Date of Award
8-1-2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
English
First Advisor
Netzley, Ryan
Second Advisor
Shapiro, Joe
Abstract
Speaking broadly, this dissertation explores the marginalization of American drama within the field of literary studies. In attempting to account for this marginalization, theater scholars have tended to invoke the genre’s supposed lack of “difficulty,” meaning its failure to pose meaningful interpretive challenges to its readers. However, this dissertation takes an alternative view of the matter, contending that if American drama has indeed been marginalized, it is not because literary studies departments have regarded it as intrinsically “simpler” than other literary genres; in fact, it is theater scholars who have been more likely to read the genre as simple, or more specifically, as middlebrow. Departing from this line of thinking, this dissertation’s most general claim is that American drama in fact resists being read for simplicity. Through advancing readings of individual plays by four of America’s most eminent dramatists — Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night — it aims to demonstrate that the genre is wary of the middlebrow reading strategies through which it has often been approached. Put more exactly, the genre dramatizes its own inability to provide the kind of unambiguous practical and moral guidance that its readers have been apt to expect from it; it thereby reminds us that to read or see a play is not in itself an act of self-improvement.
Access
This dissertation is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.