Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

Series Editor Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14765 Stephen Marino · David Palmer Editors Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas Editors Stephen Marino David Palmer Department of English Massachusetts Maritime Academy St. Francis College Buzzards Bay, MA, USA Brooklyn, NY, USA

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-030-37292-7 ISBN 978-3-030-37293-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37293-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

This book is a project of the Arthur Miller Society, a group of academics committed to furthering the study and performance of Miller’s plays and the exploration of his ideas. The Miller Society was founded by Steven R. Centola in 1995, growing out of conferences on Miller he had organ- ized at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Since then the Miller Society has hosted twelve more conferences devoted to Miller and his work in addition to organizing panels on Miller at national and international literature conferences, such as the American Literature Association Conference, the Comparative Drama Conference, and the International Conference on American Drama and Theater, which generally is held in Europe. In 2006, the Miller Society launched the Arthur Miller Journal, a semi-annual periodical containing articles about Miller and his works, reviews of productions of Miller’s plays, and notices of new books relevant to Miller studies. The journal is published by Penn State University Press. The Miller Society invites as new members anyone with an interest in Miller’s life and plays, his other writings and his role as a public intellectual, or the development of twentieth- and twenty-frst-century American theater. More information about the Arthur Miller Society, upcoming events related to Miller, and the Arthur Miller Journal can be found at the following websites:

The Arthur Miller Society: https://arthurmillersociety.net/. The Arthur Miller Society on Facebook: https://www.facebook. com/arthurmillersociety/.

v vi PREFACE

The Arthur Miller Journal at Penn State University Press: http:// www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_ArthurMiller.html.

New York, USA David Palmer President, The Arthur Miller Society Acknowledgements

The Arthur Miller Society gratefully acknowledges the guidance and encouragement of Allie Troyanos, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who frst suggested that our proposal for an anthology on Arthur Miller could be suitable for the series American Literature Readings in the Twenty- First Century and who coordinated our proposal’s review by Linda Wagner-Martin, the series’ academic editor. We also are grateful to Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave, who shepherded the manuscript through the fnal phases of its editorial development and the production process. We thank Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and its imprint Methuen Drama for permission for Matthew Roudané to adapt his introduction to their book The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (2015) for publication here. We also thank Bloomsbury for its permission for Claire Conceison to draw material from her introduction to the 2015 centennial edition of Miller’s 1984 book Salesman in Beijing, retitled Death of a Salesman in Beijing.

vii Praise for Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century

“Presenting a variety of essays on his writings, this collection convinc- ingly demonstrates Arthur Miller’s continuing importance in the history of American dramatic literature, making an excellent case for his ongoing relevance for twenty-frst century readers and audiences. The contributors are thoroughly familiar with current Miller scholarship, and because many of them regularly teach Miller’s work, their essays also will be especially useful in the classroom.” —Jackson R. Bryer, Professor of English, University of Maryland, USA

ix Contents

1 Introduction 1 Stephen Marino

Part I Arthur Miller and the American Dramatic Canon

2 Arthur Miller and American Tragedy 13 Livia Sacchetti

3 Pipe Dreams and the Self: Eugene O’Neill’s and Arthur Miller’s Conceptions of Tragedy 27 David Palmer

4 Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and the American Family 51 Brenda Murphy

5 Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Crises of the American Family: American Civilization and Its Discontents 65 Michael Y. Bennett

xi xii CONTENTS

6 Arthur Miller and Contemporary American Women Dramatists 75 Ellen B. Anthony

7 Shaming, Rebellion, and Tragedy: Arthur Miller and African American Drama 99 David Palmer

8 “Some Men Don’t Bounce”: Miller’s The Price, Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss 123 E. Andrew Lee

Part II Arthur Miller, the Writer

9 Approaches to Teaching All My Sons: Making the Play Matter Across the Curriculum 141 Jan Balakian

10 Irish Immigrant Rebellion in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays 161 Joshua E. Polster

11 Before the Empty Bench: The Equivocal Motif of “Trial” in Arthur Miller’s Works 177 Rupendra Guha Majumdar

12 Reaganism in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 197 Thiago Russo

13 Arthur Miller, Essayist 211 Matthew Roudané

14 Viewing the Playwright Through a Different Lens: Miller’s Fiction and How It Connects to His Life and Drama 219 Susan C. W. Abbotson CONTENTS xiii

15 Miller in China 237 Claire Conceison

Part III Arthur Miller and Contemporary Issues

16 Human Rights and the Freedom to Write 263 Christopher Bigsby

17 “What a Man”: Performing Masculinity in Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ Plays 277 Claire Gleitman

18 Devouring Mechanization: Arthur Miller and the Proto-Posthuman 293 Peter Sloane

Index 311 Notes on Contributors

Susan C. W. Abbotson is a leading scholar on the work of Arthur Miller and has published three books on the playwright, A Critical Companion to Arthur Miller (2007), Student Companion to Arthur Miller (2000), and Understanding Death of a Salesman (with Brenda Murphy) (1999); edited the Methuen Drama Student Edition of The Crucible (2010), as well as the Collected Essays of Arthur Miller for Penguin (2016); and published numerous articles on Miller in books, journals, and databases. Her most recent book was for Bloomsbury/ Methuen, Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1950s (2017). Ellen B. Anthony is an adjunct assistant professor of theater history and Shakespeare studies at Marymount Manhattan College. She earned her MFA in dramaturgy from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a Ph.D. in theater history from the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Her current research area is celebrity culture and its infuence on play adaptation on the eighteenth-century British stage. She recently authored a chapter on Katherine Philips, one of the frst women dramatists to be produced in Ireland, entitled “Corneille in Dublin” for the anthology The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Vol. 1, edited by Ann Buckley, forthcoming from Brepols Publishers. Jan Balakian is Professor of English at Kean University, where she teaches literature and writing. She has published essays on American drama (Cambridge University Press); a cultural studies book about Wendy Wasserstein’s plays (Applause); hosted an international

xv xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS conference with the NEA, “Why American Plays Matter;” and writ- ten screenplays and plays. Her current play, Dreams on Fire, set during the election of 2016 on a college campus, explores the transmission of trauma through the Armenian Genocide. Michael Y. Bennett is an Associate Professor of English and Affliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He also will be a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where he will be a Visiting Fellow in 2020. Known for his work on absurd drama and his work on the philosophy of theater, he is the author or editor of eleven books in the felds of drama, theater, and performance studies. Christopher Bigsby an award-winning academic, novelist, biogra- pher, journalist, and broadcaster, is a Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he founded the Arthur Miller Center for American Studies. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, he has published more than 50 books, among them the three-volume The Cambridge History of American Theatre (edited with Don B. Wilmeth); the three- volume Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama; Modern American Drama, 1945–2000; a major commentary Arthur Miller: A Critical Study; his acclaimed two-volume biography of Arthur Miller; and his multivolume series Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby. As a broadcaster, he has had regular series on BBC radio and has done television documentaries on John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. Published widely in academic journals and anthologies on many twentieth-century American dramatists, he recently has turned to exploring drama on American television. His most recent book is Staging America: Twenty-First Century Dramatists (Bloomsbury, 2019). Claire Conceison is Quanta Professor of Chinese Culture and Professor of Theater Arts at MIT. Her book Signifcant Other: Staging the American in China (2004) examines representations of Americans on the Chinese stage from 1987–2002. She is editor of the anthology I Love XXX and Other Plays by Meng Jinghui (2017). Her play translations include contemporary Chinese plays as well as Gao Xingjian’s French plays into English. As a director, she has staged contemporary Chinese plays at several American universities. Her 2009 book Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China’s Revolution and Reform (Chinese version 水流云在: 英若诚自传) is the autobiography of the NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii late Chinese actor and cultural diplomat Ying Ruocheng, Arthur Miller’s partner in staging Death of a Salesman in China in 1983. She wrote the introduction to “Death of a Salesman” in Beijing (Bloomsbury, 2015), a new edition of Arthur Miller’s 1984 book “Salesman” in Beijing. Claire Gleitman is a Professor in the Department of English at Ithaca College. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary drama, with an emphasis on gender and masculinity studies as well as historiography. Her work has appeared in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, the Arthur Miller Journal, Eire/Ireland, and The New Hibernian Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies published by Bloomsbury Methuen, Cambridge, Blackwell, and others. She is the founding director of the On the Verge theater company at Ithaca College. Currently, she is at work on a book-length study of anx- ious masculinity in American drama. Rupendra Guha Majumdar retired as Associate Professor, Department of English, Delhi University, India, in 2016. A Visiting Fulbright Fellow in the Department of English at Yale University (1981–1982; 1992–1993) and Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University, Boston (2014–2015), his book, Central Man: The Paradox of Heroism in Modern American Drama, was published by Peter Lang (Brussels, 2003). He has published four books of poetry in English between 1971 and 1990; he has contributed to the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama (2007); Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Robert M. Dowling (New York, 2008); Critical Insights: Eugene O’Neill. Ed. Steven F. Bloom (New York, 2012); Intertextual Exchanges: Recent Scholarship on Eugene O’Neill et al, ed. Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy (McFarland, 2013); and articles to several anthologies and journals in India and abroad; he has translated Rabindranath Tagore’s play, Roktokorobi (Red Oleanders) into English for The Essential Tagore (Harvard University Press, 2011). His “An Unpublished Interview with Arthur Miller,” appeared in The Arthur Miller Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (November 9, 2016). E. Andrew Lee is Professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he has taught for twenty-six years. He has published in the Eugene O’Neill Review and the Arthur Miller Journal. He is a member of the Eugene O’Neill Society, the Arthur Miller Society, and the Edward Albee Society. His other scholarly interests include Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Dostoyevsky. He is currently helping to develop a xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS fnancial literacy course at Lee University, and he writes a monthly per- sonal fnance column entitled “Money Matters” in a regional magazine called GoodNews Tennessee. Stephen Marino is the founding editor of the Arthur Miller Journal. He teaches at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. His work on Arthur Miller has appeared in many journals and essay collections. He is the author of A Language Study of Arthur Miller’s Plays: The Poetic in the Colloquial and the editor of the Methuen critical student edition of Miller’s A View from the Bridge. His recent essay collection, Arthur Miller’s Century, Essays Celebrating the 100th Birthday of America’s Great Playwright was published in summer 2017 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. His book, Essential Criticism, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, was published in the fall 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. Brenda Murphy is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. She wrote Miller: Death of a Salesman in the Cambridge Plays in Performance Series and edited After the Fall for the Methuen Drama Miller edition, as well as Critical Insights: Arthur Miller and Critical Insights: Death of a Salesman. On Williams, she wrote The Theatre of Tennessee Williams and Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre and edited Critical Insights: Tennessee Williams and Critical Insights: A Streetcar Named Desire. Her most recent books include Eugene O’Neill Remembered and Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel. David Palmer taught philosophy and literature at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he developed the course The Brain, Narrative, and the Self: A Cognitive Science Approach to Tragedy. He is the current president of the Arthur Miller Society and a board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society. He recently edited the anthology Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury, 2018). Joshua E. Polster is Associate Professor of Theater at Emerson College. He was president of the Arthur Miller Society and currently serves on its board of directors. His publications include Stages of Engagement: U.S. Theatre and Performance 1898–1949, The Routledge Anthology of U.S. Theatre 1898–1949, Reinterpreting the Plays of Arthur Miller, a critical edition of Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays, and numerous articles on Arthur Miller and U.S. theater. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater at Georgia State University, Atlanta, has published more than a dozen books on various aspects of American Drama, including Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), Approaches to Teaching Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1995), and The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Arthur Miller. His most recent book is Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Thiago Russo is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral candidate in Linguistics and Literary Studies at the University of São Paulo. He is a lifetime member of the Arthur Miller Society. His theater research focuses on American drama and its relation to politics and history. His master’s thesis compared the works of Arthur Miller and Henrik Ibsen, highlight- ing their sociopolitical essence. His doctoral dissertation concerns Arthur Miller’s critique of the neoliberalism of the Reagan-Bush eras. During 2018–2019, he developed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Louisville with funding from a CAPES fellowship. Livia Sacchetti earned her Ph.D. from Sapienza, University of Rome, with a thesis entitled “Stoppard’s Theater: The Baseless Fabric of a Vision.” Her main research interests are postwar and contemporary theater and Shakespeare studies. She currently is working on a book project evaluating the impact of the Copernican revolution on the structure of Shakespeare’s late plays and a second project investigating the impact of Einstein’s theories on twentieth-century theater and the dramatization of time on stage. Her essays include a chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens entitled “A Gap in Nature: Rewriting Cleopatra through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology and Illusions and Stage Magic in Romeo and Juliet” (Memoria di Shakespeare). She has been teaching literature and creative writing for the past twelve years. Peter Sloane is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. He teaches and writes on contemporary fction, drama, and flm, with a particular interest in modernization, the body, and literary experimentation. His frst monograph, David Foster Wallace and the Question of the Body, appeared with Routledge in 2019, and he currently is working on his second book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Radical Poetics, for Bloomsbury.