CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... i 摘要 ............................................................................................................................... i i ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................. i ii
Chapter One Introduction (1)
1.1
Introduction to Eugene O’Neill and His Works ........................................... 1 1.2
Literature Review ......................................................................................... 3 1.3
Trauma Theory ............................................................................................. 7 1.4 Layout of the thesis .. (9)
Chapter Two The Cultural Others (12)
2.1 Jones’s Blackness in The Emperor Jones (1920) (12)
2.2 Eugene O’Neill’s Irishness (16)
Chapter Three The Industrialism’s Derelicts (22)
3.1 Yank’s Disbelonging in The Hairy Ape (1921) (22)
3.2 Eugene O’Neill’s Derelict Life Experiences (26)
Chapter Four The Society’s Failures (31)
4.1 The Residents’ Pipe Dreams in The Iceman Cometh (1939) (31)
4.2 Eugene O’Neill’s Hopelessness in His Early Adulthood Years (35)
Chapter Five Conclusion (41)
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 43 攻读学位期间本人出版或公开发表的论著攻读学位期间本人出版或公开发表的论著、、论文 . (47)
“Tragedy is a foreign country. We don’t know how to talk to the natives.” Only the natives can understand each other and speak for each other.
----A quote and some inspiration from a movie called
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
Chapter One Introduction
1.1Introduction to Eugene O’Neill and His Works
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (October 16, 1888 - November 27, 1953) has been regarded as the greatest playwright in America. He was the first and so far the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1936) and also a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner(1920, 1922, 1928, 1957). It was because of him that the American theater grew up into a serious and important cultural institution where social issues and ideas can be delivered through multi cultural forms. He was also among the very first to introduce characters that inhabited the fringes of the society to American theater. Most of his works contain a strong autobiographical content and almost all of them are tragedies. It’s through his tragedies that he’d shared his concern for the tragedy of the human condition, shown his sympathy and respect for his fellow Americans who in his era have suffered greatly, and found helpful relief and salvation upon his own likewise tragic life.
Born in a Broadway hotel in New York, where his father, the Irish immigrate actor James O’Neill, worked as a touring stage actor, Eugene O’Neill was destined to live a difficult, rough-and-tumble life. His mother Mary, who was also of Irish decent, accompanied his father back and forth across the country. Young Eugene has spent most of his childhood between hotel rooms, on trains and backstage. He was first educated in a catholic boarding school, where he received a strict catholic upbringing, followed by another few years at a non-sectarian preparatory school. He spent a year at Princeton University, then left school and began a long adventure which he later regarded as a real education in life experience. He led a restless, wandering life for several years, working at various occupations. He was first a secretary of a small mail order house, and then he went on a gold prospecting expenditure for some time in the wilds of Spanish Honduras, found no gold but contracted malarial fever. Returned to the United States, he worked for a time as assistant manager of a theatrical company on tour, after which he spent several years on sea, suffering from great depression and