Challenging Representations: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s Oleanna

The practical functions of representation in general, and literature in particular, have been at the centre of much theoretical speculations. Plato’s Republic, perhaps to the chagrin of its author, is the first credible source to have posited such a worldly function for literature. The issue in such debates is not whether literature can or cannot represent the world, but rather, it concerns the practical implications of such a representation. In other words, debates mostly revolve around the question of whether literature inevitably serves the interests of those favoring the status quo, or it has the potential to be subversively critical of it.This study is an attempt to illustrate how literary works can challenge the status quo through representation. In other words, it is concerned with whether literature has the potential to play this emancipatory role in the first place, and if so, how it comes to play this role. To this end, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and David Mamet’s Oleanna have been chosen for analysis.I shall begin my discussion by a general, and hopefully short introduction with the explicit aim of situating the former in the context of the latter. Then I shall deal separately with each of the two plays. Death of a Salesman has sometimes been accorded the high stature of modern tragedy. In this paper, I shall attempt to show that far from being a vindication of the capitalist system at the general level, this deceptively simple play is an indictment of unbridled capitalism and its potential to create and then shatter a very dangerous kind of optimism at the cost of the individual.David Mamet’s Oleanna is also credited for its encouraging of widely diverging readings. In this paper, I shall attempt to show how Oleanna portrays the nightmarish consequences of political correctness. To this end, case will be made for the corrupting influence of political correctness on language and social institutions. A short note concerning the crucial role of literature in changing the world (as opposed to mere reflectionism) will bring the paper to its hopefully logical conclusion.

کلیدواژه ها:

Literature ، Representation ، Capitalism ، Political Correctness