The Discovery of the self in Eugene O'neil's the emperor Jones and the iceman cometh and Joseph Conrad's heart of daekness and "to-morrow"

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study between some of the works of the American playwright Eugene O'Neill's and the British writer Joseph Conrad. It aims to trace the hidden links between The Emperor Jones (1920) and Heart of Darkness (1902) from the one side and between The Iceman Cometh (1946) and "To-morrow" (1903) from the other. It is based on two complementary approaches. On the one hand, it uses Julia Kristeva'stheory of intertextuality which is backed up with a number of textual notions and views by Ihab H. Hassan, Mikhail Bakhtin and Harold Bloom. On the other hand, it uses psychoanalysis which tries to narrow the scope of the intertextual study with some concepts of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.