Death of a Salesman

Literary theory and criticism have developed over the course of more than 3000 years, starting with Aristotle and even Plato and Socrates, and it took many forms based on the time period or conditions within which the theory arose. Literary theory is basically seeking an answer to why we read and produce literature and what makes a work of literature good while literary criticism is the appliance of the theory in practice to evaluate or understand a work of literature. There have been many ways to read a text throughout the history but as for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, I will use certain methods to do a close reading into the selected 20 lines from the text. These are Platonian reading, Aristotelian reading, Horacian reading, Russian Formalism, and lastly Psychoanalytic or Freudian reading. ...

Reference excerpt is at the bottom of the page. Literary theory and criticism have developed over the course of more than 3000 years, starting with Aristotle and even Plato and Socrates, and it took many forms based on the time period or conditions within which the theory arose. Literary theory is basically seeking an answer to why we read and produce literature and what makes a work of literature good while literary criticism is the appliance of the theory in practice to evaluate or understand a work of literature. There have been many ways to read a text throughout the history but as for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”, I will use certain methods to do a close reading into the selected 20 lines from the text. These are Platonian reading, Aristotelian reading, Horacian reading, Russian Formalism, and lastly Psychoanalytic or Freudian reading. ...

Reference excerpt is at the bottom of the page. Jacques Derrida has changed the way people think about a text. He not only created a new understanding for the text, but also changed the way people interpret languages. With his deconstruction, the language became a subjective medium within which signifiers and symbols and signs dominated the vague meaning, as far as semiotics concerned. After deconstruction, the literary criticism and theory changed completely for a while, especially in the United Kingdom and United States as Derrida was counted among the 5 master theorists in the world along with Marx, Freud, Hegel and Kant. Therefore, I will try to hold a deconstructive approach throughout this paper to analyze the excerpt from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. ...