The role of silence in Edward Albee's plays.
Item
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Title
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The role of silence in Edward Albee's plays.
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Identifier
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AAI9720119
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identifier
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9720119
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Creator
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Mitra, Mita.
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Contributor
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Adviser: W. Speed Hill
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Theater
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Abstract
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When Edward Albee (1928-) began his dramatic career, he wrote plays that were set within the framework of traditional realistic drama. The playwright's desire to experiment with form, however, led him to reject the convention of revelation in realistic drama and to choose one of the key elements of modern drama--silence. Silence is not to be understood as the absence of sound or noise. Unspoken meanings are conveyed in gaps, sentences begun and left fragmented, stories started and not completed that leave the motives of characters or their inner selves hidden, truths concealed or cryptically expressed. These gaps, incompletions, and silent syllables beneath sentences, which constitute the linguistic silences in Albee's plays, are made eloquent in the theater by the actor's or the actress's use of gesture and tone. All these nonverbal techniques for implicitly conveying meanings are the subject of my study. I show how silence indicates the breakdown of communication, conveys the emptiness in familial relationships, and evokes mystery around events in the past and the present. I analyze the cyclical structure of the plays that denies conventional closure. Finally, I discuss the altering relationship between the audience and the plays that evolves from the modifications in the structure. An open-ended structure results in multiple interpretations as it gives the audience the freedom to draw upon their cultural and social experiences as they fill in the silences.;My purpose in this study is to establish that silence is necessary to evoke mystery and to create a kind of structure that Albee's theater aims towards--a structure of mystification and revelation, or partial revelation.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
