Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The tradition of social drama
- 3 The early plays
- 4 All My Sons
- 5 Death of a Salesman and the poetics of Arthur Miller
- 6 Conscience and community in An Enemy of the People and The Crucible
- 7 A View from the Bridge
- 8 The Holocaust, the Depression, and McCarthyism
- 9 Miller’s 19s “power” plays
- 10 Miller in the eighties
- 11 The last plays
- 12 Arthur Miller and the cinema
- 13 Arthur Miller’s fiction
- 14 Critic, criticism, critics
- 15 Arthur Miller
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To ...
14 - Critic, criticism, critics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The tradition of social drama
- 3 The early plays
- 4 All My Sons
- 5 Death of a Salesman and the poetics of Arthur Miller
- 6 Conscience and community in An Enemy of the People and The Crucible
- 7 A View from the Bridge
- 8 The Holocaust, the Depression, and McCarthyism
- 9 Miller’s 19s “power” plays
- 10 Miller in the eighties
- 11 The last plays
- 12 Arthur Miller and the cinema
- 13 Arthur Miller’s fiction
- 14 Critic, criticism, critics
- 15 Arthur Miller
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To ...
Summary
From the very beginning of his career, Arthur Miller has engaged with the critical enterprise, but perhaps even more interestingly he has himself been a relentless and passionate critic, in all of his plays, of the human social and psychological condition, and has consistently ascribed a high value to that critical engagement. In fact, Miller’s is a remarkably diverse yet tautly consistent group of major works that have made him, without doubt, the major American dramatic writer of his time, perhaps of the twentieth century. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the expectations of American theatre audiences, Miller’s critical reception, particularly in his native America, has been mixed, at times downright hostile; Miller has irked critics from the beginning of his career and continues to do so, and it is precisely this irksomeness, along with his relentless will to excavate his own and the general human psyche and to place his discoveries into hypotheses about the human experience that draw broad (and often very critical) conclusions, that make his plays so compelling and powerful. “Great drama,” he declares, “is great questions or it is nothing but technique.” It is this notion of “great questions” that Miller has been most interested to explore, throughout his work. Though many of his plays show a flexibility of form, Miller has on the whole not been primarily interested in attempts at radical innovation in form, or indeed in content, but despite this relative conservatism in an experimental age, most evident in his rigorous and prevailing belief in structure, content, and meaningful communication, Miller has energetically explored a committed liberal humanist agenda, whose great questions are always critical ones, frequently working against the grain of prevailing taste, both critical and public.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller , pp. 259 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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