Gaps In The Zoo Story From A Reader-Response Critical Perspective

Edward Albee(1928-2016)is one of the most influential playwrights in the contemporary theatrical circle in the United States and widely considered a representative of the Theatre of the Absurd.The Zoo Story(1959)is his first play that has exerted an extensive influence upon the Western theatrical circle.This one-act play tells the story of Peter and Jerry from chatting to friendly talking and finally to fiercely fighting for one of the two benches in the Central Park on a Sunday afternoon,a play that has expressed the difficulty of understanding and communication among modern people,the characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd,and various ironical implications.Reader-response criticism emerged during the period of the 1960s~70s.It gave the reader a higher position compared to the Russian Formalism and the New Criticism in which the text is seen as an autonomous entity that can exist by its own without the intervention of either authors or readers.Reader-response criticism,on the contrary,believed that the text itself and the function that the text exercises upon the reader cannot be separated;that the reader is an active agent in the production of meaning,rather than a passive receiver of the so-called unchangeable and timeless meaning that is implicit in the text as is upheld by the new critics.The present thesis is an analysis of the semantical gaps,grammatical or syntactical gaps,and structural gaps by applying reader-response criticism to Albee's play The Zoo Story.It consists of 3 parts: namely,introduction,body and conclusion.The introduction is mainly about the life and literary achievement of Edward Albee,the play The Zoo Story,and the researches done both at home and abroad,and the purpose and significance of the present thesis.The body includes 4 chapters as follows.The first chapter introduces the reader-response criticism,including the 5 categories of the reader-response theory(Transactional Reader-response Theory,Affective Stylistics,Subjective Reader-response Theory,Psychological Reader-response Theory and Social Reader-response Theory),and the concept "gap".On the textual level,there are three forms of gaps: semantical,syntactical and structural gaps.Semantical gaps refer to various ways of expression in literature,like puns,metaphor,simile,implication,metonymy,synecdoche,etc.;Syntactical gaps refer to new collocations,shift of parts of speech,punctuation choice,omission of sentence components,reversion of normal order of sentences,adjustment of rhythms and rhymes of sentence,etc.;structural gaps refer to utilization of dissociation,overlapping,transference,displacement,anachronism and anti-narrative,pursuing the aesthetical effects of multi-tempo-spatiality and multi-dimension,etc.The second chapter analyzes the semantical gaps in The Zoo Story,including 2 parts: the first part is devoted to the mystery of Jerry's death,in which the analysis goes from "weariness" to Jerry's tragical life experience further to the crisis of his spirit and thought;in the second part,an analysis of four layers of metaphors for the "zoo",that is,the Central Park,the roominghouse where Jerry lived,modern human society and human civilization.The third chapter analyzes the syntactical gaps in The Zoo Story,including 3 parts: in the first part,the analysis is devoted to the use of ellipsis in the play,pointing out the double meanings of ellipsis(separation and omission)and their interaction with an analysis in regard to the text;the second part centers around the usage of all capitalization: first,conventional examples are presented;then,the analysis of its special usage,that is,intensifying the emotions of characters and blurring the meaning of sentences,from which is revealed both Jerry's and Peter's identities as the victims of problems of modern society on the level of speech;the third part analyzes the usage of the sentence pattern "I don't know",a pattern that expresses meanings above its literal level so as to add to the play more indeterminate meanings.The fourth part focuses upon the structural gaps in The Zoo Story,including 4 parts: the first part analyzes how the structure of expectation,"the untold zoo story",inspires a trajectory(expectation raisedàexpectation frustratedàexpectation annihilated)and how readers have finally fallen into a state of indeterminacy;the second part analyzes the structure of "binary unity",the "two benches",as a combination of both determinacy and indeterminacy,and this structure serves the purpose to deepen the significance of the play and readers' reading experiences,and to strengthen the visual shock on the stage upon the audience;the third part analyzes how the arrangement of paragraphs of different lengths serves as the structure in which the narrative time is reversed and the logic is confused;the fourth part analyzes how the stage directions,as a silent but visible part of the play,brings into being a merger between reader,text and author and further how they create the structure full of contradictions possessing the power both to unify and to conflict.The conclusion gives a summary of the different gaps of The Zoo Story and points out that the theory of reader-response criticism still plays a distinct role in the present literary circle where there is a trend to extend the literary theory to the cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary culture studies.