Eugene_O’Neill 简介奥尼尔的作品

III. Main works
Different period
WORKS FEATURES 1. sea——destiny 2. Theme: death 3. Technique: contrast
Early naturalistic vein Bound East for Cardiff, 1914 Beyond the Horizon ,1920

II. Prize Winner

O‟Neill was no doubt the greatest American dramatist of the first half of the 20th century. Three Pulitzer Prizes(1920, 1922, 1928) and the Noble Prize in 1936 show his achievement and influence at home and abroad.
Middle symbolism and expressionism
1. Non-liner narration The Emperor Jones, 1920 2. Masks The Hairy Ape , 1921 Desire Under the Elms ,1924 3. Freudian psychology The Great God Brown ,1925 4. expressionism
Expressionism


Some of its explosive energies issued into Dada, Vorticism, and other avant-garde movements of the 1920s. In the English-speaking world, expressionist dramatic techniques were adopted in some of the plays of Eugene O‟Neill and Sean O‟Casey, and in the „Circe” episode of James Joyce‟s novel Ulysses(1922); in poetry, T. S. Eliot‟s The Waste Land (1922) may be considered expressionist in its fragmentary rendering of post-war isolation.
Eugene O‟Neill(1888-1953) 尤金· 奥尼尔
I. Life
1. Birthplace: New York City 2. Family: his father, an actor 3. Education: a Catholic boarding school, Betts Academy, Princeton 4. Working Experiences: Prospector, sailor
VIII. Long Days Journey into Night (1956)
characters

— James Tyrone, the father, a famous actor, anxious to become rich at the expense of his own talent; — Mary Tyrone, the mother, a drug addict; — James Tyrone, their elder son, an irresponsible, womanizing alcoholic; — Edmund Tyrone, their younger son, an intellectual and romantic dreamer
Naturalist spirit
The Iceman Cometh ,1939 Long Day’s Journey into Night,1940
1. Symbols 2. Disillusion of American dream 3. The mother-sonprostitute relationship
VII. The Hairy Ape(1)



Plot: Yank, the protagonist, is a leading stoker on a transatlantic liner. But when Mildred Douglas, daughter of the ship‟s owner, displays her horror and terror of him and calls him a “filthy beast” on her visit to the stokehole, Yank feels insulted, and denied a position in the world. He goes out to prove his position by insulting aristocratic strollers in New York and is then put to prison. He cannot make himself understood by his fellow prisoners, and is later rejected by the I. W. W. (Industrial Workers of the World), a labor organization. Frustrated, Yank goes to the zoo to see the ape at night. He sets free the beast, offers to shake hands with it but is killed.
IV. Expressionism表现主义


a general term for a mode of literary or visual art which in extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality. In literature, a common concern of expressionism is with the eruption of irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world.
V. features


(1) O‟Neil was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art. He paid little attention to the division of scenes. He introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic into the American theatre. (2) He borrowed freely from the best traditions of European drama, especially the stream of consciousness. (3) He made use of setting and stage property to help in his dramatic representation. (4) He wrote long introduction and directions for all the scenes, explaining the mood and atmosphere. (5) He sometimes wrote the actors‟ lines in dialect.
symbols
Fog: The changing of fog is the changing of life; A representation of the isolated life of the Tyrone family. Wedding dress: the disillusionment of Mary‟s dream Stage: The scene is put on between the bright hall and pitch-dark opisthodome, which indicts that the family lives between brightness and darkness.
analysis




The play is undoubtedly a tragedy — it leaves the audience with a sense of catharsis (净化), or emotional rebirth through the viewing of powerful events, and it depicts the fall of something that was once great. The play also creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the great conflicts in the play is the characters‟ inability to communicate despite their constant fighting. The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and morphine. This play is very autobiographical.