Research On The Theme Of Edward Albee's Drama

As an extremely famous absurd playwright in America,Edward Albee made great contributions to the development of American drama.His drama integrated realism with absurd,which reveals social problem and demonstrates his deep insight.Combined with the unique cultural background of America in 1960 s,this article conducts key word analysis on a number of Albee's works through Empson's key word analysis method,extracts two key words including “animals” and “intellectuals”.Based on key word analysis of “animals”,the author finds that Albee explores the nature of human beings through breaking the relationship between human and animals.He tries to eliminate the limitation between human and animals to help people finish self recognition.Unfortunately,this attempt ends in failure.Although human beings can recognize themselves as human by own ability and endow animals with subject position by emotion,but a subjective recognition doesn't mean that objective limitation will disappear.Since evolutionism has been widely acknowledged by the public,ethical boundary has become a main objective condition to distinguish both.Starting with “intellectuals”,the uniqueness of Albee's works is illustrated by his reflection angles.Albee focuses on intellectuals who return to family from public areas.Meanwhile,they are a batch of anti-hero intellectuals.Albee reveals the true nature of elites who consist the foundation of American society based on conflicts in trivial matters.This phenomenon represents a transformation of their status,who betrayed traditional status as the spokesman of enlightenment spirit,the guard of social conscience,the rationals,and then became a pure consumer of desire and one that lost language,which embodies a collective crisis for the whole intellectuals.Albee's creation reveals the malpractice of the contemporary American society,and also provides a profound enlightenment for people to think about the nature of human beings and the survival of intellectuals.