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Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable.

By reviewing the critical literature on Melville and Transcendentalism and then undertaking a close reading of Moby-Dick (1851), this paper argues that the novel reflects, among other things, an ongoing debate between the novelist and Transcendentalist philosophy. While in later works, Melville seems to express a more robust condemnation of the Concord movement and its dangerous idealism, Moby-Dick occupies less firmly-defined territory. The Transcendentalist urge of an Ahab to be himself is a counterpoint to Ishmael’s more idiosyncratic deployment of self-reliance, communion with the oversoul, and various other concepts easy to trace back to Emerson or Thoreau. The conclusion seems to be that a negotiation is necessary if Transcendentalism is to be heeded at all, precisely the kind of negotiation Ishmael undertakes throughout the novel, one which spares him from the maelstrom created by a more radical approach to self-acceptance and self-fashioning

Throughout this essay, I will show the characters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy moving between modernism and postmodernism, and discuss the way some of them epitomize either largely modernist or postmodernist epistemologies. My purpose is to offer a reconstruction of Auster's dialogue across both, and I will resist situating the novelist in either the modern or the postmodern camp. I see him as rather watching from a distance, while his characters scour the terrain (both terrains, as a matter of fact) for him. My conclusion is that Auster seems to acknowledge the inevitability of inhabiting the cultural space of the postmodern, while staking out a claim to question, or even to challenge, some of its presumptions. While modernism still holds a powerful spell for the protagonists of City of Glass and Ghosts (less so for the latter), the narrator of The Locked Room posits the inextricability of embracing our contemporary sensibility, the postmodern, without necessarily rejecting altogether what went before. Auster associates modernism largely with the secluded, invisible, despicable Fanshawe, whose spell and influence over him the narrator of the third novel of the trilogy manages to break.

Since Arthur Miller is frequently considered the most European of American playwrights it is hard to understand why we still lack a history of his drama in our continent and hence ignore much more about its presence here than we know. Unfortunately that has given rise to misconceptions which it would be the task of historians to refute and place in correct focus. One such misconception is that his drama was extremely successful in Europe during the 1950s. Some European productions of Miller were not successful at all and many of those that were proved less spectacularly so than is often held.