Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

Abstract

In the recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Accordingly, the literary work becomes emblematic of a voyage of spiritual discovery and the text turns into a virtual journey beyond the normal everyday world. Many writers emphasized in their works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern life and underlined the idea that flight, with its different dimensions, is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life and circumvent the social standards and the political regulations. In the postmodern political thought, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from the authoritarian policies of the social and political institutions.