아더 밀러의 작품에 나타난 사회비극 연구

Abstract

ABSTRACT

A Study on the Social Tragedy in Arthur Miller's Plays

Park Ok Ja Advisor: Prof. Kim Young-kwan, Ph.D. English Language and Literature Graduate School of Chosun University

This study is an attempt to discuss Arthur Miller as a social tragedian, who has until now been studied and estimated mainly as a tragic playwright in critical areas and the history of the American dramas, especially the social background, which examines how Miller reflected tragic social aspects such as the Holocaust in Europe during World War Ⅱ and irrational McCarthyism in America in the 1950s on his works. Also, he has influenced modern American and European playwrights on the creative structures of his works, and especially extended the scope of themes to a number of social issues through many of his plays. Miller was influenced by not only Greek tragedies, especially Aristotle's tragedy but also the atheistic existentialists such as Sartre, Camus, and Foucault. However, he made much of not their theories, but human life itself. He established the idea that not 'What should I know?' but, 'What should I do?' is important in his social dramas. Based on his own various and specific experiences, Miller described American consciousness much better than any other author. His concerns about relationships between individuals and the modern industrial society make him more absorbed in political and social issues. As a representative of modern American playwrights, Miller has been regarded as a complex thinker because of being variously called as a moralist, a humanist, an atheistic existentialist, a feminist, a social psychologist and so on from others. Therefore, it focuses on the background of Miller's tragic thoughts about society and concentrates upon the tragedy of moral humanism. On a concrete level, it tries to decipher the source of Miller's tragedy, the background of psycho-social existentialism, and the distinctive features of Miller's social tragedy. In developing an aim of this dissertation systematically, first, a variety of backgrounds based on social tragedy would need to be investigated to help in the understanding of Miller's plays in Chapter Ⅰ and Ⅱ. The distinctive features of social tragedy are examined through All My Sons(1947), Death of a Salesman(1949), The Crucible(1953), After the Fall(1964), and Incident at Vichy(1965) which have strong messages of social tragedy in Chapter Ⅲ. In conclusion, it reevaluates him from a sociologic point of view. The real movement of modern dramas started in America with Eugene O'Neill who was affected by Realism in Europe in the late 19th century, and Realism and Experimentalism were the mainstream in American dramas. Under the cultural circumstance, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were playwrights who were influenced by O'Neill in the 1920s. Realism spread out in all fields in the period when both authors worked actively and it has continued longest in the American theater since the modern dramas started. The 20th century American author, Arthur Miller is a very important figure in the modern literary world. From his early works to his latest, he found topics in his neighborhood and published works with which many people can sympathize, based on his own experiences. He mainly focused on the relationship between humans and society, and was interested in exposing social irregularities. Therefore, he is valued as a representative social playwright.