{"title":"在特蕾西·莱茨的《八月:奥塞奇县》中,韦斯顿家族的衰落和美国梦的破灭","authors":"Raluca Moldovan","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Tracy Letts is one of the best-known and most successful American playwrights of the 21st century, having won critical and popular acclaim both for his writing and acting. August: Osage County, probably his most celebrated play, premiered in 2007 and introduced the theater-going public to the dysfunctional Weston family, who reunite in a stifling, decaying Oklahoma mansion after the family patriarch’s suicide. The Westons’ familial crisis is manifested through addiction, violence, aggressiveness, adultery, rape and incest, each member having their own secrets and troubles. The present article aims, first, to examine how the characters deal with their personal crises and second, how the perceived sense of crisis and decline in the American society at large (both in a longer historical sense and in a sense contemporary to the events of the play) pushed family patriarch Beverly Weston to commit suicide out of a sense of profound hopelessness and disillusionment. Letts, by bringing familial crisis and conflict into the spotlight, shows how the disintegration of the Westons’ family ties mirrors, to a significant extent, the crumbling of the American Dream.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"The Fall of the House of Weston and the Crumbling of the American Dream in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County\",\"authors\":\"Raluca Moldovan\",\"doi\":\"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"Abstract Tracy Letts is one of the best-known and most successful American playwrights of the 21st century, having won critical and popular acclaim both for his writing and acting. August: Osage County, probably his most celebrated play, premiered in 2007 and introduced the theater-going public to the dysfunctional Weston family, who reunite in a stifling, decaying Oklahoma mansion after the family patriarch’s suicide. The Westons’ familial crisis is manifested through addiction, violence, aggressiveness, adultery, rape and incest, each member having their own secrets and troubles. The present article aims, first, to examine how the characters deal with their personal crises and second, how the perceived sense of crisis and decline in the American society at large (both in a longer historical sense and in a sense contemporary to the events of the play) pushed family patriarch Beverly Weston to commit suicide out of a sense of profound hopelessness and disillusionment. Letts, by bringing familial crisis and conflict into the spotlight, shows how the disintegration of the Westons’ family ties mirrors, to a significant extent, the crumbling of the American Dream.\",\"PeriodicalId\":37404,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"American, British and Canadian Studies\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.1000,\"publicationDate\":\"2022-12-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"American, British and Canadian Studies\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American, British and Canadian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
The Fall of the House of Weston and the Crumbling of the American Dream in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County
Abstract Tracy Letts is one of the best-known and most successful American playwrights of the 21st century, having won critical and popular acclaim both for his writing and acting. August: Osage County, probably his most celebrated play, premiered in 2007 and introduced the theater-going public to the dysfunctional Weston family, who reunite in a stifling, decaying Oklahoma mansion after the family patriarch’s suicide. The Westons’ familial crisis is manifested through addiction, violence, aggressiveness, adultery, rape and incest, each member having their own secrets and troubles. The present article aims, first, to examine how the characters deal with their personal crises and second, how the perceived sense of crisis and decline in the American society at large (both in a longer historical sense and in a sense contemporary to the events of the play) pushed family patriarch Beverly Weston to commit suicide out of a sense of profound hopelessness and disillusionment. Letts, by bringing familial crisis and conflict into the spotlight, shows how the disintegration of the Westons’ family ties mirrors, to a significant extent, the crumbling of the American Dream.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.