/lit/ - Literature

I found it shallow and pedantic.

>>1116752
Indeed

>>1116747

MOAR MOAR MOAR NOA NOA NOA

>>1116747

i want to place my nose between her thunderous thighs of glory

I think it was deliberate. I studied this play as part of my module on Tragedy, alongside Othello. The essay question was something along the lines of "To what extent do you think catharsis was reached in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf".

WHAT resemblance to Greek drama? It's about a childless couple who have an imaginary child in order to keep their relationship alive, and then the husband "kills" the imaginary child for some reason.

A Greek drama usually involves the sacrifice of an ACTUAL child, as in Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis", or the murder of someone REAL, like Orestes' murder of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus, or Oedipus' murder of his father before the start of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

The only thing Greek about it---if you go on what Aristotle says about Greek tragedy in The Poetics---is that (a) it observes a unity of time and place (if you don't count the two act-breaks), and (b) unrepresentable action, like Martha's attempt at sex with Nick, is kept off-stage, because it is (in the etymological sense) obscene.

But otherwise it does not have a tragic protagonist with a tragic flaw (or hamartia), it does not have a scene of recognition (anagnoresis), and it does not have a sudden reversal of fortune for the protagonist (peripeteia). In other words, in terms of what actually takes place onstage, it doesn't resemble Greek drama AT ALL.

Albee did write a Greek-inspired play 40 years later, called "The Goat". Read it if you want, but it's pretty bad. He's shockingly overrated.

>>1116856
Would "apparent resemblance" suit you better? Of course there is no one-to-one correspondence between the play and any greek tragedy or even theory thereof, but the similarities are there. Just to give you the name of another play which I consider similar in structure to a classical tragedy: "Biedermann und die Brandstifter".