Analysing Eugene O’Neill’s literary experiments in the context of Postmodernism, Structuralism and Metamodernism

Abstract

Eugene O’Neill and his plays have garnered significance, popularity and debates on their experimentations and existence in the modern American literary world. The characters of his plays and innumerable plot constructions combined with outrageous trials are measured by ‘a controversial modernist writer’. Writing between the changing eras of early modernism and unsure of his own writing style, O’Neill created new concepts with original dimensions and theories. The term ‘modernism’ tried to incorporate the developments of industrialization and tribulations of World War I. The impact of this in the literary arena was like a butterfly effect ‘subtle yet strong’. Writers like Eugene O’Neill, D.H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and many others broke free from their literary cocoons. With many contemporary themes and techniques like free verse, nonlinear narratives, interior monologues and others depicting emotions and experiences of individual, both in prose and poetry became the ‘new’ common. O’Neill plays continued the momentum from the beginning only getting stronger. With the postmodernism in vogue, the dramatic concepts and personas in O’Neill plays could be seen in a new light. Added with Structuralism, the language, motifs and characters in his plays become outstanding creations. The expression Metamodernism is associated with the wavering ideology which tries to get the best of both the worlds where deconstruction and construction do not challenge each other similar to O’Neill’s belief of his ideal play and world’s acceptance of his plays. The rational co-existence of both the worlds is what he believed. This research paper would attempt to re-explore the new dimensions of Eugene O’Neill plays, characters and his various literary experiments through the concepts of Postmodernism, Structuralism and Metamodernism.