Expressionist Features Of Eugene O'Neill's Play The Emperor Jones

Expressionism is an important literary movement in the 20^th-century literary history. The primary features of expressionism are: emphasis on abstraction and subjectivity, the theme of searching' for the meaning of life, two-dimensional personality and distortion of the individual, disjoined and confusing plots, absence of conflict, frequent changing dialogues, "telegraphic style" of language, peculiar use of punctuations and the use of different expressionistic techniques, etc.Eugene O'Neill is one of the most outstanding representative expressionist dramatists in America. His first expressionistic play The Emperor Jones is also the representative of all his expressionistic plays. The thesis is intended to evaluate and study O'Neill's expressionistic play The Emperor Jones from the perspective of Expressionism. Through the study, we see how does O'Neill express the theme, protagonist and settings of the play by using the techniques embodying the features of Expressionism.The paper consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction to O'Neill: his achievements, critical responses to his plays as a whole and the play The Emperor Jones, the aim and significance of my study. The second part deals with the theory of Expressionism from the aspects such as the history and the main concepts of it. The third part examines the reasons for O'Neill's acceptance of Expressionism— the influence of his family, of German expressionists, of modern philosophy and psychology and of Strindberg. The fourth part is the core of the paper, which is the analysis of expressionist features of the play from Expressionistic perspective, which are summarized as the following eight points: theme-centered on self-searching, two-dimensional personality and character deconstruction, episodic structure, combination of fantasy and reality, archetypal conveyance of man's journey of life, telegraphic and purified language, stage directions as a tool of externalization, expressionistic techniques such as aural effects, symbolic and fantastic settings and images, monologues which externalize the protagonist's interior reality and create atmosphere. The fifth part is a conclusion.