Anthropocentric Disturbance and Devastation in Edward Albee’s The Goat

Abstract

Edward Albee is one of the most prestigious contemporary American playwrights whose works tend to be engrossing for their avant garde expressions of the postmodern plight. Compared with his other works, The Goat or Who is Sylvia (2002), premiering at the turn of the millennium, pays relatively more attention to human-non-human relationship instead of interactions within the human community. Given the inadequacy of interdisciplinary studies on the play, this paper takes the philosophy of ecological ethics as the theoretical framework and juxtaposes Martin’s disturbance and Stevie’s devastation to nature, especially to the innocent goat, which share the same essence of anthropocentric exploitation, and which can lead to tragic consequences both for nature and for human-beings. Hopefully, this study can not only shed some light on the contemporary crisis of the coexistence between nature and humanity, but provide some reference for subsequent scholars to conduct more diversified cross-field studies of Albee.