Death of a Salesman | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 54 pages of analysis & critique of Death of a Salesman.

Death of a Salesman | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 54 pages of analysis & critique of Death of a Salesman.
This section contains 14,347 words
(approx. 48 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Terry Otten

SOURCE: Otten, Terry. “Death of a Salesman at Fifty—Still ‘Coming Home to Roost.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 3 (fall 1999): 280-310.

In the following essay, Otten addresses the critical debate surrounding the categorization of Death of a Salesman as a tragedy, commenting that “the play completes the tragic pattern of the past becoming the present, and it affirms the tragic dictum that there are inevitable consequences to choices.”

“Tragedy,” Eric Bentley has warned, can “easily lure us into talking non-sense” (Playwright, 128). If so, Death of a Salesman surely doubles the risk. For likely no modern drama has generated more such talk than Miller's classic American play. After only two decades of strenuous debate seemed to have exhausted the subject, critics began to complain about “the pointless academic quibbles” about whether or not Death of a Salesman is a “true” tragedy (Weales, American Drama, 3). Such topics, wrote...

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This section contains 14,347 words
(approx. 48 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Terry Otten
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Critical Essay by Terry Otten from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.