Staging Depth : The Politics of Psychological Discourse in the Drama of O'Neill

by Joel Pfister

• ISBN13: 9780807844960
• ISBN10: 0807844969
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction: The Profession of "Depth"	p. 1
Beyond Biography
O'Neill and the Making of the Psychological Family	p. 15
The Psychological Dyad in the "Land of the Mother Complex"	p. 32
The Historicity of Ambivalence	p. 40
"Depth" As a Mass-Cultural Category
Pop Psychology, the Professional-Managerial Class, and the Aesthetic of Depth	p. 53
The Therapeutic Playwright and Therapeutic Theatre	p. 57
The Production of "Psychological" Common Sense for the Professional-Managerial Class	p. 63
The Psychological as a Political and Historical Category	p. 91
O'Neill's Critique of Psychological Discourse and Iceman	p. 98
The Ideological Work of "Depth"
O'Neill and the American Left	p. 105
Workers, Race, and Psychological Primitives	p. 108
O'Neill and the Anarchist-Feminist Critique of Personal Life	p. 139
The Propaganda of "Life"	p. 154
O'Neill, the Left, and Social Depth	p. 162
Ah Wilderness! and the Reproduction of the Middle Class	p. 168
Possessors, Self-dispossessed	p. 182
The Trappings of Theatre, Gender, and Desire
Glaspell and O'Neill	p. 187
Glaspell and the Cultural Fashioning of Gender and Desire	p. 191
The Cultural Web in O'Neill's Journey	p. 203
Afterword	p. 217
Notes	p. 225
Bibliography	p. 289
Index	p. 315
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