This dissertation explores how the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect by provoking the audience's creative response to the four absurdist plays: Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (1950), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1957), and Edward Albee's The American Dream (1961). / The plot pattern of absurdist plays is characterized by contradictory and disjointed elements in the characters' verbal or non-verbal actions. This plot pattern engages the audience's detached, intellectual response to the characters' situation, in which a comic sense of deviation from normal human behavior and a tragic sense of disjointedness from meaningful human life combine to produce a tragicomic effect on the audience. When the four absurdist plays listed above present characters who are outsiders, the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect because the outsiders negate the audience's expectations, activate its intellectual responses to, and deepen its tragicomic perceptions of the disjointed stage situation. / Chapter One begins with a brief explanation of essential elements of tragedy and comedy and shows how earlier tragicomedies combine the elements of the opposite dramatic genres. This exposition will help to clarify how the absurdist plot pattern distinctively combines tragic and comic elements through disjointed devices, uses outsiders to intensify the tragicomic effect produced by these devices, and invites the audience's intellectual catharsis by provoking its probable resolution of the play's unresolved ending. / In the later chapters, this dissertation analyzes each of the four absurdist plays, focusing on how the distinctive plot pattern guides the audience's creative participation in giving tragicomic significance to the play. In doing so, this dissertation unfolds each analysis within the general framework of Wolfgang Iser's response theory which is useful for the systematic development of the analysis. According to Iser, the audience, through hermeneutic responses of expectation, frustration, retrospection, and reconstruction, fills in the indeterminate elements of the character's inconsequential behaviors and considers the unstated meaning of the play. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-04, Section: A, page: 1240. / Major Professor: Karen L. Laughlin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_78236 |
| Contributors | Moon, Sun Jung., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 193 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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