The Speed of Darkness by Steve Tesich: America After an “Orgy of Power”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/kis.2022.54.178.12Keywords:
The Speed of Darkness, Vietnam, USA, utopia, anti-utopia, the post-orgy worldAbstract
Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American playwright, transposed the negative foundations of the greatness of America into his post-Hollywood plays that belong to his late and artistically most successful and most mature period of creativity, marked by writing the so-called “moral tetralogy.” The paper comments on Tesich’s first drama from the aforementioned tetralogy, The Speed of Darkness, in which America is portrayed as an achieved utopia transformed into an anti-utopia. This Baudrillardian simulacrum is presented as a metaphor for the postmodern state of Western civilization and an illustration of his vision of the end of reality. Baudrillard’s views on America as the “post-orgy world,” as well as his concepts of simulacrum and simulation, provide the theoretical framework for our analysis.
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