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Tennessee
Williams has already achieved the status of a classic;
his reputation has endured beyond the movement at which
his plays were first produced, and now promises to
outlive the changes in taste which have occurred since
Indeed, nearly half a century after his debut on the
stage, his best known dramas, particularly The Glass
Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, are played and
replayed in theatres and on the screen , large and
small, throughout the entire world. His unique vision of
life has come to represent our whole culture . Scenes,
characters and even certain lines from his plays,
particularly as spoken by actors like Marlon Brando,
have entered into the collective unconscious of the
people, becoming finally part of the pop mythology which
not only possesses our waking imaginations but haunts
our troubled sleep.
Dr. Dharanidhar Sahu sees Tennessee Williams in a
larger, universal context. In this critical study, Dr.
Sahu has perceived that a profound sense of alienation
is the source of both, Tennessee William's strengths and
weaknesses, and that such alienation is characteristic
of the Plight not just of the artist in twentieth
century America but all artists, indeed of everyman in
the modern world.
Alienation is the key word in the pages which follows
...... Dr. Dharanidhar Sahu redeems it, restoring it to
complexity and subtlety by drawing on the theories of
such diverse thinkers as Hegel, Marx, Freud, Tillich,
Ortega y Gasset, Fromm, Marcuse and Walter Kaufmann.
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" What gives Dr. Sahu's study its true distinction,
is his ability to move from such abstract, generalizing
theories, sociological, economic, metaphysical and
psycho-analytical, to specific, concrete details of the
major plays of Williams. No one who has read his study
can return to the texts of or watch in the theatre or on
the screen The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named
Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer or
Sweet Birds of Youth, without experiencing them in a new
and richer way. It is a further virtue of this study
that it leaves us longing to return to those texts, as
well as to meditate further not just on their author and
the society in which he wrote, but on ourselves
whomever, wherever and whenever we may be. " |
—
Leslie A. Fiedler
( Buffalo, New York.) |
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