Claire Gleitman, Professor of English, will publish two articles in upcoming issues of The Arthur Miller Journal. Her research article "Saint-Mamas Strudel and the Single Man in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman" will appear in the journal's spring 2015 issue, and her review of IC's spring production of The Crucible is available in the present (fall 2014) issue.
Gleitman's research is well-known among scholars of modern drama, and particularly her work on contemporary Irish theater. She has for instance written extensively on prominent playwrights such as Brian Friel, and is a contributor to the prestigious Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Recently, Gleitman has begun to work more intensively on the American playwright Arthur Miller, and both of these pieces are products of this development in her interests.
Gleitman's essay on Death of a Salesman, Miller's most well-known play, contributes to the contentious and long-running scholarly conversation about the models of masculinity that Salesman examines. In contrast to other contemporary critics, some of whom fault Miller for presenting flimsy hypermasculine ideals as the source of Willy Loman's motivations, Gleitman argues that this flimsiness originates both with Willy and with his inheritance of an American mythology about male work and male identity that has its origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on histories of labor and gender, Gleitman shows that the changing nature of male work in the mid-twentieth century (as the labor force became increasingly bureaucratized and domesticated) generated among men a series of anxieties about the status of gender identity in relation to labor. These anxieties, Gleitman suggests, are reflected in Willy's desires to move freely over the course of his sales trips, to be known and respected by his clients, and to frame his identity in such a way as to be intelligible solely within a limited range of masculine contexts.
Gleitman served as chair of the Department of English from 2002-2008 and again from 2010-2013. She teaches survey and seminar courses in modern drama, as well as in the Ithaca College Honors Program. She is co-founder and director of On the Verge, a long-running series of staged readings of plays performed each semester by IC students and faculty, as well as by professional actors.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20141208002452342