The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.
The paper is an attempt at a systematic account of the history of influences between anthropology and the theory of drama in the twentieth century. The starting point is the definition of drama as a mimesis of the movement towards self-knowledge as rebirth. It is described as a variation of the original spring dance in honour of the regeneration of life represented in the figure of the twice-born Dionysus. Anthropologists whose contribution to the theory of drama has been acknowledged are Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Arnold Van Genep, Joseph Campbell and Victor Turner.
The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.