Playing with Plays. A Thematic and Psychoanalytic Study of Arthur Miller's Works - Georgiana-Elena Dila

At long last a Romanian monograph on Arthur Miller! Georgiana Elena Dila's PhD thesis (2011), now converted into book form, sums up Miller's life and oeuvres through the lens of psychoanalysis. Miller himself might have approved of it on condition it viewed suffering as a precondition of artistic freedom rather than as a disease to be cured. Indeed, instead of a clinical in-depth analysis, with alarming prog-nosis, Dila's study is, among other things, a playful examination of "characters that either sacrifice their life or are punished by fate for the greater good, [thereby] liberating the spirit".
Liviu Cotrau

Originally a doctoral thesis, and a most ambitious one at that, Playing with Plays is a successful attempt to join together thematic criticism and several psychoanalytical approaches amounting to a comprehensive, well-balanced and insightful monograph on Arthur Miller whom the tabloids never fail to describe as "one of Marilyn Monroe's husbands", while scholars remember him as the dramatist whose plays might well be the most sustained attack on the American Dream.

Sorin Parvu