“성난 젊은이”의 등장: 존 오스본의 『성난 얼굴로 돌아보라』와 에드워드 올비의 『동물원 이야기』 (“Enter the Angry Young Men”: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 세계문학비교학회
· 수록지 정보 : 세계문학비교연구 / 34호 / 147 ~ 171페이지
· 저자명 : 손동호

초록

The thought to write this essay began when I found out that two plays produced in Britain and the United States in almost the same period have a number of similarities: Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story(1958) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger(1956). The plays expressed the sensibility of the Angry Young Men, a whole post-war generation in both countries.
The mid-1950s was a period when commitment in the arts was taken seriously, which meant that literature and art began to concern the real world again. The tendency was one of the moves in the arts to the left politically. The power of the two plays discussed here came from its very immediacy of content, and its unparalleled contemporariness. The heroes were dissatisfied with the society in which they existed, and each in their own way rebelled against the traditional codes of their own society. Osborne was very articulate on the subjects that the ruling classes held dear to themselves: royalty, politics, religion, class, and marriage. Jimmy is a mean, arrogant, self-pitying, cruelly abusive, self-dramatizing intellectual who drives his wife away, takes a mistress and drops her when his wife returns. Look Back in Anger proved a powerful weapon in the struggle to free the reeling British theatre from the worn-out drawing room comedy.
In many respects, Albee presents Jerry’s present environment around his apartment building as an extension of his past world: he lost both his parents and an aunt very early in his life. Jerry violates Peter’s isolation through communication, that is, by bombarding him with a disarmingly shrill and frank account of his private life. The dog parable, in symbolic terms, serves as Jerry’s paradigm for the entire human situation, its intensely private narrative expanding to include a lament for all suffering humanity. When Jerry impales himself on the knife that he has thrown to Peter, he finally achieves the goal of human contact he has been pursuing all his life. Peter has lived a too easy, too safe life until he is finally shocked into understanding the tragic sense of being alive. Albee suggests that the only exit from human solitude is death, which delivers us in putting an end to our conscious life. His theatre belongs to the pessimistic, defeatist or nihilistic current which characterizes the entire contemporary theatrical scene. Peter and Jerry, despite their obviously contrasting realities, are sharing a profound sense of isolation.

영어초록

The thought to write this essay began when I found out that two plays produced in Britain and the United States in almost the same period have a number of similarities: Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story(1958) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger(1956). The plays expressed the sensibility of the Angry Young Men, a whole post-war generation in both countries.
The mid-1950s was a period when commitment in the arts was taken seriously, which meant that literature and art began to concern the real world again. The tendency was one of the moves in the arts to the left politically. The power of the two plays discussed here came from its very immediacy of content, and its unparalleled contemporariness. The heroes were dissatisfied with the society in which they existed, and each in their own way rebelled against the traditional codes of their own society. Osborne was very articulate on the subjects that the ruling classes held dear to themselves: royalty, politics, religion, class, and marriage. Jimmy is a mean, arrogant, self-pitying, cruelly abusive, self-dramatizing intellectual who drives his wife away, takes a mistress and drops her when his wife returns. Look Back in Anger proved a powerful weapon in the struggle to free the reeling British theatre from the worn-out drawing room comedy.
In many respects, Albee presents Jerry’s present environment around his apartment building as an extension of his past world: he lost both his parents and an aunt very early in his life. Jerry violates Peter’s isolation through communication, that is, by bombarding him with a disarmingly shrill and frank account of his private life. The dog parable, in symbolic terms, serves as Jerry’s paradigm for the entire human situation, its intensely private narrative expanding to include a lament for all suffering humanity. When Jerry impales himself on the knife that he has thrown to Peter, he finally achieves the goal of human contact he has been pursuing all his life. Peter has lived a too easy, too safe life until he is finally shocked into understanding the tragic sense of being alive. Albee suggests that the only exit from human solitude is death, which delivers us in putting an end to our conscious life. His theatre belongs to the pessimistic, defeatist or nihilistic current which characterizes the entire contemporary theatrical scene. Peter and Jerry, despite their obviously contrasting realities, are sharing a profound sense of isolation.

참고자료

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