most famous and groundbreaking project, his other works, including The Rose Tattoo, The Glass Menagerie, and the Pulitzer-prize winning Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, demonstrate a similar devotion to American ideals and realistic human nature. Essentially, Williams’ canon of work emerged not as an attempt to follow literary patterns, but rather, as an honest and thorough depiction of human nature in America — not surprisingly, his efforts became an icon of American theater as a whole.

The Glass Menagerie (1945)

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Edward Albee (1928-)

Theatre of the absurd

Theatrical movement, originating in France with the lays of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco, that portrayed characters grasping futilely for meaning and order in a seemingly senseless world. Much of the work of the American playwright Edward Albee can be classified as part of this movement.

Albee is supposed to be one of the greatest absurdist playwrights after the Second World War in American literature. By the early 1960s, Albee was widely considered to the successor of Williams and Miller.

lbee came up with the series of successful works like The Zoo Story; a play written in Absurdist style; The American Dream; a play that attacks on the false values which have destroyed the real values in American society; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The most famous book having the theme of emptiness, and so on. 
Most of Albee’s dramas lack specific setting. Audiences never know the situation and the place where things are happening in play. This is the important feature of absurdist drama. Most of the characters presented by Albee in his works are restless and uncomfortable in their own self. The characters in Albee’s plays seem to suffer from loneliness because they cannot or will not make any connection with each other. Through such an image of the characters, it can be assumed that Albee’s view about human condition is that it is always overpowered by separateness and loneliness, which according to him may be the result of a collapse of values on the western world in general and in the United States in particular. Love is also presented in his plays but not in the way of romantic situation but in the way of lost, decay, fall and failure. Albee’s plays are full of violence both physical violence like in The Zoo Story or verbal like in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is taken as a metaphor to the 1960s American society. The character in the drama like George and Martha are husband and wife; whose life is very much frustrated. They only argue all the time. The violence could not let them to continue their partnership. They seem to be tired of arguing. This shows the common whole American life style.

The Zoo Story (1958)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

A Delicate Balance (1966)

Three Tall Women (1994)



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