The American Nightmare in Selected Plays by Sam Shepard: A Psychoanalytic and Semiotic Study

Abstract

The present thesis explores two of Sam Shepard's family trilogy, Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, from psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives. In these plays, Shepard borrows and, at the same time, subverts the myths long held about the American family and the American Dream. He is frequently located within both American drama's obsession with the American Dream and the American Gothic tradition for his vehement critique of the American nation and its culture. Although these plays reflect the culture of the fifties and the sixties in America, they still have their influence today. This is due to the fact that the problems and the psychic agonies Shepard's families face and experience in such plays are not different from those the contemporary global family has to endure. For such a reason, his plays acquire an international dimension in the sense that it is not only the American family or society faces the problems of violence, narcissism, anomie and capitalism, but the whole contemporary world as well. The thesis attempt to shed light on the psychological agonies the American family suffers from and the deteriorated familial bonds from a psychoanalytic angle, employing the theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung, as well as from a semiotic perspective while employing the Peircean model.