 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Death of a Salesman, When Tragedy Meets the Modern Man
Marsela Turku
Full-Text PDF
XML 710 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2013.04.004
Aleksandër Moisiu University, Durrës, Albania
The most persistent criticism about the play Death of a Salesman (1949) concerns the issue of genre and its constituents: Is it a tragedy?! If yes, to what extend is it a tragedy? Miller himself considered the play to be the tragedy of the common man, as he presents his idea on tragedy as a genre and his idea of the tragic hero in his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1942), but for a group of critics it is not a tragedy but to others and to the author, it is the tragedy of the man who tries to survive in the modern world by using archaic weapons. This paper briefly revisits the Aristotelian tragedy concept and modern theories, and stands on what are tragedy and a tragic hero. It aims at reading Death of a Salesman as a meeting point between (ancient) concept of tragedy with modern man and his way of seeing life, and briefly examines and explores the continuing disagreements among academics and by what criteria this play is a tragedy.
tragedy, modern man, Aristotle, tragic hero
de Unamuno, M. (1913). Tragic sense of life. New York: Dover Publications, Inc..
de Unamuno, M. (1972). The tragic sense of life in Men and Nations. (A. Kerrigan Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hamilton, E. (1930). The Greek way. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc..
Jozzoms. (2012, March 12). “Tragedy in Death of a Salesman” In HubPages. Retrieved from http://lozzoms.hubpages.com/hub/Tragedy-in-death-of-a-salesman
Martine, J. J. (1976). Critical essays on Arthur Miller. Bosston: G. K. Hall & Co..
Miller, A. (1949). Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking Press Inc..
Miller, A. (1949, February 27). Tragedy the common man. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html
Miller, A. (1978). Tragedy and the common man. The theater essays of Arthur Miller (pp. 3-7). New York: Viking Press. Retrieved from http://theliterarylink.com/miller1.html
Morgan, F. (1979). Review of Death of a Salesman. In J. J. Martine (Ed.), Critical essays on Arthur Miller. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co..
Nietzsche, F. (1992). Basic writings of Nietzsche. W. Kaufman (Trans. & Ed.). New York: Random House Inc..
Nietzsche, F. (1993). The birth of tragedy. S. Whiteside (Trans & Ed.). London: Penguin Edition.
Perry, J. (2012, October). The extents to which The Death of a Salesman is an Aristotelian tragedy. Retrieved from http://www.joelperry.com/2007/02/the_extents_to_which_the_death.html
Porter, E. T. (1979). Acres of diamonds: Death of a Salesman. In J. J. Martine (Ed.), Critical essays on Arthur Miller (pp. 24-43). Boston: G. K. Hall & Co..
Shattuck, R. (1996). Forbidden knowledge: From Prometheus to pornography. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Steinberg, M. W. (1969). Arthur Miller and the idea of tragedy. In R. W. Corrigan (Ed.), Arthur Miller: A collection of critical essays (pp. 81-94). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc..
Turku, M. (2011). The tragedy and the human being in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. Sarajevo: Burch University. Retrieved from: http://eprints.ibu.edu.ba/120/