A Cultural Analysis Of The Violence Elements In David Mamet's Plays

David Mamet’s works have unique style and profound theme.The use of vulgar language and slang is one of the most memorable elements of his scripts,and it has strongly regional artistic feature.Also,there has a lot of violent elements in his works.These elements imply the hidden danger of American social development,and also imply the mental risk and heart dilemma of modern American people.In this way,we should dig deeper into the cultural root of the violent elements in Mamet’s dramas,in order to understand the deep-seated modern cultural psychological characteristics of American society.In this paper,the author mainly applied literature research method and text analysis method.And the proposition of this thesis is “The Cultural Analysis of Violent Elements in David Mamet’s Dramas”.It mainly contains two aspects: on one hand,it takes David Mamet’s specific script as an approach to explore the violent elements in his dramas.On the other hand,it is an effort to place Mamet’s drams of modern American literature for view and inspection,to explore the social cultural origin of violent.The main content of this thesis is divided into four parts:The first part gives a general introduction to the reason and meaning of this topic,and summarizes the mainly works of David Mamet.Then,the writer has listed domestic and overseas research review related to this topic,and analyses the innovation point and research method on this paper in the end of this part.The domestic research of David Mamet has prevailing problems.It is still at the initial stage and it is hard to find the first hand information.However,the idea of“Violence” may provide some new ways.The second part,on one hand,it analyses the theory of violent culture,including the classification of violence,the theory of Micro-Sociology analysis of violence,and the importance of identity.On the other hand,we have a brief introduction of Mamet’s dramas and the propensity for violence in his works.The third part is closely connected with David Mamet’s typical dramatic works--A Life in the Theatre,American Buffalo,Oleanna and so on.We use these plays as examples to discuss the Violent Scenes,the Violent Language,the Violent Behavior and the Symbolic Violence in Mamet’s drama.It concluded that “The aim of using violent element in the drama is to touch the audience’s baseline,and awaken their conscience.So that they can reflect the gloomy sidein our reality.”The fourth part is a summary for this paper,it focuses on the original of American violent culture and the Cultural Psychological Crisis of American modern society.We will try to find out the causes of violent elements and reveal the mental risk and heart dilemma of American modernsociety,it will deepen the topic of the whole thesis.The analysis of violent elements in David Mamet’s dramas is not only the result of human communication by profit-guiding in West Country,but also the aberrance of American violent culture tradition in modern Capitalism Civilization context.It also provides a new thought for Chinese Mamet’s research.To sum up,David Mamet’s dramas have essential research value for revealing the social problems and showing people’s mental states.So we can better understand the deep cultural psychological characteristics of American by analysing the violent elements in David Mamet’s dramas.