Lipar 51

XIV / 51 / 2013.
Editorial Board
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aslav Nikoli, Assistant Professor, PhD

Faculty of Philology and Arts, Kragujevac
Editor in Chief
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Vladimir Polomac, Assistant Professor, PhD

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Nikola Bubanja, Assistant Professor, PhD


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Jelena Arsenijevi, Assistant, PhD

Radomir Mitri
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prof. Persida Lazarevi di Giakomo, Full Professor, PhD

he G. dAnnunzio University, Pescara, Italia
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Jelenka Pandurevi, Assistant Professor, PhD

Faculty of Philology in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Hercegovina
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Svetlana Kalezi, Assistant Professor, PhD

Faculty of Philosophy in Niki, Montenegro
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Ivan Maji, Assistant Professor, PhD

Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia
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Ostap Slavinski, Assistant Professor, PhD

Faculty of Philology, Ivan Franko National University of
Lviv, Ukraine
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Borjan Janev, Assistant Professor, PhD

University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria

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Editorial assistant
Bojana Veljovi
Referees
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Aleksandar Jerkov, Associate Professor, PhD

Ala Tatarenko, Associate Professor, PhD
Jelenka Pandurevi, Assistant Professor, PhD
Dalibor Soldati, Full Professor, PhD
Anelka Pejovi, Associate Professor, PhD
Persida Lazarevi di akomo, Full Professor, PhD
Radmila Nasti, Full Professor, PhD
Slobodan Vladui, Assistant Professor, PhD
Radivoje Mladenovi, Associate Professor, PhD
Sanja urovi, Assistant Professor, PhD
Dragan Bokovi, Associate Professor, PhD
Sanja Paji, Assistant Professor, PhD
Ivica Radovanovi, Full Professor, PhD
Aleksandar Nedeljkovi, Assistant Professor, PhD
Tomislav Pavlovi, Assistant Professor, PhD
Slobodan Lazarevi, Associate Professor, PhD
Mirjana Mikovi Lukovi, Associate Professor, PhD
Aleksandar Petrovi, Associate Professor, PhD
Katarina Meli, Assistant Professor, PhD
Milanka Todi, Full Professor, PhD
Duan ivkovi, Assistant Professor, PhD
Vladimir Polomac, Assistant Professor, PhD
Nikola Bubanja, Assistant Professor, PhD
aslav Nikoli, Assistant Professor, PhD
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Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture
XIV / 51 / 2013
Year XIV / Volume 51 / 2013
/ Editors:
/ Radmila Nasti and aslav Nikoli

University of Kragujevac
21. ........................................................................... 7
Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar
TESICH AND TOLSTOY.................................................................. 17

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21. .......................... 37
Lena S. Petrovi
MARGINALISATION OF ART
IN THE LATE PLAYS OF STEVE TESICH...................................... 47
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Duica S.Lazi
STEVE TESICH: RECOVERING THE (AMERICAN) DREAM

THROUGH ART AND MORAL REBELLION............................... 159
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I I....................... 169
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eljka Lj. Babi
CHANGING THE NATURE

OF SPEAKING ASSESSMENT...................................................... 191
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MOTHER CLAPS MOLLY HOUSE............ 233
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Marginalisation of Art in the Late

Plays of Steve Tesich,
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, 2013.
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1971. The Carpenters, Dramatist Play Service, New York, .
1974. Baba Goya (Nourish the Beast), drama, Samuel French, New York, .
1976. Gorky, drama, Samuel French, New York, .
1978. The Passing Game, drama, Samuel French, New York, .
1979. Breaking Away, (Cetiri mangupa), scenario: Steve Tesich, : Peter Yates, .
1980. Touching Bottom, Samuel French, New York, .
1981. Division Street, Samuel French, New York, .
1981. Division Street and Other Plays, PAl Publications, New York, .
1981. Eyewitness (Svedok), scenario: Steve Tesich, : Peter Yates, .
1981. Four Friends ( ), scenario: Steve Tesich, : Arthur Penn, .
1982. Summer Crossing, roman, RandomHouse, .
1982. The World According to Garp (Svet po Garpu), : Steve Tesich,
Johna Irvinga, : George Roy Hill, .
1985. American Flyers, : Steve Tesich, : John Badham, .
1985. Eleni, : Steve Tesich, Nicholasa Gagea, : Peter Yates, .
1989 The Speed of Darkness, American Theatre Magazine, New York, .
1990 Square One, Applause Book, New York, .
1992 On the Open Road, Applause Book, New York, .
1997 Arts & Leisure, Samuel French, London, .
1998 Karoo, Harcourt Brace & Company, .
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Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture
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821.111(73).09 Tesich S.
Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar1

Faculty of Dramatic Arts
University of Arts, Belgrade
TESICH AND TOLSTOY
In his interviews, Steve Tesich often referred to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This is not surprising
because he is of Slavic origin and because, as an undergraduate student in Indiana, and graduate
student at Columbia, he studied Russian Literature. The influence of Dostoevsky is obvious in
his play On the Open Road, where the second coming of Christ (reference to the Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov) is central to both the plot and the overall meaning of
the play. This paper will highlight Tesichs less obvious connection with Tolstoy, and focus on
the importance that Tolstoys evolving views on war and peace (and the Tolstoy-Gandhi-Martin
Luther King connection and tradition) had on the development of Tesichs own historical sense
and anti-war art and activism. This paper argues that in his late plays, preoccupied with ethical
questions, Tesich was composing his own version of Tolstoys The Kingdom of God Is Within You,
and clarifying his own New Theory of Life.
Key words: Tesich, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Philippe Diaz, Thomas More, George Orwell, Tony Kushner,
Raymond Williams
Stojanovic: You speak about the lack of humanism in todays world. What
do you mean?
Tesich: This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art dont
exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown,
an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become
the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can
believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for
man to become a human being. Man has been turned into something else.
(...)We would like to be freed from the responsibility of being human.2
1 bogoeval@yahoo.com
2 In Stojanovics interview Tesich gave his own version of the reasons why Gore Vidal, or playwright
David Hwang, call America the United States of Amnesia: We should have carried with us everything
that has happened to us as human beings and proceeded to a higher and higher ground from where we
can see further into the future, instead of freeing ourselves completely from history, religion, morality,
and memory. This is contrary to president Obamas appeal to Americans to turn to the future with no
concern for the past. American writer Alice Walker shares Tesichs view that radical systemic change
(the kind Tolstoy , Martin Luther King and Tesich wished to see) is possible only if the past is faced
17
Steve Tesich, interview by Dejan Stojanovic, in the Serbian Magazine Views

(Pogledi) No. 107, April 1992
On April 1, 2013, the Internet site Countercurrents posted a short

text written by John Scales Avery3, entitled Count Leo Tolstoy, We Need
Your Voice Today. The text gives a brief account of Tolstoys life and
concentrates (the way the Count himself did) on the contradictions that
plaque our nominally Christian civilization, most morally reprehensible of
these being social inequality and war. Among other things, Avery notes
Tolstoys observation that Between us, the rich and the poor, there is a
wall of false education, and his insistence that before we can help the
poor, we must tear down that wall. He also quotes, from A Confession, the
conclusion reached by Tolstoy in 1880,4 that Our own wealth is the true
cause of the misery of the poor.
This is not unlike the point made by the filmmaker Philippe Diaz
in his 2008 masterful documentary The End of Poverty? In the film we are
reminded that in the 21st century every 3.6 seconds somebody dies of starvation and that 20.000 children die daily, because they are poor, and they
are poor only because we are rich5.One of the experts Diaz interviews, Susan George, explains what is in progress behind the facade of our seemingly civilized and just world: Sub-Saharan Africa, reports George, which is
and examined carefully, and regret expressed for the destructive traditions and habits it has left us as
a legacy. She specifically mentions millennia of womens silence, during which kindness and compassion were ridiculed, and their opposites, competition and exploitation, admired and extolled as roads
to true success. See Alice Walker reading her poem Democratic Womanism on Democracy Now!,
September 28, 2012.
3 John Scales Avery (b. 1933), is an American theoretical chemist and peace activist, who lives and
works in Denmark. As a professor of Copenhagen University he helped to organize a summer school
called Towards a Non-Violent Society, at the International College in Elsinore, and a course Science
and Society, which has been given every year since 1989. He worked on a bibliography Health Effects of War and the Threat of War, because war is the worlds major health problem. He is still active
through the projects of the Danish Peace Academy. He loves scientific work, but when doing research,
he admits, he feels like the Emperor Nero, who is said to have played the violin while Rome burned. He
is profoundly aware that we are living at a time of crisis for civilization, and that everyone should give
a high priority to the great task of abolishing war.
4 Confession was first published in Geneva in 1884.The Introduction states that it is the drama of a
soul who has sought from his earliest years the path of truth, or as the author refers to it, the meaning
of life. This places Tolstoy in the Socratic tradition, and links him with Viktor Frankl and his logo
therapy, which helps patients discover (or recover) the sense of meaning of life.
5 Philippe Diaz, The End of Poverty? (2008). Born in Paris, Philippe Diaz studied Philosophy at the
Sorbonne. He produced his first feature in 1986. In 1991, he moved his production and distribution
company to Los Angeles. His directorial debut was the 2001documentary New World Order (Nouvel
Ordre Mondial: Quelque Part en Afrique) shot in Sierra Leone. It won the Grand Prix at the Festival of
African film in Montreal and well as a Special Prize at the 1 World Film Festival in Prague. It is virtually
impossible to find information about this film on the Internet. It must have been exceedingly offensive
to the US and NATO officials, since it presents the same threesome (Madeleine Albright, James Rubin
and Richard Holbrooke) destroying Africa in the same way they destroyed Yugoslavia in 1999, a year
before Diaz s film was completed. In 2006, Diaz made The Empire in Africa, which also won numerous international awards. The End of Poverty? premiered in 2008 at the Cannes Film Festival. The film
should be mandatory viewing. Through the facts he presents, to support his arguments against poverty,
Diaz, like Tesich, makes it impossible for his viewers to free themselves from the responsibility of being human.
18
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Tesich and Tolstoy
the poorest part of the world, is paying $25.000 every minute to Northern
creditors. Well, you could build a lot of schools, a lot of hospitals; (create)
a lot of jobs if you were using $25.000 a minute differently from debt repayment. And I think people dont understand that it is actually the South
that is financing the North. If you look at the flow of money from North
to South and then from South to North, what you find is that the South is
financing the North to the tune of about $200 billion every year.
As Diaz points out, this intolerably unjust situation started a long
time ago, with the colonial expansion of Europe. If you think about it,
says Diaz, how do these small countries, like Great Britain or France or,
even worse, Holland and Belgium, become those huge empires? They were
very small countries with almost no resources whatsoever, and they become the greatest empires. How? Well, by taking by force, of course, all
the resources from the South, creating therefore a huge workforce -the
dispossessed who in their own country become slaves of the conquering
civilizers. Later on Diaz clarifies: Now we are not taking the land and
the resources by way of the gun: we are taking the resources by way of
debt, privatization and hit men, in order to continue the same policy.6
The historical roots are actually much deeper. In the last few pages of
Utopia (1516, 1551), written in the so called early modern period, Thomas
More protested against the same type of injustice that later Tolstoy, Diaz
(and in his own time Tesich) refused to adjust to. More was one of the first
conspiracy theorists: in Utopia, his Hythlodaeus concludes that when he
considers any social system that prevails in the world, he cannot, so help
him God, see it as anything but the conspiracy of the rich to advance
their own interest under the pretext of organizing society. They think up
all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains,
and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society which includes the poor as well as the rich
they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its
insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the
needs of the whole population7.
More (1478-1535), was eventually beheaded, and for making similar observations Tolstoy (1825-1910) eventually excommunicated. Not
6 It is important to note that the criticism of Aime Cesaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955),
is even more radical. Cesaire claims that Europe is morally and intellectually indefensible, not only
because of what it did abroad, to the other continents, but also because of what it did at home, to its
own working classes.
7 More writes: Elsewhere, people are always talking about public interest, but all they really care
about is private property. In Utopia, where there is no private property, people take their duty to the
public seriously. And both attitudes are perfectly reasonable. In other republics practically everyone
knows that, if he does not look out for himself, hell starve to death, however prosperous his country
may be. He is therefore compelled to give his own interest priority over those of the public; that is, of
other people. But in Utopia, where everything is under public ownership, no one has any fear of going
short, as long as the public storehouses are full. Everyone gets a fair share; so there are never any poor
men or beggars.
19
much has changed. In our time, the 99% movement is simply facing new
ways the old tricks and dodges are made to work today: as in Mores
time, they become international laws, all the better to protect the ill gotten
privileges of the latest 1% elites. The modern day protestors (whose wages
are slashed, whose jobs are cut, who cannot afford health insurance, and
whose pensions disappear in bank speculations and government scams)
certainly agree with More, when he asks:
Can you see any fairness or gratitude in a social system which lavishes such great rewards on so-called noblemen, goldsmiths, and people
like that, who are either totally unproductive or merely employed in producing luxury goods or entertainment, but makes no such kind provisions
for farm-hands, coal-heavers, labourers, carters, or carpenters, without
whom society could not exist at all? And the climax of ingratitude comes
when theyre old and ill and completely destitute. Having taken advantage of them through the best years of their lives, society now forgets all
the sleepless hours theyve spent in its service, and repays them for all
the vital work theyve done, by letting them die in misery. Whats more,
the wretched earnings of the poor are daily whittled away by the rich, not
only through private dishonesty, but through public legislation. As if it
werent unjust enough already that the man who contributes most to society should get the least in return, they make it even worse, and then arrange for injustice to be legally described as justice.
Tesich (like Diaz after him) was eminently of the More and Tolstoy
tradition. Modest and unpretentious to a fault, this is how he answered the
question why, as an accomplished playwright performed in most prestigious theatres, and Oscar winning screenwriter, he continued to be a sharp
critic of social and political conditions in the US: When one achieves success, ones outlook becomes even sharper. I have gotten much more than I
ever hoped for, and that is why I now feel I should observe problems that
affect the whole world. I dont think I have achieved anything extraordinary; others have helped me a lot, and perhaps there are greater writers
than I am whom no one has helped. I never forget that. I have talent, but
there are others who also have talent. Now that I have accomplished more
than I expected, I look at how life flows for those who are held down. I
write about those things what holds man down. The gift of life seemed
so great to him that man could become crazy from happiness just thinking about it. He wrote because of the enormous forces that want to convince us how life is just a little thing, that it is nothing, that man is nothing. (Stojanovi)
When asked about the obligation that the West has taken upon itself
to help former communist countries reorganize, Tesich answered: Western countries would have to have a morally clean house to be able to do
that. Money can be given, of course, but the houses in the West are not
clean, and there is no moral strength. If we point our finger toward Russia
and say, This is what happened in Russia in the same way that finger can
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Tesich and Tolstoy
be pointed toward the streets of New York and Chicago. What is happening
here, how do we behave toward our own people? How do we treat those
that work, work, and work, and suddenly there is no work and they fall and
dont exist anymore? How can we say then that in other countries life is
not respected? Where is it respected here? What is respected is power and
money. The West can hardly be an example to follow. The only hope, in my
view, is a tradition that existed in Russia. There was an idea in literature,
in music, Dostoevsky wrote about it; Tolstoy too. And that idea really existed in the Russian people, regardless of the fact that terrible things have
happened there. The only hope for the world is in cooperation and mutual
help. If the countries of the East only imitate the West, then everything
will collapse.8
In several never published texts written after 1992, Tesich repeatedly wrote about the destruction of Yugoslavia. In the eighties, drawing an
analogy with deceased friends he still vividly remembers, he said that his
childhood is supposedly gone, and yet it is still with him every day of his
life. I left the country where I was born he added, but after I got over
the pain my native country moved right back inside and I now have two.9
(Rothmayer p. 307) In the 1992 interview with Stojanovi he elaborates: I
loved Yugoslavia tremendously; I loved the idea that many different people
lived together. What is happening now is a tragedy. When it was sensed
that some new connections could be established, in Slovenia and Croatia,
greed was awakened to get connected with the West. That was terrible.
Only money is important. They are ruining something good for something
worse. I still cherish the idea of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was like a small
Slavic America10, or it could have been at least. That it does not exist anymore is a huge tragedy. I cannot think about it in any other way.
Rejecting the idea that the changes in the region were made for the
sake of a wider union, Tesich complained that there are no ideals any more
and no unity, only a Western European market: Wider union is that I am
a human being. We dont need to make any other union. That is an idea,
8 In Rothmayer, on page 252, we are reminded that 1992, the year Teischs play On the Open Road
premiered, was also the year of the beating of Rodney King and the consequent Los Angeles racial
riots, in which 54 people died, over 2000 were injured and over 700 million dollars in property damage
incurred. Tesich saw the riots as a manifestation of the unacknowledged civil war between the poor
and the privileged in America, caused by traditional forms of exploitation but also by the rising level
of accepted criminal behavior among the leaders of the US political and business establishment in the
Nixon/Reagan era. He turned this situation into the background for his play. It was becoming more and
more obvious that America he was once in love with did not intend to make its rewards available to all.
As he had foreseen in his 1991 New York Times interview, there was absolutely no agenda for helping
those on the bottom of this country. Nobody was really interested in them, and Tesich no longer knew
what the country stood for. The plays he wrote helped him renegotiate his understanding of America.
9 This statement is part of the speech Tesich gave during the memorial service for Bob Foss, who was
his friend.
10 Tesich was initially delighted that in America people from very different parts of the world shared
the same neighborhood. In that sense, on a much smaller scale, Yugoslavia was comparable to America:
it was a country shared by many different nationalities living in the republics that constituted the
federation.
21
but of course not an economic one. And now, economy is prevailing.

Countries that are not ready to enter that game will become resorts. These
resorts can be visited, so we could talk how nice the savages are.11 His
comments, with the exception of the reference to Huxleys Brave New
World (the source of the comparison of countries excluded from the newly
invented connections to savage resorts or reservations the civilized can
visit to enhance their sense of superiority over the nice savages) everything else in these answers is in the spirit of Tolstoy, not because Tesich
was plagiarizing but because he was maturing and reaching Tolstoy-like
insights from his own personal intuitions and experiences.
***
In his text Count Leo Tolstoy, We Need Your Voice Today, John
Scales Avery provides the following introduction to Tolstoys second complaint against inauthentic Christianity: Tolstoys book, What Then Must We
Do? tells of his experiences in the slums and analyses the causes of poverty.
Tolstoy felt that the professed Christian beliefs of the Czarist state was a
thin cosmetic layer covering a structure that was fundamentally built on
violence. Violence was used to maintain a huge gap between the rich and
the poor, and violence was used in international relations. Tolstoy felt especially keenly the contradictions between Christianity and war. In a small
book entitled The Kingdom of God is Within You he wrote: All other contradictions are insignificant compared with the contradiction which now
faces humankind in international relations, and which cries out for a solution, since it brings the very existence of civilization in danger. This is the
contradiction between Christianity and war.The sharpest of all contradictions can be seen between governments professed faith in the Christian
law of the brotherhood of all humankind and the military laws of the state,
which force each young man to prepare himself for enmity and murder, so
that each must be simultaneously a Christian and a gladiator.
Avery proceeds to tell the familiar story of how in 1894 Gandhi read
Tolstoys book The Kingdom of God is Within You, wrote a review of it, and
several years later, in 1909, wrote to Tolstoy about the civil rights struggles
of Hindus in South Africa12. One year before his death Tolstoy replied with
the following comment:
11 In Stojanovis interview, talking about the need for cooperation and mutual help, Tesich said that
It would be exceptionally good if brotherly help would come into existence, instead of the pressure
put on Eastern European countries to imitate the West. Countries like Serbia, Romani, or Russia have
something to offer to America, and if America doesnt see that, it is bad for America.
12 Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part II,
Chapter 15) that Tolstoys book The Kingdom of God is Within You overwhelmed him and left an
abiding impression. In 1908 Tolstoy wrote, and Gandhi read, A Letter to a Hindu, which outlines the
notion that only by using love as a weapon and through passive resistance could the native Indian
people overthrow the colonial British Empire. This idea ultimately came to fruition through Gandhis
organization of nationwide non-violent strikes and protests during the years circa 1918-1947. The two
continued a correspondence until Tolstoys death in 1910. Tolstoys last letter was to Gandhi.
22
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Tesich and Tolstoy
...The longer I live, and especially now, when I vividly feel the nearness of death, the more I want to tell others what I feel so particularly
clearly and what to my mind is of great importance, namely that which is
called passive resistance, but which is in reality nothing else but the teaching of love, uncorrupted by false interpretations. That love, i.e. the striving
for the union of human souls and the activity derived from that striving, is
the highest and only law of human life, and in the depth of his soul every
human being knows this (as we most clearly see in children); he knows
this until he is entangled in the false teachings of the world. This law was
proclaimed by all, by the Indian as by the Chinese, Hebrew, Greek and Roman sages of the world. I think that this law was most clearly expressed by
Christ, who plainly said that in this alone is all the law and the prophets...
...The peoples of the Christian world have solemnly accepted this
law, while at the same time they have permitted violence and built their
lives on violence; and that is why the whole life of the Christian peoples is
a continuous contradiction between what they profess, and the principles
on which they order their lives - a contradiction between love accepted as
the law of life, and violence which is recognized and praised, acknowledged
even as a necessity in different phases of life, such as the power of rulers,
courts, and armies...
Since the contradictions and paradoxes were not resolved but intensified, they reappear as the slogans of Orwells 1984: WAR IS PEACE,
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. These slogans
are becoming more and more descriptions of the actual lives most people
are forced to live today: worldwide secret prisons, and other government
institutions comparable to Orwells Ministries of Love, practice torture.
Ministries of Truth fabricate lies to start wars, which then rage endlessly,
allegedly to bring to the terrorized population peace, security and democratic governance. In Orwells world the only kind of human being that is
allowed to survive is the one that denies love. Do it to Julia, cries Orwells
faithless Romeo, as the system squeezes out of him the last drops of his
capacity for friendship, love, and human dignity.
Averys essay ends with a long list of rhetorical questions aimed at
shocking the public into awareness how much worse our world has become
100 years after Tolstoys death. Quoting Averys first question will suffice:
What would Tolstoy say about the 1.700.000.000.000.00 dollars which the
world spends each year on armaments while 11 million children die each
year from poverty and starvation? After the review his text provides of
our appalling failure to protect our humanity, it becomes clear why Avery
thinks that the voice of Count Leo Tolstoy, great author and humanist, pioneer of nonviolent resistance, is desperately needed again!
23
***
John Scales Avery is not the only concerned citizen who, under the
current threats of global war, remembers the pacifist tradition of Tolstoy,
Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In 2011 the BBC aired Alan Yentobs new
two part documentary The Trouble With Tolstoy, where the through line
of Tolstoys life runs from his childhood search for the magic green stick
that would make all the people in the world happy, to the participation in,
and subsequent disillusionment with, the traditional aristocratic links with
militarism and war, to the inspiration gained from the Doukhobors who
helped him resolve his crises and see clearly that the spiritual battles are
the ones worth winning and that love is the most powerful instrument of
peace. To love without a motive is what defines a human being. That is the
free for what of freedom,13 says Al in Tesichs play On the Open Road, adding that if we do not demean this definition (if we do not ridicule it, as Alice
Walker claims we have ridiculed kindness and compassion; if we do not call
kind men Idiots, as Dostoevsky observed we are taught to do), we will no
longer feel disoriented or lost. Erich Fromm wrote the Art of Loving, as well
as all his other important books, in the same spirit: Escape from Freedom,
To Have or to Be, The Sane Society, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,
On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying No to Power, Nature of Man,
The Dogma of Christ, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, etc. Psychiatrist Viktor
Frankl celebrated it, claiming that it is not a lot of money that invests life
with meaning, but that lives, meaningfully lived with others and for others, make human existence such a potentially glorious phenomenon and
experience.14 Italian Filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Liliana Cavani, excellent students of European history, discovered and highlighted this tradition, as well. They both made films about St Francis, a precursor of Tolstoy,
who rejected having (unearned privileges and wealth) for the fuller and
more complete way of being human. In the film Europa 51, Rossellini created a more modern version of the same awakening and moral transformation, explaining to Ingrid Bergman (in the film an upper class lady who
is led by tragic circumstances to reject the callousness and greed of her
class and embrace solidarity and compassion for the poor), that she was
to be a female Saint Frances. In Europa 51, the woman is ridiculed by the
sane society and punished for her disregard for class distinctions by being
confined to an insane asylum. Rossellini also made films about Socrates
and Jesus (The Messiah, 1975), and died with a finished screenplay for a
film about Marx (Working for Humanity was the title of the manuscript)15.
13 Two important questions - Free from what? Free for what? - are raised by Tesichs characters,
traveling to the Land of the Free. Similar investigations into the meaning of freedom are undertaken by
Kushner in Angels in America. On this point the similarities between Tesich and fourteen years younger
Kushner are striking.
14 Viktor Frankl, Why to believe in others, video clip from 1972, on TED (Internet)
15 See accounts of Rossellinis films in Peter Brunettes book Roberto Rossellini, University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1996. The book traces the development of Rossellinis historical
24
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Tesich and Tolstoy
Liliana Cavani, on the other hand, made a film about the Tibetan yogi Milarepa16, the Socrates of Asia, inviting her audience to relate the European
humanist tradition to the culture of the continent that gave to us the tradition of Buddha, Ashoka and Gandhi.
In the US, besides being praised by the influential literary critic Harold Bloom, who included him among the 26 great authors of The Western Cannon, Tolstoy has been frequently referenced by the Pulitzer Prize
winning playwright Tony Kushner. Most significantly Kushner mentions
Tolstoy in his essay A Modest Proposal, published in 1998 in the January
issues of American Theatre.17 The essay is concerned with the decline of
American education. Kushner deplores the transformation of education
into mere vocational training and sees the possible remedy in subversive
actions through which the students can be given a chance to develop what
conservative America is trying to deprive them of: ethics. Kushner says
that education, as opposed to training, addresses not what you do, or will
do, or will be able to do in the world: it addresses who you are, or will be,
or will be able to be. He sees the dumbing down of students who are being
trained, but not how to think as a deliberate strategy of the conservative
government, afraid of the resurgence of the revolutionary spirit of the sixties.18 Half jokingly, Kushner gives the following advice to teachers: make
them read The Death of Ivan Ilych and find some reason why this was necessary. Then at least youll know that when you die and go to the judgment
seat you can say But I made 20 kids read Tolstoy! and this, I believe, will
count much to your credit. We should turn our students, and ourselves,
into activists says Kushner, and lists the causes he is prepared to fight for:
We should have democratic socialism, clean air, clean water, clean food.
Our children, all children, should feel safe should be safe. The Messiah
should come, or should come again, whichever you prefer. Until then, and
to hasten his or her arrival, we must teach undergraduate theatre majors
how to read Kant. Even if that means we have to learn how to read Kant
ourselves. It is interesting to note that Tesichs play On the Open Road in
sense, and clarifies the reasons that led Rossellini to make films about key figures of Western history.
16 The only study of Liliana Cavanis films is the book by Gaetana Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth:
The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, Princeton University Press, 2000. Chapter 7 of the book is referred to in
the text. The title is The Architectonics of Form: Francesco and Milarepa.
17 Besides Tolstoy, who figures prominently in The Western Cannon: the Books and School of the Ages,
1994, Harold Bloom included Tony Kushner on one of the extended lists of great writers appended to
the book. Tolstoy is said to have changed the life of Gandhi, as well as Wittgenstein. Tony Kushners
A modest proposal was published in American Theatre, January 1998. The text begins on p, 20. Pdf
version is available on the Internet.
18 See the documentary Berkeley in the 60 (directed by Mark Kitchell, 1990), and the 618 pages
anthology The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002), edited by Robert
Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik. These sources make it abundantly clear what kind of ideas and ideals
the conservative government feared. In one sequence, talking about the knowledge industry that
the Universities had come to serve, Michael Rossman describes the astounding perception of the
elite students that the education at the best American universities was actually the worst. It severed,
Rossman says, technology from values, the intellect from the heart, turning students into willing
accomplices and servants of the most conservative and destructive government institutions.
25
fact deals with the second coming of the Messiah, and that in the closing
section of the play Tesichs characters (crucified because they refused to
kill Jesus) quote Kants A starry sky above me, and a moral law within
me.
***
It is also interesting to note that Kushner and Tesich (both admirers
of Tolstoy, preoccupied with moral themes) wrote their plays at approximately the same time. (In fact, the conclusion of Angels in America, part
one, was published in 1992, in the same July/August issue of American Theatre that contained a report on the Los Angeles riots, and Stephen Coens
conversation with Tesich concerning his new play. The interview was titled
The only kind of real rebel left, he figures, is a moral person, and opened
with the questions: How do political plays function in an apolitical society,
and what is the purpose of art in a bankrupt culture?) Performances of Angels in America started in 1990, and the play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.
Tesichs On the Open Road, after three drafts written in the previous years,
premiered at the Chicago Goodman Theatre in March of 1992. It is painful
to read the reviews of Tesichs play by critics dumbed down, it would seem,
by the kind of education Kushner went on to describe and criticize: their
texts make it evident that critical examinations of the abuses of Christianity continue to be unwelcome and unpopular. Especially with the rising
conservative, militant Right, addicted to parading its devotion to Christ
and claiming monopoly on faith. Entrenched, unexamined dogmas prevail, and interpretations of Biblical motifs which deviate from the authorized readings are met with incomprehension. The philosophical references
Tesich makes in his play are offensive to the critics and remain fragments
which they are unable (or unwilling) to connect. If they did, a New Theory
of Life would emerge, different from the one cherished by the Nixon/
Reagan establishments.
The Angel that appears in Kushners play announces: A marvelous work and wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and
straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sward
and broom of Truth! Tesichs intention in On the Open Road is the same
(to abolish error and use the broom of Truth to free America from accumulated political lies and prejudices), but significant differences in the specific strategies Kushner and Tesich employ exist. Angel, in Tesichs play, is
an ordinary human being, one of the characters. As if desiring to dramatize
Tolstoys claim that the ills of the world are caused by false education and
false teachings (about everything, including Christianity), Tesich makes
the relationship between his Al and Angel pedagogical. Al, who has internalized the best education the system offers and who endorses the values
that keep the system in power, acts as a mentor to the physically strong but
uneducated (and for that reason exploitable) Angel. The situation is analo26
/ , ,
Tesich and Tolstoy
gous to Iago teaching Rodrigo, or Othello, how things are done in cities like
Venice, centers of civilization where love does not exist, where passions
of the blood and appetites of the body are quenched by putting money in
your purse and buying sexual favors on the competitive market, and where
the supremacy of the system is assured by the wealth of the merchants
and politicians, and military interventions of the generals). Al epitomizes
the type of intelligence the new world order requires. He understands the
gist of everything, and feels nothing. He is like the male version of Madeleine Albright: little children could bleed before his eyes, he would get it,
and before anything could get to him - move on. He teaches Angel, who
from the opening scene of the play seeks companionship and love, to throw
away the violated little girl he goes out of his way to find and save, because
such act of compassion, which he as the mentor ridicules and dismisses,
would bring the pupil no profit, only irksome obligations and entanglements. Still, in the end, what is ridiculed and dismissed triumphs. It is not
Als rationalizations that prevail. When he comprehends the last thing left
for him to understand what kind of human being he has become like
Conrads Kurtz, Al screams in horror. The play ends with an important
reversal: it is the simple humanity of Angel that triumphs, and not the
false and sterile sophistication of the educated dehumanized world that
Al represents. At the end of his journey Al finds himself where Angel was
at the beginning. He sees in the shadow cast by the cross on which he is
crucified the truth about man: that he is a being capable of loving without
a motive (i.e. profit), and that he is capable of opening his arms wide, ready
to embrace (not conquer and devastate) the universe.
In Angels in America, love is examined in the context of the Zeitgeist
of the Reagan era. Whats it like to be Reagans kid? asks one of Kushners characters: Enquiring minds want to know. I think we all know
what thats like. Nowadays. No connections. No responsibilities. All of us
falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves and
what we owe to love. Land of the free. Home of the brave. Call me irresponsible. Joe, the young man who is being initiated into this kind of
freedom, comments that the proposition is terrifying. The answer he gets
is: Yeah, well, freedom is. Heartless, too19. (Act 2,7 p. 77) The seduction
seems to work and Joe responds: I just wondered what a thing it would be
if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really
19 In Act 2,6 p. 69 Kushner wrote a prediction that has, unfortunately, become completely true, even
if the person sitting in the White House at the moment is a Democrat. Talking about the election of
the new president, one of the lawyers proclaims: Its a revolution in Washington, Joe. We have a new
agenda and finally a real leader. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican
appointees, and the Federal bench Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they
turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And well get our way on just about
everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate. We will
have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix in the Oval Office?
Its possible. Its really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto
secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald
Wilson Reagan.
27
gone away. Free. It would be heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and Very
great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one, and then walk away,
unencumbered, into the morning.(Act 2,7 p. 78)
In the relationship between Louis and Prior (the lover Louis abandons because he has AIDS), the ailing young man sees his friends betrayal
as an outcome of a world deliberately set on producing men like him: men
whose hearts are deficient, who love but whose love is worth nothing. (Act
2,9 p. 85). Later on Louis, the betrayer, who compares himself to Cain and
Judas, speaks of the fate of men who in betraying what they love betray
whats truest in themselves. (Act 3,2 p.105) Yet, he is prepared to avoid
personal responsibility and blame his ethical weakness on the difficulty
of being too much immersed in history. Kushners characters demonstrate what Tesich meant when he said that modern men would like to be
free from the responsibility of being human. Louis refuses to be bound by
personal commitments, and says: this reaching out for a spiritual past
in a country where no indigenous spirits exist only the Indians, I mean
Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods
here, no ghosts and sprits in America, there are no Angels in America, no
spiritual past, no racial past, theres only the political.(Act 3,2 p.98) We
have already noted what Victor Frankl had to say about the spiritual bankruptcy of the West. Warning America that freedom without responsibility
is destructive, he advised Americans to create the necessary symbolic balance by erecting, on the West coast, a Statue of Responsibility.
The central and most Tolstoy-like moment in Kushners play comes
in a scene in the hospital where a black male transvestite nurse, Belize,
cares for the sick and abandoned AIDS patients. Since most of the clientele
are Washington DC lawyers, Belize is in a position to warn these worldly
lawmakers about one important thing. He says: Ive thought about it for a
very long time, and I still dont understand what love is. Justice is simple.
Democracy is simple. These things are unambivalent. But love is very hard.
And it goes bad for you if you violate the hard law of love. (Act 3,2 p.106)
That is precisely the point Tolstoy was repeatedly making in his final years:
Love is the highest and only law of human life, and in the depth of his
soul every human being knows this (as we most clearly see in children);
he knows this until he is entangled in the false teachings of the world.
Tesich and Kushner take their place with Shakespeare and Tolstoy (the
paradox that Tolstoy did not like the Bard notwithstanding), as playwrights
who looked into these false teachings and related the failures of Western
Civilization to the turning away from love that patriarchal cultures and
systems of domination require.(Eisler: 1987, 1995)
The most corrupting agent of patriarchy in Kushners play is the lawyer Roy Cohn, historical figure politically active in the second half of the
XX century, trained in what More would call legal trick and dodges by the
notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. In one of the most important seduction scenes in the play, Cohn says to young Joe: Everyone who makes it
28
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Tesich and Tolstoy
in the world makes it because somebody older and more powerful takes an
interest. The most precious asset in life, I think, is the ability to be a good
son to a father who pushes them farther than they would otherwise go. Ive
had many fathers, I owe my life to them, powerful, powerful men. Walter
Winchell, Edgar Hoover. Joe McCarthy most of all. He valued me because I
am a good lawyer, but he loved me because I was and am a good son.The
father-son relationship is central to life. Women are for birth, beginning,
but the father is continuance. The son offers the father his life as a vessel
for carrying forth his fathers dream. Love; thats a trap. Responsibility;
thats a trap too. Like father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror;
nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever
needs from you, threatens you. Dont be afraid; people are so afraid; dont
be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone Learn at least this: What
you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way. (Act 2,4 p. 62-3) In case
we missed the point Kushner is trying to make, Roy Cohn proudly declares
his greatest achievement to be not the making and breaking of presidents,
major and judges, or amassing a fortune, but the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. He is proud to have been instrumental in putting that sweet unprepossessing woman, two kids, boo-boo-boo, reminded us all of our little
Jewish mamas in the chair. He would have pulled the switch if they had
let him. He did it, he says, because he hates traitors and communists. Was
it legal? Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. They say terrible things
about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be nice, or you want
to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it is his last attempt to educate
his young portage. (Act 3,4 pp.115-14)
The presence of Ethel Rosenberg in the play is important. It is connected with the opening scene of the play in which homage is paid to the
mothers of Europe who brought their children to America, to be safe. The
New World, however, did not manage to be new, since the old patriarchal
model prevailed. Mothers, like Ethel Rosenberg, who wanted social justice and change, and lived by the law of love that embraced all, presented
real danger to the entrenched discriminatory and exploitative legacies of
the West. An interesting, but not fully developed theme runs through the
works of both Tesich and Kushner: in various ways they are approaching
Orwells insight (derived from Shakespeare) concerning the difference between the world of mothers, and the conquering world of Big Brothers that
has replaced it.
***
The Proust Questionnaire, page 126 in the book Tony Kushner in conversation, displays a list of prose writers Tony Kushner considers his favorites. Among the worlds greatest novelist (Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
Virginia Woolf, etc) it is nice to see that Kushner has included Raymond
Williams. With so many shared themes and concerns (Columbia University
29
as well, where Tesich got his MA in 1967, and Kushner his BA in 1978),
perhaps Tesich, too, would have acknowledged the enormous contribution
Williams has made to our understanding of modern drama. Williams final
points, in Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, certainly go a long way to help us
understand better the structure of feeling out of which Tesich created his
plays.
Williams claim is that modern drama, beginning with major naturalism, is an inherently critical form: it showed the (bourgeois) world as unacceptable by showing directly what it was like, and then how impossible it
was when people really tried to live in it. Today, the life of modern drama
continues to be defined by the need of dramatists to make their critical
insights explicit, by creating for them appropriate dramatic forms. Aware
of the danger of revolutionary naturalist conventions being confused with
counter revolutionary, inauthentic naturalist habits, Williams warns: The
driving force of the great naturalist drama was not the reproduction of
rooms or dress or conversation on the stage. It was a passion for truth in
strictly human and contemporary terms. It is one of the great revolutions
in human consciousness; to confront the human drama in its immediate
setting, without reference to outside forces and power. It involved a long
prepared redefinition of sources of human understanding and of the objects of human concern. It was a successful revolution and it is from its
central purposes that nearly all serious modern drama derives.(pp. 384-5)
Tolstoy became part of this revolution when he rejected the authority of
outside forces and proclaimed that the kingdom of God is within us.
Playwrights courage to question the relation between men and their
environment (seen no longer as ordered by God, or by immutable social
hierarchies) was enormously liberating. As Williams states, Ibsen had to
make rooms on the stage, in order to show men trapped in them, to show
creative forces inside the people in these rooms which could not be realized in any available life (390). Nora had to walk out and slam the door of
her doll house in order to be free to explore the potentials of her thwarted
life. The newly won freedom to criticize society, and show men how they
become trapped in their own creation, implied both readiness of the artists to assume responsibility, and courage to believe in the possibility of
liberating change. But the revolution initiated by naturalism has not been
completed, because the will to change has not been sufficient (or not sufficiently shared by all) to produce the desired, changed world. The question
What has to be done to get truly outside (p. 339) continues to be crucial,
and attempts to provide the answer involve today not only modern dramatists and other artists, but concerned individuals from all walks of life.
Williams notion of a room as a trap appears in Tesichs plays in
several different ways. In On the Open Road (1992), what traps Al is his
mind, his perception of the world adjusted to the demands of survival dictated by the forces that control it. In the already referred scene 4 in Act
two of the play, in a moment of self awareness, Al realizes than an insa30
/ , ,
Tesich and Tolstoy
tiable-I-get-it-God in his head has made a mouse-trap of his mind.The

trap keeps tripping and snapping the spines of moments that could have
lived on in my life, says Al, but I get them and they die and then I move
on. And wherever I go the I-get-it gospel goes with me. I get it. The gist of
things. The gist of everything. I get it. I get it all before anything can get to
me. I get it so I can get it all over with, And then, when theres nothing left
to get, my mind, like a scorpion striking at itself, will get me, the gist of me,
over and over again Ill get myself because thats all thats left to get and I,
I, I will get me, me, me (He starts to scream in horror). The confrontation with this truth carries Al beyond the trap and, having recovered his
humanity, he is mentally liberated, healed and made whole.
Twenty years earlier, in the very strange and disturbing play The Carpenters (1971), Tesich shows Daddys traditional patriarchal house to be
the trap20. The daughter of the house, Sissy, conveys how demoralizing
and spiritually debilitating life inside it is, both for her and for the other
inmates. In an early scene in the play, having told her brother that she
has again flunked her exam, she continues: Its kind of sad, dont you
think. I was going to go to law school and defend the poor and then I was
going to med school and heal the poor.Now it looks as if I am not going
anywhere. I am just going to stay home. When he suggests that she can
leave home and start her own family she answers: I couldnt, I tell you.
The very thought of my family TERRIFIES ME. My anything, for that
matter. Even my life is too much for me. The fact that I have to live it,
that Im expected to do something with it its all too much for me, Im a
dependent. Whatever desire to act I might have had has been amputated
out of me. I look at Mother and Father and I dont understand it .theyre
not terribly clever or strong and yet somehow theyve put this house together. True, I hate the house, I hate everything about it, but I couldnt
have done what they did. Dont you seeI am even dependent on them to
create things for me to hate. When Mark reminds her that there are new
families, without family heads and family rules, without family ties tying
you to roles you dont want to play, she snaps: You sound just like Daddy
FamilyFamilyhe expects the family to do everything, and all the time
there is no family. Theres only an old house with a new family room added
on. Why its called a family room Ill never knowPerhaps because nobody
ever goes there. Nobody but Daddy. He sits there for hours waiting for the
family to show up and have a family chatWhen he thinks nobodys listening he plays those old recordings of us when we were kids. It is quite
amazing how accurately Tesich perceived and how successfully he transposed into drama the failures of the patriarchal tradition that still underpin the conventional, normal, American, but not only American, way of
20 Several films are built around the same metaphoric presentation of Western Civilization as a house,
a structure, which has become a trap. The most brilliant are Roman Polanskis The Tenant, Stanley
Kubricks The Shining, and Tarkovskys The Sacrifice.
31
life. He provided proof that it is possible to get truly outside the patriarchal
trap in the play he wrote soon after, about a very different kind of house.
Goyas house (Tesichs mother was called Goya), in Nourish the Beast
(1974), is an establishment where all the physical and spiritual orphans of
patriarchy can find a home and become a family. In this play Sissy becomes
Silvia, and 7 other very colorful characters appear. Even the new title (the
original was Baba Goya) plays into the thesis that is being expounded: women discussing history in Donna Reads documentary Goddess Remembered
summarize the catastrophic shift from matrifocal cultures to patriarchy
by pointing out that the nurturer was replaced by the conqueror. Not in
Goyas house. The title of the play Nourish the beast refers to the reminder,
on the list of Things to be done (sooth Sylvia, brighten Bruno, meliorate
the mean old man, nourish the beast) to get dog food for Dodo, the new
arrival to the establishment. No one is overlooked. Everyone is nourished.
Love is shared by all.
The trap and how to get out of it is both the theme, and the structuring principle of Square One (1990). Very skillfully Tesichs plays operate
on two levels: the naturalistic, often reminiscent of television dramas he
loved to watch as a child, and the archetypal, the one that disturbs the
critics, or that the critics completely fail to get. Square One is a good example. The names of the characters are quite telling. The interaction on the
naturalistic level is between a young man called Adam and a young woman
called Diana. But in fact, what Tesich channels through the naturalistic
and plausible plot is a milder version of the conflict between the world of
mothers and the world of Big Brother found in Orwell. Adam is the paradigmatic Biblical man, drilled to be obedient and respect external authority and hierarchical order unquestioningly. Diana, on the other hand, is the
pagan Goddess of our first world, seduced into his trap but adamant in her
determination not to stay. She walks out of it, and out of their compromising marriage, and returns to the park, her Edenic Garden, where life can
be lived according to the laws of nature, and not according to the laws of
patriarchal culture. When Professor Lionel Trilling of Columbia University
wrote Beyond Culture, in his own professorial way this was the kind of criticism of culture he had in mind.
Arts & Leisure (1996), the last play Tesich completed and saw performed before he died, also provides support for the suggested interpretation. Aleck Chaneys mind is a variation of Als. Patriarchal ideas of what
is normal, which he defends throughout the play, using tricks and doges
generated by his well informed but instrumentalized mind, are judged and
condemned by the women whose lives he has destroyed: his mother, his
wife who is the mother of his child, his child who cannot become a mother
because the very thought of him causes her to abort the babies she is carrying. The idea that they would grow in the world he defines is deadening. The
structuring conflict in the play is the one posited by Tolstoy, and Kushner.
It is the conflict between people who need love and the world (the room,
32
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Tesich and Tolstoy
the trap) whose order depends on loves complete denial. Preparing herself
to meet her father, Alex Chaney daughter, who is reminiscent of Sissy and
who eventually commits suicide, says: To be young, gifted and dead is to
be finally embraced by your culture and your country. You can come home
again. Just dont forget to be dead. You know how your father gets when
you come home alive. The look is dead. But deliciously, delightfully dead.
Dead in a life-affirming way. Despairing about their encounter, the father
confesses to the audience: I have told my daughter I love her and I have
told it to her over and over again. In person. On the telephone. In birthday
cards, attached to birthday gifts. The problem is not that I havent told her.
The problem is that my daughter does not want to be told. She wants to be
loved instead. I care for her. I worry about her. I want her to be happy. My
time is hers. When you put it all together its just like love, but she does not
want love thats just like love, she wants to be loved instead. In the final
confrontation, when his daughter tells him that she ran away from home
because he did not love her, and that she is back to check again, since she
failed to have a child of her own, to love and find consolation, all Chaney
can say is Oh sweetheart. I know youre hurting. I know the nature of
your pain and what you need to make the pain go away. But why must it
be love? Why wont something else do? We are not trapped, after all, in
some Greek tragedy where standards of human conduct are set in stone
and where to deviate from the standard and settle for less is seen as spiritual annihilation thats worse than death. So what are we to do?
Indeed, What is to be done, or What then must we do? is the question Tolstoy asks in the title of one of his more important books. The answer may lie in some of the biographical details of Tolstoys life. What Raymond Williams says about too much evident tension between the critical
positions and the varying creative practices of great artists is true, and
may be extended to the inconsistencies and tensions present in their personal conduct. Regardless of the troubled relationship with his wife in
his final years, and his general troubling weakness for women, when the
inner voice told Tolstoy not to write a novel about Peter the Great but
about Anna Karenina, he consented. He disliked the idea, but obeyed the
authority within. The wisdom of the advice was indisputable. It changed
him. It made him realize many specific things about love, the feeling he
so passionately promoted, when in writing the novel he had to imagine it
and experience it from Annas point of view. One of the things to be done,
it was beginning to dawn on him, was stop the patriarchal crimes against
women, liberate women from the tyranny of patriarchal law, and liberate
the feminine in men, permitting them and encouraging them to use their
mother mind21. Related and equally important was relentlessly to oppose
21 On the Globaloneness site, on the Internet, it is possible to watch Riane Eisler speak about Caring
Economics, attitudes which can take us from the traditional patriarchal domination models of society
to the partnership models which can save us; Varsamazulu Credo Mutwa speak of the necessity to
awaken the mother mind in modern man, and end the domination of the warrior mind; Duramunmun
33
war. Clearly these measures would make the world of love, kindness and
compassion easier to achieve. In the late XX century Tesich and Kushner
were moving in the same direction. This paper has not addressed Tesichs
currently most popular anti-war play, The Speed of Darkness, and Kushners
numerous anti-war activist plays. It covered a lot of ground, but a much
longer journey through these plays, in part II, still lies ahead .
REFERENCES
Avery 2013: J. S. Avery, Count Tolstoy, we need your voice today! Countercurrents,
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Bloom 1994: H. Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and The School of the Ages, New
York: HarcourtBrace, 1994.
Briggs 1997: A. D. P. Briggs, Editor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underworld
& Lev Tolstoy, A Confession, London: Everyman Library, J. M. Dent, 1994, 1997.
Brunett 1996: P. Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996.
Coen 1992: S. Coen, Steve Tesich: The Only Kind of Real Rebel Left, He Figures, Is a
Moral Person, American Theatre Volume 5, Summer 4, July/August 1992.
Cohen 2002: Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, Editors, The Free Speech Movement Reflections on Berkeley in the 60, Berkeley: 2002.
Diaz 2008: P. Diaz, The End of Poverty? documentary film.
Eisler 1987: 1995: R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, HarperCollins, 1987, 1995.
Frankl 1955: V. Frankl, The Doctor of the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy,
Knopf, Vintage Book, 1973.
Fromn 1962: E, From, The Art of Loving, New York, Harper and Row, 1962
Fromm 1998: E. Fromm and Rainer Funk, Love Sexuality and Matriarchy, Fromm
International, 1998.
Kitchell 1990: M. Kitchell, Berkeley in the Sixties 1990 documentary film.
Kubrick 1980: S. Kubrick, The Shining, 1980, feature film.
Kushner 1992: T Kushner, Angels in America, New York, Theatre Communications
Group, 1992, 1995.
Kushner 1998: T. Kushner, A Modest Proposal, American Theatre, January1998.
Steindler 2011: Tony Kushner, The Paris Interview, No.201, Summer 2012: The Art
of Theatre No. 16
Marrone 2000: G. Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth, The Cinema of Liliana Cavani,
Princeton, 2000.
More 1516, 1965, 2003: T. More, Utopia, 1516, translated by Paul Turner, Penguin
Classics. 2003.
Orwell 1949: G. Orwell, 1984, Penguin Modern Classics, 1949, 2003.
Polanski 1976: R. Polanski, The Tenant 1976, feature film.
Read 1989: D. Read, Goddess Remembered, National Film Board of Canada, 1989,
documentary film.
Rothmayer 2002: M. Rothmayer, The Drama of Life Unfolding, The Life and Work of
Steve Tesich, Doctoral Dissertation, Lincoln Nebraska, 2002.
Max Harrison, from the Yuim North Australian Aboriginal tribe, speak about the Aboriginal sense of
oneness of all nature; Vandana Shiva speak of the sacredness of the Earth, etc. These are all modern
variations of Tolstoys idea that love and responsibility should bind us to one another. Efforts to
promote and practice these attitudes would constitute, as Tesich put it, the demonstration of the free
for what of freedom.
34
/ , ,
Tesich and Tolstoy
Shakespeare 1603: W. Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Editors Stanley Wells et al., 1987.
Shakespeare 1597: W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Editors Stanley Wells et al., 1987.
Stojanovi 1992: D. Stojanovi, Interview in Pregledi (Views), No. 107, April 1992.
English version available on the Internet Ourmedia site.
Tarkovsky 1986: A. Tarkovsky, Offret (The Sacrifice), 1986, feature film.
Tesich 1971: S. Tesich, The Carpenters, New York: Samuel French, 1971.
Tesich 1974: S. Tesich, Nourish the Beast, New York: Samuel French, 1974.
Tesich 1990: S. Tesich, Square One, New York: Samuel French, 1990.
Tesich 1992: S. Tesich, On the Open Road, New York: Applause Theatre Book, 1992.
Tesich 1996: S. Tesich, Arts & Leisure, New York: Samuel French. 1996.
Tolstoy 1879: L. Tolstoy, A Confession, translated by David Patterson, New York and
London: Norton, 1989.
Tolstoy 1886: L. Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? Translated by Aylmer Maude,
1925, 1935
Tolstoy 1894, 2006: L. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You. 2006
Trilling 1967: L. Trilling, Beyond Culture, Penguin, 1967.
Vorlicki 1998: Tony Kushner in Conversation, Edited by Robert Vorlicki, University
of Michigan.. 1998.
Williams, 1968: R. Williams, Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, Penguin, 1968.
Yentob 2011: A. Yentob, The Trouble With Tolstoy, BBC documentary, 2011.
All Tolstoys books can be read on the Internet. The following list of his philosophical works
(taken from Wikipedia) illustrates the range of his concerns:
A Confession (1879); A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (1880); The Gospel

in Brief, or A Short Exposition of the Gospel (1881); The Four Gospel Unified
and Translated (1881); Church and State (1882); What I Believe (also called
My Religion) (1884); What Is to Be Done? (also translated as What Then
Must We Do?) (1886); On Life (1887); The Love of God and of ones Neighbour (1889); Timothy Bondareff (1890); Why Do Men Intoxicate Themselves?
(1890); The First Step: on vegetarianism (1892); The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893); Non-Activity (1893); The Meaning of Refusal of Military Service
(1893); Reason and Religion (1894); Religion and Morality (1894); Christianity and Patriotism (1894); Non-Resistance: letter to Ernest H. Crospy (1896);
How to Read the Gospels (1896); The Deception of the Church (1896); Letter to
the Liberals (1898); Christian Teaching (1898); On Suicide (1900); Thou Shalt
Not Kill (1900); Reply to the Holy Synod (1901); The Only Way (1901); On
Religious Toleration (1901); What Is Religion? (1902); To the Orthodox Clergy
(1903); Thoughts of Wise Men (compilation; 1904); The Only Need (1905); The
Grate Sin (1905); A Cycle of Reading (compilation; 1906); Do Not Kill (1906);
Love Each Other (1906); An Appeal to Youth (1907); The Law of Love and the
Law of Violence (1908); The Only Command (1909); A Calendar of Wisdom,
compilation (1909)
35
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1971. The Carpenters, Dramatist Play Service, New York.
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1976. Gorky, Samuel French, New York.
1978. The Passing Game, Samuel French, New York.
38
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1980. Touching Bottom, Samuel French, New York.

1981. Division Street, Samel French, New York.
1989. The Speed of Darkness, American Theatre Magazine, New York.
1990. Square One, Applause Books, New York.
1992. On the open Road, Applause Books, New York.
1997. Arts end Leisure, Samuel French, London.
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Branko Popovic / Plays by Stojan Steve Tesich for the 21st Century
Summary / Tesich is discussed from the point of view of the theatre productions of
his plays. The focus is on one of Steve Tesichs major plays, The Speed of Darkness
produced in Belgrades Zvezdara Theatre. Tesichs dramaturgy, especially his characterization, is compared to that of leading American dramatists, in the first place
Tennessee Williams. The play deals with a moral dilemma of two Vietnam veterans
and the consequences of their war and post-war actions. It is an anti-war play implying criticism of war politics in general, through powerful stage metaphors. The
analysis based on the stage production is an attempt at a new reading of the play
which continues to be topical.
8. 2013.
2013.
45

821.111(73)-2.09 Tesich S.
Lena S. Petrovi1
Department of English
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Nis
MARGINALISATION OF ART
IN THE LATE PLAYS OF STEVE TESICH
The paper traces the motif of the misuse of art as it is developed in Steve Teshics post-Hollywood
drama. The focus is on the various strategies, exposed most forcibly in On the Open Road, ensuring the spiritual remoteness of classical art even when it is physically accessible, but also on
the differences in reception conditioned by class i.e. the much more immediate experiential
value art potentially holds for the economically/socially /educationally marginalized groups as
opposed to those occupying privileged/central positions. In the second part of the paper, the
recurring issues in Tesichs late plays the corruption of art, falsification of truth, trivialization
of freedom, and the loss of being in the post-modern era are contextualized within a broader
comparative analysis of two conflicting traditions in the history of European art, particlarly
drama, whose archetypal clash is the theme of Tyger Two, Adrian Mitchells play about Blakes
sudden reappearance and triumphant survival amidst the flood of popular culture and conceptual
art two updated versions of the revolutionary poets old adversaries.
Key words: Art, truth, lying, freedom, music, ethics, (post)modernism, tradition, Tesich, Blake
Writing for the Guardian in 2000, the British playwright Mark Ravenhill complained of the pressure to catch up with the increasing cultural
overload, which caused him to feel stressed out and guilty. The trouble
with culture, he said, was that there was too much of it. The title of his
article Help! I am having an art attack - and the half-joking solution that starting from January 1, 2001, nothing should be produced for a year:
no experiences, no performances, nothing that could be considered, even
by the most dogged commentator, as art or culture - hardly seem to corroborate my contention about the marginalization of art in contemporary
society. But what I mean by marginalization has little to do with quantity,
and much with the kinds of art produced and kinds of approaches applied.
Ravenhill does come closer to what I think the real problem is when he
mentions the business aspect of cultural overload, the merciless assault
of art marketeers with their indiscriminate advertising of a gold standard of largely American culture and of the richer and more diverse work
that continues to be produced around and between the global edifices of
American film and television, but does not pursue this critical observation
1 lnpetrovic@gmail.com
47
Lena S. Petrovi
about two competing and, in my view, mutually exclusive kinds of art any
further. On the contrary, he maintains that there is something intrinsically worrying in the multiplicity of choices suggested by the ever greater
proliferation of images, narratives, voices, performances through which,
since the Renaissance cultural Big Bang, we have made sense of our lives.
Ultimately, however, he decides that diversity is better than a return to any
kind of mono-myth, and concludes with a qualified proposal that instead
on art, a one year-long moratorium be placed on art news in the media:
No reviews, no cultural commentators on radio or television, no profiles
of artists in magazines. Stop the presses at Time Out. Pull the plug on Front
Row. Ban the Guardian listings. Just a simple sign up outside each gallery
or cinema or opera house saying whats on. And let gossip and rumor do
the rest. (Ravenhill 2000)
Incurably optimistic as he describes himself, Ravenhill fails to gauge
accurately the pernicious effect of the cultural overload he describes. Cultural advertising is certainly part of it, but once silenced, he seems to be
saying, richer and diverse work will take care of itself, happily coexisting with the golden standard of American culture. It does not occur to
him that the steady outpour of entertainment and other kinds of pseudo
art is in itself an indirect perception management, one of the strategies
for rendering genuinely artistic work unrecognizable or ineffective: that
if self-expression finally seems to have become available to diverse social
groups of producers as well as consumers, as Ravenhill states approvingly,
it has done so only because the overwhelming quantity of profit-oriented,
popular kitsch along with the more sophisticated abstract stuff currently
produced and advertised, has its qualitative correlative, which is the marginalization of the total approach to art, in the absence of which, potentially vision-expanding, revolutionary drama, painting or music, for most
people, are rendered experientially meaningless.
Total approach is a phrase taken from John Bergers Ways of Seeing, a study of the ways in which the perception of visual arts has been
controlled since the Renaissance, and particularly in the age of mechanical
reproductuion, when paintings and sculpture, once confined to sacred cultural space reserved for it, became freely circulating images for mass consumption. I will return to his arguments in connection with the motif of
commodification of artworks in Tesichs play On the Open Road, but for the
moment I want to observe that Bergers insights about the cultural misuse
and betrayal of visual arts are equally valid when applied to literature and
particularly drama. In fact, there is no better example of this practice than
the manner in which in March 2012, in an episode of RTS 2 talk show serial
Our People in Hollywood, the work of Steve Tesich was introduced to the
TV audiences in Serbia. The presentation was largely a misrepresentation:
much was made of his early films, and the Oscar he won for it, but of his
late, most subversive plays one was not mentioned, while another, about
Vietnam, was distorted out of all recognition to fit the standard of current
48
/ , ,
Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich
political correctness. Thus ironically the tribute ostensibly paid to Tesic

consisted in implicitly endorsing attitudes to art, truth and politics whose
tragic consequences for the global humanity this important playwright,
novelist and activist of Serbian origin spent the last engaged years of his life
exposing and denouncing. They can be summarily described as postmodern
attitudes, by which I do not have in mind any defining formalist criterion,
but a certain ideological position: as opposed to the tradition of modernist
refusal and revolt, postmodern spirit in general I consider to be marked
by idifference and consent to the world shaped by the powers that be2.
Tesichs revolt did not happen at once. When as a teenager he left his
native Uice to settle in the United States and after a few struggling years
win a reputation as a successful screenplay writer for Hollywood movies,
Tesich did so with a conviction that the American dream was a synonym
for freedom and justice not to be found in the countries of Eastern Europe.
His awakening from this delusion came years later, when he was already
well into his forties. One of the reasons for this delayed recognition was
perhaps his need, as an immigrant, to continue to feel connected to the
moral centre of his new country, which, in the sixties, still seemed to be
there. Not that the American international politics was less dishonest then
than now, but greater care was taken to mask the real profit- and powerbased objectives with the rhetoric about democracy, peace, and freedom.
Nor was Tesich quite taken in by the this demagogy, but what sustained his
faith in America was the will to resistance and change that he saw around:
there was a certain irruption of emotions, of intellectual ideas people
deciding to cut loose from things they were doing and try new thingswhich made the sixties the decade that stayed with him and shaped his
life permanently. Looking back at it from the perspective of the nineties,
he saw the pre-Vietnam era as the last time the American citizens actively
engaged in establishing the goals of the nation(Cohen 1982: 42-54). It was
the new policies of the eighties, openly more reactionary, both in ruthlessly
violating civil and human rights with the view of preventing such massive
movements of organized resistance as was the anti-Vietnam protest, and
also in being shamelessly outspoken about the crass economy and politics
of self-seeking that two decades earlier decision makers felt better masked.
This cynicism also involved lying, but it was lying with a difference.
Thus the US military interventions after Vietnam, from its scandalous involvement in Nicaragua, to the Gulf War, to the attack and dismantling of
Yugoslavia, all crucial in Tesichs change of attitude, were accompanied
by excuses so outrageous, invented with such disregard for ascertainable
2 The distinction was drawn by John Cruickshank to describe two possible trends in the philosophy and
ethos underlying the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, one represented by Camus resistance against
fascism, the other embodied in Pirandellos ultimate consent to it. (Cruickshank 1984: 7-32). I use the
distinction as a starting point of a more fully developed argument concerning the ideology of modernism/postmodernism in The Tradition of Modernism in the works of John Berger, Adrienne Rich and
Helena Sheehan, a still unpublished paper presented at the Language, Literature, Tradition Conference held at the Faculty of Philosophy in Pale in 2012.
49
Lena S. Petrovi
factual truth, that he could only interpret them as signals confirming the
prediction of a specialist for totalitarian regimes Hanah Arendt, who had
warned that an era might be coming when not only philosophical but factual truths could be ignored with impunity. He called it a post-truth era
(Jeremi 2008: 124-127). It is a time when sufficient number of people
have been deprived of their critical faculties and prepared to believe anything for the decision makers not to bother about those conscious enough
to see through their lies. But in addition to its practical effectiveness, the
moral implications of lying changed with the coming of the new era. Far
from being a degrading practice to be concealed, lying has become open
and self-complaisant, a performance steeped in arrogant pride. While in
postmodern literature and art it took subtler, more sophisticated forms,
such as new theoretical postulates about the inability of signs to capture
truth, reality, or meaning3, and hence about the impossibility of representation, in politics the much more obvious cynicism concerning truth and
falsehood was supported by new, frankly amoral, scientific explanations
of human nature, culture and history.4 A random example, combining political practice and theory, of the new honorable status assigned to duplicity is to be found in the essay The Postmodern State by Robert F. Cooper.
What the world and particularly the Balkans need, he argues in his essay,
is a new kind of imperialism, in accordance with human rights and cosmopolitan values, in that it would not impose any rules, but will be realized as
a movement of voluntary self-imposition i.e., of voluntary acceptance of
the conditions which provide the weak with the protection of the strong,
without whose intervention law and order would for ever remain inaccessible to the weak. Coopers name for this new postmodern kind of state
is cooperative empire. For this political plan to materialize, however, it
is necessary to respond positively to the greatest moral challenge of the
postmodern world, which is to get used to the idea of double standards.5
3 In his study Whatever Happened to Modernism, Gabriel Josipovici points to the idea of the free circulation of signs no longer attached to any referent as the crossroads in the history of modern art, at
which it moves in two very different directions. One, exemplified by Duchamp and his followers, abandons representation and embraces abstraction, and represents a way of seeing that is diminished and
diminishing, indifferent to the world and ultimately boring to the viewer. The other, that of Picassos
follower Francis Bacon, remains responsible to the world: like Rembrandts self-portrait (Josipovici
quotes Bacon as saying), it uses the non-representational details in order to record a fact. This kind
of art it never abandons its crucial purpose to report or record, but preserves the modernist tension
between figuration and abstraction, and, compared to the one-dimensional, merely aesthetic abstract
painting, is much more exciting and profound. (Josipovici 2010: 119-121)
4 Such as game theory, or selfish gene theory, described in Adam Curtis documentary The Trap: What
happened to Our Dream of Freedom? or Scott Nobles documentary The Power Principle. Their false assumptions about human conduct as consisting in strategies endlessly reinvented to satisfy the basic
biological need, which is preservation and perpetuation of ones own genes, are used to promote the
capitalist economic and military ideal of aggressive self-interest.
5 Cooper was one of Tony Blairs chief advisors, helping to shape his politics of neoliberal
cosmopolitism and humanitarian military intervention. Their underlying principles and motives also
become apparent in the passage about voluntary imperialism and double standards: The challenge to
the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on
the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of
50
/ , ,
When Tesichs mounting doubts about the US as a model of freedom and democracy lead to the final bitter disillusionment at the time of
the NATO bombing of Serbia, accompanied as it was by shameless falsifications in the media, Tesics response to the postmodern challenge of double
standards was to remain a modernist, recreating a tradition in which he, a
spiritual heir to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, already had his roots. Which is to
say that both as a citizen and a playwright he stood up in defence of truth,
convinced that in an era openly committed to falsehood and violence, telling the truth becomes a primary moral requirement, and morality the only
authentic form of rebellion.6
The interviews, essays and letters Tesich sent to the press at the time
exposed the shameless methods used by the U.S. and world mainstream
media to disseminate the fabricated version of the Balkans conflict. The
intended effect, all too soon achieved, was the niggerization of Serbs, who
now joined the Indian, African, Mexican, Iraqi niggers on a long open
list of the weak peoples deprived by the strong nations of the world of
their right to fight back in defenceof their lives, freedom or dignity (see
Jeremi 2008: 128). These letters were all composed in the hope that the
truth about the totalitarion atmosphere in nominally non totallitarian societies a development not even Hanah Arendt, a specialist for totalitarian
regimes, could predict - would reach and alarm enough people to stir some
action. They were not published in Tesichs lifetime, the indifference of the
press aggravating the anger and despair that, in his sisters words, in the
end killed him.
***
The artistic transposition of Tesichs protest required a radical change
in medium, style, and message. A successful Hollywood scriptwriter, a recipient of prestigious awards including Oscar, for movies reflecting his still
states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live
in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when
we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle. (Cooper, 2002)
6 In an interview given to the American Theatre in 1992, Tesich said: The only remaining form of
rebellion is a moral person. The same year his text A Governmaent of Lies appeared in Nation,
exposing, among other kinds of lying, the duplicity in American education one kind of values being
paid official lip service in schools and universities, and its opposite being taught by example:
We have forgotten the central premise that you educate by example. The practise and
tolerance of racism is education. The system of justice in which the crimes of the wealhy
and the crimes of the poor are not the same in the eyes of the law is education. The Reagan
Bush decade of corruption and greed has been a decade of education. That our education
President had the chance to preside over the first generation in this century to mature
without a war, and that he chose to teach them a lesson that war is good, is education. .. It is
not that our education has failed. It is that has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.
[We have] taught our children to tuck in their wings, to narrow their range of vision and
concerns, to jettison moral encumbrances and seek self-fulfillment in some narrow shere
of interest...
51
Lena S. Petrovi
unshaken faith in his adopted country, Tesich was never the person to be
seduced by success, as his later wry comment about the award for his first
film, makes clear: What is an award? It makes for a fabulous week-end.
It does not transform the world!( Rothstein, 1991);or his observation that
We are are not born with the congenital need to win an Oscar. Our inborn
need is of love...( Jeremi 2008: 119) Now as the year 1990, the time of
decisive turning point, drew near, and Tesic, having just adopted an eight
days old baby girl, increasingly felt that the world in which she was to grow
up was loveless and in need of transformation, he decided to return to his
former medium, the theatre. Big ideas, he felt, were best articulated in the
theatre, because the theatre allows for the expression the (American) film
would never tolerate.
In 1989, he wrote The Speed of Darkness in the conviction that America would never heal untill it faced the time of Vietnam with complete honesty. The life of one of its two heroes, Joe, a Vietnam veteran, is based on a
lie. He has suppressed his pain and anger in exchange for family happiness
and social reputation, but his memories and his conscience are stirred back
to life by the sudden emergence of his former mate, the delibarately unadjusted, homeless loser, Lou. When Lou commits suicide in a self-sacrificial
gesture reminiscent of Christ, Joe turns a communal gathering celebrating
his triumph as the citys Man of the Year into an occasion for public confession. The disclosure of the secrets among them of the attrocities committed in Vietnam, and their effects on the American soldiers (Joes permanent sterility is the consequence of radioactive exposure), of the toxic
waste he and Lou, ignored and unemplyed on their return from Vietnam,
were secretly and illegally hired to dump in a nearby mesa, currently sheduled for the new water supply system reveals how the past, buried and
unrecognised, threatens, literally and symbolically, to poison the future of
the town. Yet the opportunity Joes confession offers to the community to
confront the truth is ultimately refused, the public, at first enthusiastic,
soon finding his presence too embarrassing a reminder of what is easier to
forget, and quietly forcing him to leave.
There followed three more plays Square One, (1990), On the Open
Road (1992) and Arts and Leasure (1996), which together with the Speed
of Darkness comprise a thematic whole, aptly called the moral tetralogy.
Having depicted the failure to confront and learn from the past, Tesich
now turned his gaze to the bleak future he felt was bound to result from
this failure, and which he developed new dramatic conventions, such as
futuristic allegory instead of the former realism, to conjure. The angle of
his vision changed in another respect too, for in the three subseqent plays
the falsification of political and historical truth is assimilated, more or less
completely, into another theme, that of the corruption, or suppression of
art.
On the Open Road, reflecting as it does the recent global political upheavals, is not altogether an exception, for the use and misuse of art is its
52
/ , ,
pervasive theme too. It blends in with the motif of Christs Second Coming
and provides the play, inspired as it was by the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the authors premonition of the civil wars to come, with a certain distancing allegorical perspective, that takes the plays themes beyond the historical circumstances that gave rise to it. Its two protagonists, Al and Angel are
among the survivors of an unspecified civil war, groping from a devastated
part of the world towards an unnamed Land of the Free. To be allowed to
enter it, Al and Angel, very much like the deluded victims of the real transition that befell the former socialist countries in Europe, are eager to submit
to any conditions. Among the requirements is the proof that they qualify
culturally. To show that they are not some miserable refugees fleeing for
their lives, but prove their worthiness Angel is pulling a cart cluttered with
paintings and sculptures plundered from bombed-out museums, while Al
is helping him memorise titles and dates of famous artists, and musicians,
along with the key ideas of major European philosophers. This misconception of knowledge as a burocratic ability to parrot the external facts is the
first of the pedagogic strategies directed against complete experience of art
that Tesich attacks in his play . The motif of museums introduce another,
time honoured practise, that of confining art works within a special space,
from a temple or a church, to the houses of the rich, to public museums,
which all act as dividing lines, barring the experience that happens within
from ever surviving or affecting the life beyond its walls.
Visual arts [writes John Berger], have always existed within a certain preserve...The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was
set apart from the rest of life precisely to be able to exercise power over it.
Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the
ruling classes, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their places
and houses. (Berger 1972: 25)
The age of pictorial reproduction has not brought about essential

change, according to Berger, except that art has lost its former authority.
Entering the mainstream of life, the reproduced images of art, have become ubiquitous, free, available, but also ephemeral, insubstantial, valueless. The original paintings acqured the aura of holy relics, their authenticity identified with some mysterious spiritual quality and invoked to justify
their market value, while at the same time as this kind circular reasoning
implied - their exorbitant price on the market was a garantee of their spiritual value. Thus whether in guilt frames in the livingrooms of the rich or
as public museum exibits, their function has remained basically the same :
they are made to justify the mystery of anaccountable wealth from which
the majority feel excluded (Berger 1972: 17).
Now that they have come into the possession of these precious art
objects, Angel and Al face a crucial choice, comparable to the one that, in
Bergers words, opened when the camera made art theoretically available
to everybody. It is a choice
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Lena S. Petrovi
between a total approach to art, which relates it to every aspect of experience, and the esoteric approach of a few specialised experts who are the
clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. ...The real question is : to
whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who
can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierachy of relic specialist?
(Berger 1972: 24)7
In Act I, beneath their apparrent agreement to use the looted art

objects as commodities, Al and Angel in fact exemplify the two opposing
approaches mentioned obove. Al is a connoseur of visual art, a lover of
music, treating paintings and musical instruments with the affection the
neglected Angel compares to a mothers for her baby. Yet Al never extends
this love to another human being, not even to a terrified little girl Angel saves before an approaching train runs her over, but then abandons
her, persuaded by Als rational argument that in the circumstances the
love needed to go on saving her from day to day would be self destructive.
Thus Als understanding of art, theoretically correct, as that which defines, when we are fumbling in confusion and chaos, the darkness we are
in or elevates us to a promontory from where we can see the way; which
defines, if we truly want to be human, what that is and how far we have to
go to reach it or how far off course we have strayed - remains on a strictly
conceptual level, and is never translated into a gesture of intimacy that his
emotionally starved disciple longs for.
As opposed to Als highbrow aestheticism, which keeps aesthetics
strictly separated from ethics, Angel, coming as he does from the most
marginalized social group, displays, despite his mentors instructions to
the contrary, a spontaneous and ever stronger inclination to respond to
art with his whole being. The response is paradoxical, and consists in displaced rage: provoked by the double standards imposed on art, his rage is
directed against art itself. At first overwhelmed by Als worldly wisdom and
scholarly authority, he obediently and mechanically rehearses the opening
7 In his book Berger acknowledged his debt to Walter Benjamins essay, but in fact, the choice suggested above is an advance in comparison to Benjamins unqualified optimism about the modern reproductive technology power to alter the cultural landscape in socially progressive ways, particularly
through the changed conditions of viewing offered by film. Viewed collectively and cheaply, Benjamin
argues, movies withered the artworks aura, and instead of the awed worshipper, turned the viewer
into the critic. In a famous debate that the essay engendered, Adorno, agreeing with Benjamin about
the counter-revolutionary effect of art as a cult object, pointed nevertheless that the destruction of
the magical auratic element in high art also constituted a loss, because the contemplation required by
the original painting compounded an element of freedom that has disappeared since, replaced by the
distraction and obedience - as a mental condition in which mass audiences now absorb (consume)
popular art. (See Leppert 2002: 240-245) Bergers view is superior to both these positions, for he sees
how both the original artwork in its preserve and the language of images into which it has been translated are turned into commodities, but also insists on the need for a revolutionary re-appropriation of
the art of the past. It depends, however on who uses the language of images, and for what purpose.
Thus the entire art of the past has become a political question: its proper interpretation is momentous
not only in terms of personal but also historical experience, for it would give a greater chance to a class
or a people to situate themselves in history from which they have been cut off, and become its free
agents. (Berger 1972: 26)
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notes of world famous musical motifs, such as the Grail motif from Wagners Parsifal or Beethovens Ode to Joy, apparently unresponsive to the
powerful appeal of the both to heal or transform the world suffering from
the disease of lovelessness. The hidden effect of the music, however, keeps
building up in his soul, until, pierced to the heart by every single tone of a
little classical phrase Al plinks on a piano in a deserted church, he explodes
into a fit of violence, smashing the piano keys and then attacking Al with
a knife for ignoring stubbornly his unfulfilled need for friendship. From
Angels reminiscence in a previous scene, we find out that his first and only
visit to a museum, organised by a social agency for the uplift of the poor
and homeless, also ended in violence. The group of three hundred scum
of the earth, as Angel refers to himself and his class of outcasts, were
shocked and then amused to see nothing more uplifting than their own
suffering reflected in every single exibit. Snickering at what appeared to
them as an absurdity, they became outraged to hear the regular visitors in
chic lightweight summer clothes, who woud not spare a single compassionate glance at the real beggars round the corner, admire aloud the beauty of
the painted injustice and anguish8. Realising intuitively that displayed in
museums, art s purpose is reversed , that it is not allowed to turn looking
into seeing, but is, in Bergers words, used instead to bolster the illusion
that inequality is noble, and hierachies are thrilling (Berger 1972: 22), the
visiting poor merge ant-like into a single collective will and demolish the
exibition and set fire to the building. This was how the civil war started,
and Angel concludes his reminiscence observing how pleasant it was to
realise that you didnt really have to be highly qualified to make history,
how nice to feel that being stupid was not a handicap for a change. This
empowering thought did not endure in its clarity, though, a new confusion
having replaced it, caused particularly by the revarsal in his situation, now
that he is wandering with Al, trying to salvage the very thing he set out to
destroy: I thought it was the culture that was opressing me. Wrong. Its
the culture thats gonna liberate me. (19)
Wrong, again, but neither Angel, nor Al are aware at this point of
where they are mistaken. In fact, their confused and untill the very last
scene unsuccessful attemts to define the meaning of freedom constitute
the second major motif in the play. This and other catharctic insights happen only after the crucial test they undergo in the episode of Christs Second Coming. Having reached the border (so close that they make out the
flag with stripes and stars a clear indication of one meaning Tesic ascribed
to the Land of the Free), already relishing the air of freedom, they are informed, by a Christian monk, that the last condition before they cross it is
8 His protest against the separation of the aesthetics from ethics in Eurpean history and theory of art
John Berger also recorded in his novel G., whose major image, in the authors own words, is that of four
figures of African slaves chained to the platform of King Ferdinands statue in Livorno. When the sight
of chained human figures causes pity and moral confusion in a five-year-old protagonist of the novel,
the fathers serene explanation is that they are there because they are beautiful. (Berger 1972: 55)
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Lena S. Petrovi
to kill Christ, who has once again come down to men and is spreading his
message no longer by words, but music, playing the celo. Tesich comment
about this detail - everything Jesus said is already known, and if you use
those familiar words, people tend to instantly shut the door on them. With
music...they can have a more personal experience. (Weiss 1991: 5) recalls
Pinters comments about his characters frequent resort to silence as well
as his own authorial reticence when it comes to additional explanations
of his plays: to articulate is to avoid the experience.9 There is more to it
though. Music has already been established as an important motif within
the play through Angels exceptional emotional responsiveness to it, and
is also a recurrent motif in Tesichs other plays. In this respect Tesich
joins numerous philosophers who intuitively knew what recent neurologists have confirmed scientifically, namely that music is supreme among
arts in that it can bypass conceptual understanding and appeal directly
to the more primitive, pre-verbal, affective regions in the subcortical and
right brain, which - contrary to the traditional, othodox conception of the
primacy of analytical consciousness in defining human species - is what
makes us fully and truly human. Thus in his book about the uses of musicotherapy in treatment of severe amnesia, Alcheimers desease, autism,
and various psychosis, a neuro-psychiatrist Oliver Sax describes numerous
examples of musics power to stir back into life the numbed affects, lost associations and fogotten memories crucial to a sense of identity. Along with
restoration of the seemingly extinguished self that music can, if only temporarily, accomplish, there is also the awakening of empathy, so that autistic patients, suffering from what appears irretrivable loss of emotional
contact with their envirnoment, suddenly begin to recognise and share the
collective mood created by music, particularly its rhythm. The cases described can all be considered clinical evidence justifying Saxs initial quotation from Schopenhauer about the ineffable depth of music, which is so
easy to respond to yet impossible to explain, because music reproduces all
the emotions of our deepest being...[and] expresses the very quintessence
of life; it also provides proof for Nietzsches theory of drama as originating
in the spirt of music and music itself as deriving from and inspiring Dionysian rapture, when culturally acquired sense of boundaries collapses and
one returns to the archaic experience of ecstatic reunion with all life. Sax
does not refer to this aspect of Nietzsches philosophy, but he does come
close to it when he writes that love of music, or musicophilia probably
reaches back into the past to the very beginning of our species, and can be
considered as inborn as biophilia, indeed as one form of biophilia. (Sax
2007: 9/11)
9 When a character [or an image], cannot be comfortably explained in terms of what is already familiar, the [readers or viewers] tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harms way. Once
there, he can be talked about but need not be lived with. And also the more acute the experience, the
less articulate the expression. (Pinter 2009: 27-8)
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This inborn musico/biophilia can be associated with the ethics of

love that Tesichs silent, celo playing Jesus conveys with his music, and
that cultural institutions, the Church included, have systematically disregarded or supressed. As a reminder of this high moral standard that Christ
sets for humanity, his music is unbearable to the monk. Instead of Jesus,
a true Nietzschean - or Blakean - artist, ignoring compromisers, gazing at
his distant inspired vision of man, the monk, like Ivan Karamazov s Great
Inqisitor, would prefer a morally less elitist Messiah, a Messiah for the
Masses, who would never burden the fallible weak man with freedom of
choice and unconditional love as one of the options, but would mercifully
bring along a sword and provide a motive. But while it arouses the worst
fears in the monk, listening to Jesus playing the celo brings out the best in
Angel. Possessing a still undivided sensibility already demonstrated in his
sensitivity to music, he finds he cant resist it now: on the contrary, unable
to stop listening, he draws from it the moral strength to eventually resist
Als justifications for killing Jesus.
It is not difficult to recognise in Als arguments, which are a black
humour version of the monks own reasons, the perverted logic and scandalous hypocrisy of post-truth era ideologues, who have, as Tesich writes
elsewhere, emptied words such as freedom, democracy and morality of all
meaning: killing Jesus would set us free, Al argues, and to Angels objection that he feels bad having to commit another crime so he can be free,
he replies, freedom doesnt come cheap. (Doesnt this sound very much
like Madlaine Allbrights condoning comment Democracy doesnt come
cheap!- after Jeltsins military action against the Rusian Parliament resulting in 2000 dead, when the Peoples Deputies and the masses in the street
refused to be liberated at a similarly high cost?) But then, in addition to
personal interest, Al remembers there is a greater social good to consider.
To kill Jesus with his fixed criterion would be a most democratic thing to
do: it would promote social reforms, for it would introduce floating moral
standards which would make moral integrity accessible to everybody and
thus contribute to social equality. (Do we recognise in this rationale the
arguments of postmodern ethics of multiplicity and relativity?) Finally, Al
plays his moral trump card: What about the cruelty of letting the tortured
Jesus suffer on when killing him would put an end to his misery? It woud
be immoral not to kill Him, he remonstrates. In fact, to kill Christ would
be the most merciful, indeed the most Christian thing to do! (And some of
us may remember that the bombing of Serbia was an operation called The
Angel of Mercy!)
In the end though, these false arguments are silenced by the uanarguable truth of Jesuss music. To stop it, the monk himself kills Jesus,
while Al and Angel end up in the Land of the Free, crucified and exibited in
a museum, the visitors in chic summer clothes glancing at them in passing
without much interest.
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Lena S. Petrovi
For these citizens of the Land of the Free freedom represents a condition quite different from that Als and Angels. Meditatiing on the meaning
of the word Al observes that there are only two kinds of freedom: freedom
from, and freedom for. The former (negative) is achieved when external
restraints are removed, the latter is realised through a positive purpose
which it serves. The problem, Al points out, is that freedom has a purpose
only in a dream cherished by a man in chains: once tyranny is overthown
and former slaves set free, freedom loses all meaning for them, becuse they
can no longer remember or find a purpose for it. 10 Like the freedom, either
purposeless or trivialised into the freedom to consume, brought about by
revolutionary social changes in Eastern European countries that Tesics
play aludes to, the freedom of the visitors in Tesics museum, registering
intellectually but unmoved by the suffering of the two crusified men, is
negative, the purpose that would make it meaningful lost with the loss
of humanity with which they paid to be set free. Having spontaneously
refused to kill Christ, Al and Angel are now, on the contrary, discovering
the true purpose of freedom, together with the meaning of art and the
definition of humanity, which converge on the same divine principle in
human nature: To love without a motive is Art. Thats the free for what
of freedom. To love without a motive Thats what defines a human being.
The words are Als and testify to the radical change he was capable
of once he realised with mounting horror that unless the split in himself
healed which hitherto separated rational knowledge from sympathy and
compassion, his mind, quick to get the gist of the matter and then remorselessly move on, would finally get him. Nailed on his cross, his exchanges with Angel, though minimal, suggesting for the first time genuine
human concern, he sees now that the shadow he casts not of a man bound
fast to anything but spreading his arms to embrace the world speaks
more truly of his condition: he sees himself as a Masterpiece. Free. With
the starry night above and a moral law within - a quotation from Kant,
10 The terms negative and positive freedom are associated with Isaiah Berlins famous essay Two
Concepts of Liberty (1958), where he defined the former as freedom from external restraint or
interference, and the latter as the possession of power and resources to fulfill ones potential. In
reinterpreting these concepts, however, Tesich departs from Berlins own preference for negative
freedom. For Berlin, positive freedom , which is fulfilled through a purpose shared by a collectivity and
requires conditions that can only be provided by the state , is in danger of being misused in totalitarian
regimes. Als reference to tyrants must be a reflection of this aspect of Berlins theory. But as Al finally
recognizes, and Tesich demonstrates in numerous ways, the notion of freedom prevailing in liberal
democracies , which has forgotten its original spiritual purpose, and replaced it with random superficial
buyable gratifications is in subtler ways more dehumanizing and more totalitarian than any of the
socialist models of collectively exercised purposeful freedom rejected by Berlin. The difference in their
attitudes is significant : while Berlin (like Vaclav Havel) belongs to the kind of political immigrant
who will repay the country that adopted him with unquestioning loyalty, Steve Tesich possessed the
superior moral integrity that would never allow him to tolerate lies once he saw the truth. In this he is
like E. Fromm, who fled from Hitlers Germany to America, but became its unsparing critic as soon as
he recognized in it the symptoms of an equally insane society. Incidentally, Fromms Fear of Freedom
(1941), predating Berlins essay by more than a decade, contains the first formulation of two concepts
of liberty, but Berlin was typically acknowledged as the first to draw the distinction explicitly.
(See Positive and Negative Liberty, Stanford Encyclopoedia of Philosophy, 2012)
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formely a mere form of words, now an utterence so lovely that it hurts to

say it - Al claims the right to say that even though they may not be saved,
they are not lost.
***
Even this partial redemption remains beyond the reach of the protagonists of Tesichs other two late plays, Square One and Arts and Leasure,
as well as to the hero of Karoo, his posthumously published novel. Sharing
the same theme as On the Open Road, these plays and the novel are the
bleaker projections of Tesics ultimate fear that the post truth era is also a
post-art era: Adam, a certified state performance artist third class making
it to the second by the end of the play for his unquestioning propaganda
services on behalf of the Reconstuction, a proces of cleansing a heavily
burocratised dystopian countryof the remaning traces of humanity; Alex,
a syndicated drama critic, using his regular appearance on the mainstrem
TV show to advertise the conventions of commercial entertainment as
also moral guidelines in life, and quoting Shakespeare (All the world is
a stage!) as his great precedent; and Doc Karoo, a successful Hollywood
script writer, whose specialty is doctoring other peoples movies to suit
the tastes of producers, film stars, and masses of film consumers and thus
make them more marketable all these characters embody the authors
growing sense that the artist has become a clown, or an entertainer, and
that this is so because man himself has been diminished, turned into something else than man. (Jeremic, 125). They all suffer from Als inner dissociation and are unable to return love, but unlike Al, they remain incurable,
doing irreparable harm to art, to their families (incapable of giving affection and care they need, and even plead for, they all cause their childres
deaths ) and to themselves.
Instead of exhaustive analysis of these texts, I will merely point out
to two particular scenes where the tragic diminshment of man is evoked
trough the reiteration of images and concepts crucial to Tesichs vision and
to the argument of this paper. One appears at the end of Arts and Leasure.
It is the most pessimistic of the four late plays, the only one in which none
of the characters manages to recover from the destructive effect of the protagonists attitude to life, succintly described by Tesich as no less threatening than Adolf Hitlers, which is why he initially intended to call the play
Mein Kampf. Alex Chainys fascist outlook emerges both in his politics and
the treatment of the four women closest to him. Nipping or tailoring the
expression of every single one of their emotions to suit the popular stage
conception of the dramatic (thus he explains to his pity crazed mother
that his own callous indifference to his fathers suffering is merely natural, since the sound of a man screaming in agony can hold ones attention
for a few seconds, but the moment the hearer gets the gist of the matter,
the screams stop being dramatic just as the suffering of whole nations,
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say, the persecuted Kurds, could be dramatic only for so long, i. e., untill
a rational explanation undramatised it. ), Alex Chainy drove his mother
to death, reduced his wife, initially a talented actress, to an alcoholic verging on inasanity, hurt his daughter into suicide and finally forced his maid
Maria, the only remaining friend, to leave in disgust. She has been his conscience throughout the play and it is to her that he makes his only true
confession: namely, that some access to his interior is gone and that in his
capacity as a drama critic he speaks for anybody and everybody but himself. This loss of self he depicts - recalling symbolic uses of the same motif
in Tesichs earlier plays - as music having died in him:
There was this ... I dont know what to call it...this tuning fork in me...Or maybe
a set of chimes...I dont know. And day to day events of everyday life would
tap the tuning fork or brush the chimes and cause ripples of consequence to
spread in concentric circles throughout my whole being...I would resonate
to the music simply because I would suddenly see my mothers eyes. There
she is, there she is, I thought, its her, its my mother , and shes looking at
me. My fathers brown shoes. His footprints in the snow. His hands resing
on the table like fallen sycamore leaves. There they are, there they are, my
fathers hands. The tuning fork. The chimes. The music. (47)
Marias correct paraphrase what you miss is simply the drama of

being alive anticipates the final insight he experiences after his daughters suicide and Marias departure of himself as one of the many passengers on a fabulous train, moving through various landscapes, , observing wars and famines, watching survivors of massacres pleading for help,
dutifully scandalised that noone ever gets off the train to land a hand, on
and off between spectacular sunrises and sunsets, viewing more and more
tragedies. Somewhere along the way he feels the need to jump off the train,
not so much in order to help others, but to find his real life he begins to
feel is somewhere out there, and live it, but keeps postponing it in a sort of
lazy inexorability, until he realises that the train is about to plunge into a
tunnel, and that the drama is over.
Like Chainy, Saul Karoo is a fallen man who sees in the end what
has befallen him. Riveted to a toilet bowl by copius anal bleeding, his lifeblood literally oozing out of him and going down the drain, he spends his
last miniutes composing in his mind the imaginary novel he always wanted
but never got down to writing, about a modern Odyssey as an intergalactic
space journey in quest of God. The journey now projects his own wasted
life, with the age-bent Ullysses discovering that God is the cosmic love
force plowing into nothingness and causing ever new worlds to be born
in a process that seems to be endless. What has undone Ullysses/Karoo
is a reverse force of destruction, personified in the preceding episode in
the figure of the film producer Cromwell. A man whose supreme power of
annihilation Karoo always resented but never resisted, Cromwell now appears to him in all his diabolical evil. With his new obscenely enthusiastic
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project for a commercial film about Karoos own last-ditched and tragically
unsuccessful attempt to atone for his sins against love, Cromwell emerges
no longer as a man but a process:
It was like watching countercreation in the process of turning events, lives,
stories, language itself, into Nothingness. It was like witnessing the Big Bang
in reverse.
No, it was not death that Saul saw in Cromwell, for even death was an event.
This was the beginning of the death of events themselves. This was process
that nullified both life and death and the distinction between the two.
The Nothingness smiled at Saul like an old friend.
The Hollywood hack in Saul recognized in the Nothingness before him the
ultimate rewriter, the Doc of docs. (388)
Contributing to the Nothingness Cromwell embodies are his lies.

When Karoo, himself incapable of telling the truth until the very last moment of his life, recognizes in Cromwell an ultimate lyar, the recognition
completes his own process of self-confrontation, but also sums up Tesichs
unabated horror at the unreality and pseudohumanity in which the identity of post-modern man seems irretreivably to have dissolved.
Hes not just lying to Saul. He wants Saul to know that hes lying to him.
(...)Hes lying through his teeth, with his reeth, with his eyes, his gestures.
All become lies. (...)
In its own way its a spectatcular show.
A constant Darwinian devouring of deeds by counterdeeds that are themselves devoured.
This perpetual nullification provides the endless supply of energy for his
dynamic personality.
So Saul thinks, looking at Cromwell.
From Modern Man to Postmodern Man.
From Postmodern Man to this.
The Millenium Man.
The last man youll ever need to know. (380)
I quote this last passage to add support to my initial claim that in

Tesichs late drama and novel the modernist refusal and revolt against the
culture of lies perpetuates itself amidst the prevailing postmodern spirit of
indifference and consent. But of course, the modernist tradition in literature and art is itself part of a longer heritage of revolutionary subversion,
dissent and heresy.Thus the use Tesich makes of the Second Coming motif
in On the Open Road, wrenching Christ from the Church and institutionalised religion, and translating him into a complex symbol of what is inherently divine in man - the inborn, love-inspired sense of right and wrong
bonds Tesich not only to the early modernists Dostoevski, whith his Grand
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Lena S. Petrovi
Inquisitor defending the Church, long in the service of Anti-Christ, against

the subversion of the returned Christ, or Tolstoy, excommunicated for
writing a heretical book about The God Within You. It also makes Tesich a
spiritual descendent of Blake, with his notion about all deities residing in
the human breast, and his vision of Resurrection as an Eternal Gospel of
Imagination perpetually at war with abstract thought - to mention but two
of his revolutionary heresies.
But then, as a Marxist historian E. P. Thompson points out in his
posthumously published study Witness Against the Beast, Blake was not the
isolated eccentric most literary histories conjure up, but had a sturdy tradition of the 17th Century English religious dissenters behind him to provide
the structure of thought, concepts and imagery which helped him articulate his revolt against the Beast and the Anti-Christ - the opressive tendences in the Church and the State and his defiance of the polite culture
and rationalist philosophy of his age. Among the sects that influenced him
most were the Antinomians and Muggletonians, whose focus on personal
faith, or the Inner Light, rather than any dependence on the authoritarian moral law, anticipate Blakes denunciation of Thou Shallt Nots and his
embrace of Christ - a creative principle of life and art - as the only god.
(Thompson, 1993).
But the tradition to which Tesich and Blake belong can be extended
still further back. Genuine art, according to Peter Sellers, an American theatre director, is something contemporary engaged dramatists and cultural
activists share with Shakespeare, Sophocles and Aeschylus. What binds
these chronologically distant artists is their dramas central concern with
social justice and personal conscience, both banished from the empirebuilding states they lived in, but also with primary and total experience,
as a first step leading to their recovery. Art, Sellars claims in a speech about
cultural activism in the new century,
is about almost everything in our lives we have learned at a distance, twice
removed The arts are about primary experience. The arts are are about
eclipsing the distance, the arts are about understanding that someone elses
problem is your problem, and that probably your own problems which youre
not telling anyone about are way closer to that person in the street than
youre willing to admit. And the fact that you wont admit that means that
you cant deal with your own problems either.
So the question in the arts is how you break through this wall that we all
have, this mediatised wall that prevents most of us from engaging in our real
environment and changing it, entering it directly, experiencing it totally, not
through a membrane but actually touching. Actually saying were all here
for each other and whatever needs to be changed or fixed or adjusted in the
world is the same thing that always needed to be adjusted. You know that
actually the problem of being human hasnt changed at all.(Sellars 1999)
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Actually, the point at which being human became a problem coincides, according to some unorthodox archeologists and anthroplogists,
with the end of the prepatriarchal period, the longest and by far the most
successful cultural experiment so far. In Europe, the Minoan civilization
was the last phase of at least 30000 years of human history when art had
no need to quarrel with culture, but reflected and perpetually renewed the
original biophilia that permeated the entire philosophy and social practises
of Crete. In terms used by Riane Eislers, the author of one of the latest anthroplogical studies of Western culture called The Challice and the Blade, the
social order in Minoan Crete and other similar cultures, was built on the
principles of partnership or linking, and provided millenia of justice and
peace until it was destroyed and replaced by the order whose permanent
underlying principles to this day have remained ranking and domination, and whose chief spiritual aspirations have been motivated by hatred
and realised with violence. Those earstwhile, life-affirming, gylanic (i. e.,
Goddess-centred but essentially androgynous) values, now stood on their
head in the strongly misogynous myths, religions and arts used to support
the new system, were nevertheless not altogether forgotten, and soon resurfaced in the myths of the Golden Age, or the Lost Atlantis, but also in
the stories, poems, or plays of such artists as Homer, Ovid, or Sophocles,
who refused to be enlisted in the army of hymn singers celebrating victories and conquests of kings and emperors, but, siding with the victims,
looked back nostalgically to the time when the Blakean everything that
lives is holy was the only political or moral option. The purpose and function of this tradition in art is succintly described in Robert Graves study
The White Goddess:
...The function of poetry is the religious invocation of the Muse...But nowadays? Function and and use remain the same, only the application has
changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony
with the family of living creatures into among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the Lady of the house.; it is now a reminder that he
has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious
experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. Nowadays is a civilization in which the prime emblems
of poetry are dishonoured...In which the Moon is despised as the burnt-out
satellite of the Earth, and woman reckoned as auxiliary State personnel. I
which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the
truth-possessed poet. (Graves 1986: 14)
***
As a way of concluding this paper, I would like to offer one more
illustration of the perennial clash between this kind of truth-possessed
poet and his antipode, the sold-out artist, and their two conceptions of art.
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Adrian Mitchels play Tyger Two is conveniently about Blake, it is poetic

and condensed, telescoping traditions centuries long into a short fantastic
sequence of symbolic events in contemporary London, song and music are
its important ingredients, and, unlike Tesichs plays, it treats its serious
matter in a delightfully, but not at all superficially, comic manner.
The play is called Tyger Two, because it is a 1996 remake of the 1971
play Tyger, written to catch up with the new tactics invented in the meantime by the cultural establishment to deal with original artists. As Mitchel
points out in his preface to Tyger Two, while Blake seems less out of date
than he was before he is still thousand years ahead of his time - the enemies of art and humanity have altered their tactics. The updated enemies
in the play are embodied first in the figure of famous brutalist installation
artist in spectacular clothes, called Beelzebub Gloat, and advertised as a
spiritual descendent of Andy Warhall. As in so many commercial movies
and so much of what goes for serious art nowadays, Beelzebub s chief
inspiration, theme and personal need from early childhood, are cruelty
and violence.11 His latest project, an installation consisting of a thousand
dogs with cats heads, and a thousand cats with dogs heads, (to be decapitated in the moat at the Tower of London), called The Pain in the Brain
Goes Swirling Down the Drain, and advertised as a fearless confrontation
with mortality, a cool examination of speciesism, and a conceptual deconstruction of English petophilia, wins the enthusistic approval and a two
thousand pounds bursary from the British Cultural Committee, consisting
of hierarchically positioned three members: Lord Nobodaddy, Lady Hortense Blotting, and Dame Ratchett de Rachett. Ratchet shares with Gloat
his sadism, his love of money, and his belief in advertising as the divine
vision of the twentieth century, and has, with the profits gained by advertising their most important client, the White Race, bought St Pauls
Cathedral and turned into a gallery called the Art of Death). When William
Blake, long thought to have been successfully ignored to death, appears
suddenly and applies for the same grant, his uncompromising arguments
immediately disqualify him, and he is refused. His claims, most of them
Blakes original quotes, that art is the pursuit of truth, and advertising the
pursuit of money and that there can be no marriage of the two, for they
hate each other, that in England, not Talent and Genius, but Obedience,
Politeness and Passivity are appreciated and fostered, finally his invitation to the Young Men to rise up against the Ignorant Hirelings that have
usurped the Camp, the Court and the University, and would, if they could,
forever prolong the Corporeal and depress the Mental War - all accurately
describing the present day corruption of educational and cultural institutions - are summed up in a single general statement that re-phrases Eislers
or Gravess anthroplogical views, about two contending beliefs shaping the
11 Incidentally, the intensification, in art and culture, of the tendency to represent violence, particularly
against women, such as we are witnessing at present, predicts, according to Eisler, periods of large scale
military destruction. (See Eisler 1995: 142-147)
64
/ , ,
history of western society and art: You believe, says Blake simply, that
the world is made of pain, and power and money and death. But I know the
world is made of love. (23)
First treated with usual clichs of postmodern literary theory and
condescending indifference (Well, isnt this just an opinion of a Dead White
Europen Male?), then with scornful anger (But hasnt this Blake bloke been
long deconstructed?), Blakes utterences finally unite Gloat, the Committee, the Soul Control Chief Officer and Poetry Police in a common action
to eliminate what they diagnose as a hundred per cent subvert. Yet neither
a resort to old fashioned, adverse literary critisism of Blake as a lunatic,
whose excesses must be stopped at all costs, nor the more sophisticated
pornographic temptation, based on the Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of art as a result of sexual trauma and enacted by the female officers
of Psycho-Sexual Squad, nor yet the starvation blackmail, nor finally the
grotesque conspiracy to turn Blake, who has just resisted the seductions of
ownership, first into a commodity to be sold at an auction, and then into a
picled preserve in a huge jar - none of these can stop him from what he is
and does: a man in love with his wife, a slavery-hating humanist, a revolutionary and prophetic poet illustrating his verses and visions with illuminations that freak out the judge presiding over his trial into pronouncing him
free and convert another adversary, Crab, from an enemy and a spy into a
friend and disciple. Crab joins the guests at Blakes birthday party, the poets from Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Romantics, to the rock musicians
Dylan, Lennon and Bob Morley, in songs celebrating poetrys power to heal
the soul, inspire revolt, initiate an unsparing self-examination and judgement, and, finally when all dreams fail, mourn the failure.
Poetry glues your soul together,
Poetry wears dynamite shoes
Poetry is the spittle on the mirror,
Poetry wears nothing but the blues.
In all its capacities, including the last two (becoming, in Gravess

definition, a reminder of an error or a loss) the kind of poetry associated
with the names of Blakes visitors is always constructive. Hence when the
poets, joined by the rest of the crew (representing Ordinary People who,
Blake explains to Crab, are all very extraodinary, and The Wretched of the
Earth), begin to build the New Jerusalim, working to the rhythm of their
ecstatic song, we imagine the ghost of Tesich, the anguished witness of human lives emptied of love and music, as doing also his bit of work.
65
Lena S. Petrovi
References:
Berder 1972: J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Company and
Penguin Books.
Berder 21991: J. Berger, G, New York: Vintage International.
Koen 1982: B. Cohen, Steve Tesich Turns Memories Into Movies. New York Times
Magazine, 17 January, 42-54.
Kruikenk 1984: J. Cruickshank, Introduction, u: Albert Camus, Caligula, Cross Purpose, The Just, The Possessed, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Kuper 2002: R. Cooper, Postmodern State, in Mark Leonard, (ed.) Re-Ordering the
World: The Long-Term Implications of September 11, London: Foreign Policy Centre.
Esler 1987: R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, New York:
HarperCollins Publishers.
Grejvz 81986: R. Graves, The White Goddess:A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, London, Boston: Faber and Faber
Jeremi 2008: Z. Jeremi, Stojan Tei: ivot i tri drame, Beograd-Uice: Program
Open Arc Theatre.
Josipovii 2010: G. Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Lepert 2002: R. Leppert (ed.), Commentary to Section 2: Culture, Technology Listening, in Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Miel 1996: A. Mitchell, Tyger Two, London: Oberon Books.
Pinter 42009: H. Pinter, Various Voices: Prose Poetry, Politics 1948-2008, London:
Faber &Faber.
Positive and Negative Liberty, Stanford Encyclopoedia of Philophy, First published Thu
Feb 27, 2003; substantive revision Mon Mar 5, 2012, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/)
Rejvenhil 2000: M. Ravenhill, Help! Im Having an Art Attack, Guardian, 18 November, 2000.
Saks 22010: O. Saks, Muzikofilija: Prie o muzici i mozgu, (Prevela J. Staki). Beograd:
Klio.
Selars 1999: P. Sellars, Cultural Activism in The New Century, ABC TV, 19 August,
1999. (http://www.abc.net.au/arts/sellars)
Tei 1990: S. Tesich, Square One. New York: Samuel French Inc.
Tei 1991: S. Tesich, The Speed of Darkness. New York: Samuel French Inc.
Tei 1992: S. Tesich, On the Open Road. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers
Tei 1992: S. Tesich, A Government of Lies, Nation, 6 January, vol. 254, No. 1:12.
Tei1997: S. Tesich, Arts and Leisure. New York: Samuel French Inc.
Tei 19992: S. Tesich, Karoo, London: Vintage Random House.
Tompson 1999: E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the
Moral Law, Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press.
Vajs 1992: H. Weiss, Steve Tesich: On the Road to Apocalypse, Chicago Sun-Times,
15 March, sec. show 5.
66
/ , ,
Lena S. Petrovi / Marginalizovanje umetnosti u poznim dramama Stiva Teia

Rezime / U radu se prati motiv zloupotrebe umetnosti u poznim, post-holivudskim
dramama Stiva Teia. U fokusu analize su najpre razliite strategije, posebno
upeatljivo opisane u drami Na otvorenom drumu, iji je cilj da obezbede emotivnu
distancu od dela klasine umetnosti ak i onda kada su ona fiziki dostupna, a potom
razlike u recepciji uslovljene klasnom pripadnou tj. mnogo neposrednija iskustvena vrednost koju umetnost potencijalno ima za ekonomski/drutveno/kulturno
marginalizovane grupe, nasuprot onima na centralnim/privilegovanim pozicijama.
U drugom delu rada, problemi i pitanja karakteristina za Teieve post-Holivudske
drame degradacija umetnosti, falsifikovanje istine, trivijalizacija pojma slobode, i
gubitak bia u postmodernoj eri kontekstualizuju se unutar optije uporedne analize
dve antagonistike tradicije u istoriji evropske umetnosti. Njihov arhetipski sukob
tema ukratko prikazane drame Tigar dva Adrijana Miela, koja govori o Blejkovom
iznenadnom povratku i pobedonosnom opstanku uprkos naporima drzavnih institucija
kontrole da ga diskvalifikuju ili silom onemogue, i usred poplave pop kulture i
konceptualne umetnosti, dve apdejtovane verzije veitih neprijatelja originalne i
revolucionarne umetnosti.
Kljune rei: Umetnost, istina, la, sloboda, muzika, etika, (post)modernizam,
tradicija, Tei, Blejk
: 8. 2013.
2013.
67

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archive.org/details/AFewMomentsWithSteveTesich-InterviewByDejanStojanovic>.
12 : Weiss, Hedy. Steve Tesich: on the Road to apocalypse. Chicago Sun Times. 15 March 1992.
:<http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4100850.html>
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, , 13 Al: The true maning of freedom exists only in bondage. Only a slave in chains can have a vision of
what freedom means. As soon as he is freed, he gains freedom and loses his vision of it [] You can
be a slave and know what freedom means, or you can be a free man and have no idea [] I trust youll
agree that there are only two kinds of freedom. Freedom from something. And freedom for something.
A slave in chains has a profound vision of the latter, the why for and the what for of freedom, but to
realize his vision, he first needs to be freed from something, his chains. As soon as he is, he loses the
vision of free for what. If he wants to re-experience the beauty of his vision and the full meaning it had
for him, he has to contrive to enslave himself again [] The triumph of tyranny, of course, although
there are for the time being, no tyrants left, is that it has left man incapacitated to create meaningful
visions of life in freedom. The cushy arrangement he had with tyrants whereby the tyrants had to create the environment in which truth mattered, has left man lazy and soft. His ability to create meaning
on his own, for himself, has atrophied. So hes left with only two choices. Live a life without meaning
or pray for the tyrants to return so he can experience the meaning of life in chains [] Being free in
that sense carries with it a sense of inception, something new, not merely rebirth, mind you, but birth
itself. .
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14 Al: The problem is, before your love can reach me, I get, and move on. Little children bleed before
my eyes, but in the midst of their agonies, I get. The problem is not that Im blind to their agonies
or deaf to their cries, the problem is, I get it, and move on. The Torah, The Koran, the Bible, The
Mahabharata. I have read them in the original Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Sanskrit, and got them, I have
gotten the gist of them all. There is an insatiable I-get-it-God in my head and He has made a mousetrap
out of my mind. The trap keeps tripping and snapping the spines of moments that could have lived on
in my life, but I get them and they die and then I move on.
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15 : Smith, Mark Chalon. Oscar winner Steve Tesich Just Says No To Hollywood Violence; Lecture: Speaking At Chapman, The Breaking Away Screenwriter Says He Rejects Most Film Projects Offered Him. Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1994. : http://articles.latimes.com/199401-17/entertainment/ca-12852_1_steve-tesich
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- 2008: Lj. Bogoeva-Sedlar, Moral kao bunt i alternativa, : Stojan

Stiv Tei, ivot i tri drame, priredio Zoran Jeremi, Beograd Uice: Academica.
2011: W. Golding, Lord of the Flies, London: Faber and Faber.
1990: W. Golding, PincherMartin, London: Faber and Faber.
2009: F.M. Dostojevski, Braa Karamazovi, Beograd: Book.
1988: F. M. Dostojevski, Zimske beleke o letnjim utiscima, Zapisi iz
podzemlja, Kockar, Beograd: Rad.
2009: A. Miller, Plays: Volume Six, London: Methuen.
1990: N. Miloevi, Dostojevski kao mislilac, Beograd: Beletra.
1988: F. Nietzsche, Volja za mo, Zagreb: Mladost.
2004: O. Dord, 1984. Beograd: Libretto.
, 1992: S. Tesich, (1992).On the open road, NewYork: Applause.
1986: E. From, Bekstvo od slobode, Zagreb: Naprijed.
2010: N. omski, Neuspele drave, Beograd: Rubikon.
1903: A. Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, London: Swan
Sonnenschein & Co., Limited.
90
/ , ,
...

Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. <http://projects.ecfs.org/eastwest/
Readings/CesaireDiscourse.pdf>. [28.1.2013].
Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967. <http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/literature/1949/
Faulkner-speech.html>. [25.1.2013].
Plato, Symposium. : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600h/1600-h.htm#2H_4_0002 [10.3.2012].
Smith, Mark Chalon. Oscar winner Steve Tesich Just Says No To Hollywood
Violence; Lecture: Speaking At Chapman, The Breaking Away Screenwriter Says
He Rejects Most Film Projects Offered Him. Los Angeles Times, 17 January
1994. : http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-17/entertainment/ca12852_1_steve-tesich [22. 1. 2013].
Stojanovi, Dejan. A few moments with Steve Tesich. [].
: www.archive.org/details/AFewMomentsWithSteveTesichInterviewByDejanStojanovic [25.6.2012].
Tesic, Steve. Consider the following. http://www.srpska-mreza.com/tesich/
consider.htm [27.1.2013].
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cold Turkey. <http://inthesetimes.com/article/cold_turkey/>
[10.3.2013].
Weiss, Hedy. Steve Tesich: on the Road to apocalypse. Chicago Sun Times. 15
March 1992. : http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4100850.html
[22.12.2012].
Radoje oki / On the Road to Love Without Motive or Between the Will to Power
and Will to Meaning in F. M. Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov and Steve Tesichs
On The Open Road
Summary / This paper strives to connect thematically and conceptually F. M. Dostoevskys
novel The Brothers Karamazov (in particular The legend of the Grand Inquisitor) and Steve
Tesichs play On The Open Road and shed light on their similarity in terms of these authors
understanding of the will to meaning as an omnipotent and essential driving force of human
nature. In addition to the motif of Christs second coming, which the authors deliberately
incorporate into their works so as to criticize the historical practice of destruction and
violation of human creative potentialities which keeps occurring within the materialistic,
utilitarian and technological world, Tesich and Dostoevsky are preoccupied with the problem of human (negative) freedom from and (positive) freedom for, as well as the rule of
instrumental reason that has reduced man to a calculating machine. Drawing on the ideas
of Dostoevsky, Fromm, Schopenhauer, Golding and Tesich, the paper also discusses the
modern mans ethos and tries to find a solution to the global morality crisis that has taken
over the entire civilization of our time.
Keywords: Dostoevsky, Tesich, the will to power, the Grand Inquisitor, the will to meaning,
Christ, freedom from, freedom for, sadism, masochism
: 8. 2013.
2013.
91

821.111(73).09 .: 792.2.02
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I love you like the Pilgrim loves the Holy Land,

Like the wayfarer loves his wayward ways,
Like the immigrant that I am loves America,
And the blind man the memory of his sighted days.
Steve Tesich, Four Friends (1981)
Its not that the idea in America is not good, but that it was somehow lost.
People lost faith, and a person doesnt feel in America the same as before.
Steve Tesich, a 1992 interview

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1982: C. Amata, Penn/Tesich/Georgias Friends, Films & Filming, No. 332,

22-23.
1988: J. Baudrillard, America, London: Verso.
1995: J. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
1997: J. Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, London: SAGE Publications.
1984: P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
1999: K. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, New York: Dial Press.
1986: D. Georgakas, Eleni, Cineaste, Vol. 14, No. 4, 49-51.
1981: B. Drew, Yates and Tesich shift gears, American Film, Vol. 6, No. 5, 48-51,
53, 75.
1981: M. Earley, Playwrights Making Movies, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 5,
No. 3, 20-53.
2004: D. Kellner, Culture Industries, : T. Miller (.), R. Stam (.), A
Companion to Film Theory, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
. 1982: B. Cohen, Steve Tesich turns memories into movies, New York Times,
January 17th, 42-49.
. 1992: S. Coen, Steve Tesich: the only kind of real rebel left, he figures, is a
moral person, American Theatre, Vol. 9, No. 4, 30-37.
2011: R. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, New York: Oxford University Press.
2008: A. Leroux, The Path to Consciousness, : M. Chaiken (.), P. Cronin
(.), Arthur Penn: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 162-171.
1981: L. OToole, Broadway to Hollywood, Film Comment, Nov-Dec, 22-25.
, 1993: R. Porton, G. Crowdus, The Importance of a Singular,
Guiding Vision: An Interview with Arthur Penn, Cineaste, Vol. 20, No. 2, 4-16.
1985: R. B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2002: M. Rothmayer, The Drama of Life Unfolding: The Life and Work of
Steve Tesich, Doctoral Dissertation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002.
2011: N. Segaloff, Arthur Penn: American Director, Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky.
2008: M. Ciment, Interview with Arthur Penn, : M. Chaiken (.), P. Cronin
(.), Arthur Penn: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 151-161.
Smith, S. Breaking Down: Steve Tesichs Bleak Vision Of America In Decline,
Chicago Tribune, April 23rd 1989. <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-0423/entertainment/8904060534_1_steve-tesich-vietnam-war-connection/2>
: 21.4.2013.
2000: T. Stempel, Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American
Film, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Stojanovi, D. A Few Moments with Steve Tesich, Pogledi, April 1992. <www.
dejanstojanovic.org/steve-tesich.html> : 21.4.2013.
1983: J. T. Hartzog, The World According to Garp by George Roy Hill, Film
Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2, 39-44.
, 2002: M. Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
116
/ , ,
1991: F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,

Durham: Duke University Press.
2004: D. James, Is there Class in this Text?: The Represssion of Class in Film
and Cultural Studies, : T. Miller (.), R. Stam (.), A Companion to Film
Theory, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
2008: R. Shickel, Arthur Penn, : M. Chaiken (.), P. Cronin (.),
Arthur Penn: Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 176-193.
Weber, B. Steve Tesich, 53, Whose Plays Plumbed the Nations Identity, New York
Times, July 2nd 1996. <www.nytimes.com/1996/07/02/arts/steve-tesich-53-whoseplays-plumbed-the-nation-s-identity.html> : 21.4.2013.
Aleksandar Radovanovi / Suspicion on Second Sight: The American Dream and
Hollywood Legacy of Steve Tesich
Summary / In the late 1970s, Steve Tesich appeared in Hollywood as a new writer
with a fresh set of ideas framed within conventional narrative structures. Having
found the space to present personal content within mainstream production, the
Yugoslav immigrant created a nostalgic vision of America, breathing vitality into one
withered social image. Permeated with the playfulness of ideals on account of which
he had embraced his new homeland, his screenplays also leave traces of bitterness
of an immigrant whose American Dream was dispersing before his eyes. Tesichs
cinematic expression is led by mild comedy, as well as strong characterization which
enables pursuit of layered answers to questions posed by classism, immigraton and
social activism. Out of six realized screenplays penned by Tesich, this article deals
primarily with films Breaking Away and Four Friends as the most representative
samples of his cinematic work and examines them in relation to the norms of the
entertainment industry.
Key words: Steve Tesich, Hollywood, immigration, class structure
: 8. 2013.
2013.
117

821.111(73)-2.09 .
821.111(73)-31.09 .
1
-

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When the world we envisage is better than the one we live in, we will
follow our vision. And when they tell us, that the frontier is gone we will
reply: The frontier of dreamers is endless and we still have a dream.3
(Steve Tesich, Division Street)
-
, (Division Street, 1980), .
(Nourish the Beast),
(1973),
-, ,
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ja
1 rnastic@gmail.com
2 21. 10.
2013.
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4 Steve Tesich on Letterman, 1982, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7a_DQTEQiw
120
/ , ,

Maybe I never had a room of my own, I think now.
Other peoples places
(Native Land, 18)5
Thats what I said, what I recorded after everyone
left, thats how some of us remembered it
later the birth of my son as that
time came to an end
(Far from Vietnam, 292)6
, :
(Shadow Partisan,1989), (Native Land, 1998), (To Die in Chicago, 2010), (Far from Vietnam,
2012). ()

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7 (Alain Resnais), (William Klein),
(Joris Ivens), (Agnes Varda), (Calude Lelouch). http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0061913/30/06/2013.
122
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He would flee to the city
where he was born (Chicago), to the house where he was
raised, and to the woman (his mother) who had given birth to
him (Karoo, 345)8
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126
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,
(Upton Siclair, The Jungle, 1906).
e e , (the hog-butcher of the
world, Sandburg 1914),
, ,
(Mattson 2006).
(In the Jungle of Cities),
. (St. Joan of the
Stockyards) ,
.
, (Lakeboat) 1980.
-
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1984.
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(Bigsby 1990: 262-269).
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1998: 47)
: 21.
He has no need of faith anymore, be it large
or small. In its place is an effortless kind of love for anything that lives.
A love without motive of any kind.
(Steve Tesich, Karoo, 405)9
Long live life came out in French since everybody
knows when it gets rough you revert to whats most basic.
(Nadja Tesich, Far from Vietnam, 292)10
,
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130
/ , ,

,

,
, ,
- .
Benstock 1988: Sh. Benstock, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Womens
Autobiographical Writings,Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Bigsby 1990: C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American
Drama, Volume Three: Beyond Broadway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brecht 1988 (1923): In the Jungle of Cities, in Brecht, Collected Plays: One, London:
Methuen.
Brecht 1997: St Joan of the Stockyards, in Brecht, Collected Plays: Three, London:
Methuen Drama.
Jeremi 2008: Z. Jeremi, Stojan Stiv Tei, ivot i tri drame, Beograd Uice: Edicija
teatar van kutije.
Mamet 1983: D. Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross, New York: Samuel French.
Mamet 1996 (1981): D. Mamet, Lakeboat, Plays 2, London: Methuen.
Mamet 2010 (1975), D. Mamet, American Bufallo, New York: Samuel French.
Mattson 2006: K. Mattson, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century, Hoboken,
N.J: John Wiley & Sons.
Sandburg 2013 (1914): C. Sandburg,Chicago,Chicago: Poetry Magazine,
Sinclair 2001 (1906): U. Sinclair, The Jungle, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
Tesich 1989: N. Tesic, Shadow Partisan, New York: New Rivers Press.
Tesich 1998: N. Tesich, Native Land, Cambrdge MA: Lumen Editions.
2012: . , , : .
Tesich 2012: N. Tesich, Far from Vietnam, Bloomington: iUniverse Inc.
Tesich 1980: S. Tesich, Division Street, New York: Samuel French, Inc.
Tesich 1974: S. Tesich, Nourish the Beast, New York: Samuel French, Inc.
Tesich 1998: S. Tesich, Karoo, London: Vintage.
131
Radmila Nasti / Autobiographical in the Works of Steve and Nadja Tesich

Summary / Autobiographical elements are an important constituent part of Steve and
Naa Teis work. Steve Teis movies Four Friends and Breaking Away are overtly
autobiographical and contemporneous with the period of his American dreaming. He
introduced elements of autobiography in some of his novels and plays like Summer
Crossing, The Cerpenters, Divison Street and Karoo, while his metaphysical play On the
Open Road may be considered autobiographical in terms of the authors apocalyptic
vision involving the fate of Yugoslavia, the future of mankind, and the position of the
artist within it. Naa Teis four novels are all autobiographical, either implicitly or,
in the case of her memoir To Die in Chicago, explicitly. The other three novels dealt
with are The Shadow Partisan, Native Land and Far from Vietnam. A contribution to the
study of the role of memory in literature, they disclose both conscious and unconscious motivation behind the construction of leading female characters. Novels and
plays by Naa and Steve Tei contain autobiographical ingredients which provide
a link between their Serbian origin and their American lives, and can be classified
into the reputable category of urban narratives centered on Chigaco and New York.
Key words: autobiography, memoir, poetics, urban narratives
: 8. 2013.
2013.
132
/ , ,

821.111(73)-2.09 .

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1 jstevanovic8@yahoo.com
2 21. , 10.10.2012,
-
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133
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3 Kamp, David (April 2009), Rethinking the American Dream, Vanity Fair
4 Rothmayer The Moral Tetralogy: American Social/Political/Cultural Commentary he later writings
of Steve Tesich
5 .
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7 esich, S. Niggerization: Everything, not just charity, begins at home. <http://www.srpska-mreza.com/
tesich/atHome.htm> 13.6.2012.
8 , : E. S. Herman, N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 37-86
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Oxford University Press
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Rothmayer The Moral Tetralogy: American Social/Political/Cultural Commentary he
later writings of Steve Tesich
1991: . Rothstein, Moralitys The Thing For This Playwright
<http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/12/theater/morality-s-the-thing-for-thisplaywright.html?pagewanted=all> , 14.6.2012.
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1991: Steve Tesich, Moralitys the Thing for This Playwright in New York
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www.vietnam-war.0catch.com/vietnam_war_nature.htm
156
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Summary / This study deals with the dramatic opus of Stojan Steve Tesichs later plays
Speed of Darkness, Square One, On the Open Road and Art & Leisure, which are part of
his Moral Tetralogy. The problem of moral choice the protagonists are faced with
is being analysed in those plays. Apart from the problem of moral choice, the main
themes discussed in the plays are the theme of Vietnam War and its consequences,
the influence of media on life and its manipulating power, the question of freedom
and art. The purpose of the essay is to emphasize the problems of contemporary
society Tesich deals with and to show the path of moral growth his protagonists
are following in order to solve them. What is important is the fact that all plays are
universal, because they do not only refer to the protagonists of the plays which are
Americans and to their country America, where Tesich spent his whole life after the
emigration from Serbia with his family, but it also refers to the whole universe and
to every man. Tesich offers the solution in his plays and he strives to wake up the
human consciousness about the existence of an alternative, although a lot of things
have already been lost.
Key words: moral, moral choice, freedom, art, media, Vietnam, manipulation, America
: 8. 2013.
2013.
157

821.111(73)-2.09 Tesich S.
Duica S. Lazi1
Faculty of Medical Sciences
STEVE TESICH: RECOVERING THE (AMERICAN)

DREAM THROUGH ART AND MORAL REBELLION
Abstract:This paper highlights the key points of the introduction to the masters thesis Morality
as Rebellion in the Post-Hollywood Plays of Steve Tesich. The title of the thesis was taken from
the one of the last interviews Steve Tesich gave before his sudden death. The paper emphasizes
similarities that exist between the preoccupation with the moral state of America in the speeches
given by Martin Luther King and Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Lecture, and the significance that
Tesich ascribes to morality in his plays. There is, moreover, a notable similarity betweenTesichs
analysis of the so-called American Dream and the analyses of America reported byWimWenders
in The American Dream, Jean Baudrillard in Amerique, and Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, or Faith in Fakes. Preoccupation with the moral principles on which Western civilization is
founded is also the central concern of plays written by South African writer Athol Fugard and
Australian playwright Stephen Sewell. All these comparisons are seen as context for the better
understanding of Tesichs contribution to American 20th century art, and background against
which specific features of his talent and creativity can be studied.
Key words: Morality, rebellion, truth, art,culture, Tesich
The art of Steve Tesich (1942-1996) evolved during the four decades
of his productive life from initial belief in the American promise, or the
American Dream, to the post-Vietnam and post-Hollywood disappointment in the moral decline of the nation. One of his last interviews, published in 1992 in the July/August issue of American Theatre, has the title
The Only Kind of Real Rebel Left, He Figures, Is a Moral Person. (Coen
1992: 30-37) The title clearly indicates how he felt in the last period of his
creative life, when he was working on his last two plays (On the Open Road
(1992) and Arts and Leisure(1996)) and his posthumously published novel
Karoo. Stephanie Coen, who conducted the interview, states that at that
point in his career Tesich had resolved, in his life as well as in his work,
to make political discourse once again respectable. Once again, because,
whereas he previously avoided being at odds with things, with the culture,
with the country, in the interview Tesich says:
I dont let things go by anymore.Everyone knows whats wrong and there is
this kind of agreement lets not talk about it, lets not deal with it. The es1 dulazic@yahoo.com
159
Duica S. Lazi
sential problem has been sealed off as an embarrassment. When you bring up
moral issues people just look at you as if your fly is open....I wish there were
a conspiracy that creates our culture because then we would know where
to point the finger. But instead things go along... on an automatic pilot. The
culture ... waits for something of meaning to happen,then takes it and spits
it out as trivia. We are now in a mad kind of thing where we are appreciating the quality and elaborateness of the Governments lie. If either Bush or
Clinton felt the way to win the upcoming election was to sell cancer, they
would do it. There was a time, when a majority of people lived what I would
call, lives rooted in reality. That reality could become so powerful that they
would want an escape from it in whats called entertainment. I now honestly
feel that people live in unreality. The purpose of art now must be just the
opposite to remind people of what they have abandoned. (3031)
Twenty-five years earlier, in 1967, the same inability to let things

go by, from the moral point of view, inspired Martin Luther King (19291968) to give his A Time to Break Silence or Beyond Vietnam Speech.
Like Tesich, King knew how terrible it was to be at odds with ones country
but he decided to take that difficult stance because he said his conscience
left him no choice. Like Tesich, he knew that even when pressed by the
demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing
their governments policy. He felt he had to do so because, as he famously
put it, a time comes when silence is betrayal (King, 1967).It is quite
paradoxical that silent uncritical support of governments crimes was (and
continues to be) considered patriotic, while any kind of well meaning
criticism was, and is, seen as an unpatriotic sign of disloyalty. Because of
this kind of reading of his activities, King was assassinated, even though
he repeatedly claimed he opposed the war in Vietnam because he loved
America, and out of a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand
as a moral example of the world. (King, 1967)
As in the case of Steve Tesich, who admitted openly that he was
initially in love with America, (Rothstein, 1991).2 Kings disappointment
with America came out of his great love of America. King was most of all
disappointed because America failed to deal positively and forthrightly
with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.
Things have to a large extent remained the same. Chronicling the state of
affairs in America today, in an interview with Bill Moyers conducted on
June 7th 2013, professor of economics Richard Wolff pointed out how little
has changed from the sixties, from the moral point of view:
For fifty years, when (the question of) capitalism is raised (instead of having
an honest debate which exposes its flows and makes it possible to repair or
improve them) you have two allowable responses: celebration and cheerleading. But that means you have freed the system from all criticism, from
2 Steve Tesich explained his initial enchantment with America that later became a deep concern for
the fate of the nation in his interview given to Mervyn Rothstein for The New York Times in 1991.
160
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Steve Tesich: recovering the (American) dream through art and moral rebellion
all real debate. It can indulge its worst tendencies without fear of exposure
and attack. Because when you begin to criticize capitalism, you are either
told you are ignorant and dont understand things or with more dark implications, you are somehow disloyal. You are somehow a person who doesnt
like America or something.(...)For my colleagues, it became dangerous to
your career. If you went in that direction, you would cut off your chances
of getting a University position or being promoted and getting your works
published in journals and books, the things that academics need to do for
their jobs, so yes, (criticism) was shut down and shut off. And I think we are
living the results of the lack of debate. (Wolff, 2013)
The danger of not being published because of unpatriotic

critical views that Richard Wolff emphasizes in his 2013 interview, was
experienced by Steve Tesich in his post-Hollywood phase, in the nineties.
Not a single text he wrote for the newspapers was published in the United
States. The truths he wished to expose were extremely inconvenient for
the establishment, involved at the time in new patriotic wars and other
types of humanitarian interventions. The loss of Tesichs voice was
compensated in 2005 by Harold Pinter, in whose Nobel Prize Lecture Art,
Truth and Politics the tradition of moral indignation and outrage lives on.
The tradition is much broader that this paper could touch upon, but the
connection between Pinter, Tesich, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi
and Tolstoy is relevant for this thesis, as well as the one that connects
Blakes moral indignation with StephaneHessels, voiced in his famous
pamphlet Indignez Vous (Time for Outrage), published in 2011. Like
Martin Luther King and Tesich before him, looking at American foreign
policy in the 21st century, still marked by racism, economic exploitation
and militarism, Pinter asks: What happened to our moral sensibility? Did
we ever have any?and concludes his Nobel Lecture by saying that the role
of art is to defend the truth and by doing so, ensure the survival of moral
intelligence and the dignity of man.
After Pinters death, most memorable voices from this tradition of
moral indignation and outrage come from playwrights from South Africa,
such as Athol Fugard (b. 1932), whose address to students at Stellenbosch
University in 2011 is brilliant, and Australian playwrights such as Stephen
Sewell (b. 1953), author of the 2003 play Myth, Propaganda and Disaster
in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America. Hilary Glow, in her study
Power Plays: Australian theatre and the Public Agenda (published in 2007 by
the Sydney Currency Press), quotes Sewells comment: Even though it is
today very hard to shock people about anything it is easy to shock people
by saying the ruling class is destroying the country and oppressing you.
Try saying that somewhere and see how shocked people are.(169) His
post-nine-eleven play Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and
Contemporary America investigates the kind of ideological arguments used
by the Right (i.e. those in power) to maintain their dominance. Hilary Glow
161
Duica S. Lazi
says that the ideology of social conservatism that began in the Reagan
Thatcher era and is still going strong, has been responsible
for the transformation of social debate into opportunities for labeling
individuals and groups as enemies of society. Sewells play illustrates how
labeling takes place and attempts to deconstruct the process by which (critical) debate has come to be regarded as a threat to Western democracies. It
explores ways of understanding the politics of the Right by investigating the
gradual erosion of the right to dissent, whereby those who find the courage
to speak with an oppositional voice are not apparently active participants in
the democratic process, but traitors and enemies of the state.(168)
Quite like Steve Tesich in his 1992 interview, Sewell argues, in the
one he gave ten years later, in 2003, that if Australian theatre writers avoid
the political matters of the day, they are not doing what they need to do
they are not saying the hard things that they need to say, they are not
insisting that they have the right to say them. Sewell points out that every
day more and more artists come to realize that it is essential to understand
the ideological underpinnings of our beliefs and values and to ask questions
about how we have come to be where we are, and believe what we do. The
thesis Morality as Rebellion in the Post-Hollywood plays of Steve Tesich
studies this moral awakening. It analyses the evolution of Steve Tesichs
critical questioning of the American way of life and follows his search for
the truth hidden under the elaborateness of the Governments lie (or, in
Pinters terms, the thick tapestry of lies) that so many modern artists feel
it is imperative to unravel and take apart.
***
Tesich tirelessly criticized the American business of manufacturing
false-images, and U.S. cultures extreme hypocrisy evident in the fact
that, while seeming to promote individual freedom, it in fact devalued
the individual. He came to believe that America worships consumerism
because it uses overconsumption as a way of seducing the individual into
uncomprehending compliance. Lionel Trilling, professor at Columbia
where Tesich did his graduate studies, thought that American culture
is marked by the most pervasive loss of the precise knowledge of the
self, of what self is and what its genuine needs are. Mass culture, based
on artificial imagery, addicts its consumers to conformity and has
dehumanizing effects on people. Tesich satirized the absurdity of the false
American Dream, pointing out that people who unconditionally followed it
most often accepted moral indecencies and corruption as a way to further
their success. Everywhere he looked he could see constant perception
management and negation of the outward reality.
Wim Wenders came to similar conclusions. He traces his own
changing attitudes to America in a prose poem called The American Dream.
162
/ , ,
He came to see America as a land of imagery, land made of images, land

for images, where more striking images had to be invented all the time, to
override the last ones. He came to understand that Thats exactly the way
American television operates and how it deals with its viewers and their
view of the world. The power of images.The power of affirmation The
affirmation of power. (Wenders 1989: 120-121) Jean Baudrillard draws
similar conclusions. In Amerique, he says that American cities look like they
are born out of films: everything seems sponsored, euphoric, clean, one
total advertising event. In short a picture of one ideal world. Umberto Eco,
too, mentions in his Travels in Hyperreality that in America the completely
real becomes identified with the completely fake. Absolute unreality
is offered as real presence (Eco 1986: 7). The American imagination
demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake;
where boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum
is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation
of fullness, of horror vacui. (8)
Tesich, who shared all the above listed concerns, was also worried by
the fact that the mass media constantly feed people on murders, sex crimes,
explosions, natural disasters, on man-made atrocities and wars. He believed that the aim of this daily diet of threats and danger was to justify
the systems own use of violence and cast it in the role of guardian of order
and provider of safety. Education also played its part in this indoctrination. Distinguished American theatre critic, Professor Robert Brustein, the
author of Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987-1994
(1995), writes in his essay Dreams and Hard-backed Chairs that American education, at its best, is capable of refining the intellect and training
the body but remains completely indifferent to developing the imagination. Schools make no provision for daydreaming, which is the stimulus of
the non-competitive imagination. They suppress the individuals capacity
for fantasy, they inhibit the faculty of invention, they suggest that discomfort is intimately associated with achievements. () Any vestigial passion
(students) might harbor for music, poetry or painting will be segregated to
the patronizing category of extracurricular activity.3(Brustein 1992: 249)
Especially in his late plays Tesich had much to say about this insidious type
of pedagogy.
Many contemporary writers write about the danger of willful selfdeception and encourage their readers to take an active role in the pursuit
of the real truth. One author very specifically related his own critique to
the insights he gained from Steve Tesich. In his book The Post-Truth Era:
Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, American author Ralph
Keyes analyzes how lies come to be accepted as truths by ordinary people,
and why no one cares to ask whether official reports are really true or not.
3 Robert Brustein provides a reflection on the American theatre in his collection of reviews and essays
Reimagining American Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991).
163
Duica S. Lazi
Deception becomes, according to him, increasingly the general, normal way

of life: to deceive others becomes a game, a challenge, a habit. As deception
comes to be present at almost every level of American culture, and as the
constant decline of honesty progresses undeterred, people become more
and more convinced that there are things more important than truth.
Keyes calls this age of dishonesty a post-truth eraand credits Steve Tesich
for inventing this phrase that so aptly describes our modern culture. This
is how Keyes explains peoples need to accept deception as something
normal: Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone. It allows us
to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior
conflicts with our values, what were most likely to do is reconceive our
values. For the reason people do not like to think of themselves as unethical,
they simply devise alternative approaches to morality. (Keyes, 2004)
Tesich came to understand that in the Land of the Free people gain
freedom only when they get rid of their conscience and lose their true
human identity. The fact that so many people were unable to preserve their
moral and emotional intelligence made him wonder if it is possible for a
person to pursue his American Dream without failing into the American
nightmare. Again, many aspects of the American way of life that he was
ultimately forced to problematize were scrutinized by others as well. A
more recent example of an artist covering the same ground as Tesich is
BBC documentary film maker Adam Curtis. In the four-part documentary
program The Century of the Self Curtis documents the role played by the
media, education and popular culture in supporting American ambition
to dominate the world. He followed this study with a new series called The
Trap: Whatever Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?, in which the similarity
with Tesich is even more striking. All, the main character in Tesichs play
On the Open Road, asks two fundamental questions: Free from what, and
free for what, and comes to the conclusion that his quest for freedom is a
failure because of the kind of mind the world order has produced in him:
his well trained but unfeeling mind has become a trap from which it is
difficult to exit and reach a different, more complete and more humane
level of awareness. The realization of this truth about himself, as Pinter
would say, becomes the first step towards his redemption.
The thesis Morality as Rebellion in the Post-Hollywood Plays of
Steve Tesich will demonstrate what made it possible for Steve Tesich to
produce criticism of the failed American Dream more radical than that
of authors who were moving, in their writings, in the seemingly same
direction.
164
/ , ,
References
Bodrijar 1988: J. Baudrillard, America, London: Verso.
Brustin 1991: R. Brustein, Reimagining American Theatre, New York: Hill and Wang.
Brustin 1995: R. Brustein, Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt,
1987-1994, published by Ivan R. Dee Inc.
Kertis 2002: A. Curtis, The Century of the Self, documentary produced by BBC.
Available at (topdocumentaryfilms.com)
Kertis 2007: A. Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?
Documentary produced by BBC. Available at (topdocumentaryfilms.com)
Koen 1992: S. Coen, Interview with Steve Tesich: The Only Kind of Real Rebel Left, He
Figures, Is a Moral Person, American Theatre, v.9, n.4, July, 30-37.
Eko 1986: U. Eco,Travels in Hyperreality, English translation copyright by Harcourt
Brace&Company.
Fugard 2011: Athol Fugard addresses students at Stellenbosch University. Available at
(www.youtube.com).
Glou 2007: H. Glow, Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda, Currency
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with Alba Arrikha, foreword by Charles Glass. London: Quartet Books.
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Available at (http:/www.naked capitalism.com/richard-wolff-discusses-the failureof-capitalism-with-bill-moyers.html).
/ :
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(Morality asRebellion in the
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.
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165
Duica S. Lazi
.
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burgenlnd. Kroaten), j, . 6., .2, , 282288.
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-, 400495.
Jakobson 1952: R. Jakobson, Studies in Comparative Slavic Metrics, Oxford Slavonic Papers,
vol.3, 21-60.
Mini 2000: V. Mini, Ljubiine tuilice i Grbaljka Drage Ili, ARS, 1-2, Cetinje, 100103.
Pei, Miloevi-orevi 1984: R Pei, N. Miloevi-orevi, Narodna knjievnost,
Beograd: Vuk Karadi.
176
/ , ,
i i i
Oksana Mykytenko /

The article deals with the correlation of Slav traditional folklore texts, created both by improvisators and performers-professionals, in whose work the desire for individual, authors
role is evident. Such aspect of the existing tradition raise the question of broadening of the
genre sphere of the traditional ritual folklore and addresses both the problem of oral / written
tradition and the phenomenon of folk professionalism. In this context analysis of the text,
in particular the funeral mourning in South-Slav traditions, requires broad parallels both
in Slav and non-Slav traditions. The examples available in particular in North-Russian and
Rumanian traditions can be qualified as the tendency to convey individuality in the folklore process in the form of authors written text. This tradition functionally tends to reflect
chronicle folklore text widely presented in the Carpathian and Balkan region.
Key words: folklore, oral and written text, Slav tradition, funeral mourning
: 8. 2013.
2013.
177

971.3::811.163.41
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. Stabilno poznavanje
akademskog, strunog, sektorijalnog jezika udbenika predstavlja realan
preduslov za prava reenja u svim domenima akademske jezike upotrebe
( 2009: 436).
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IV , : .
2007: V. Bagari, Definiranje komunikativne kompetencije, Metodika, 1,

Zagreb: Uiteljski fakultet, 8493.
- 2010: . -,
, : , VII/1, :
, 717.
2009: J. Vuo, Akademska kompetencija, jezik obrazovanja srpski i italijanski,
: . (.), , , , . 1,
, : , 427437.
2011: J. Vuo, Srpski jezik i jezici obrazovanja srpski i italijanski, : .
(.), , , , . 1,
() , : , 279287.
188
/ , ,
1995: . ,
-
, : , 32/2, 317326.
- 1979: P. Katalini-Udovii, Nauni funkcionalni stil,
Beograd: Strani jezici, VIII/12, 7482.
- 2001: M. Katni-Bakari, Stilistika, Sarajevo: Nauna i
univerzitetska knjiga.
2004: . , (
), : , LI/12, 2338.
1999: . ,
, : , : , 261271.
2012: . ,
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, 49, : , 111124.
2009: . , . ,
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, 2010: . , . , ,
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2011:
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2008: M. Radovanovi, Socilingvistika, Novi Sad: Knjievna zajednica
Novog Sada, Dnevnik.
, 2012: . , . ,
, : . . (), ,
. , II , :
, 159185.
2002: . , , : .
Milka V. Nikoli / The methodological approach to functional scientific style of
teaching Serbian Language in secondary school
Summary / The subject of interest of this paper is methodological processing of the
functional scientific style of teaching Serbian Language in secondary school, where
the methods of teaching Serbian (Native) Language is seen as applied linguistics. The
objective of this paper is to examine ways of structuring methodological processing of
functional scientific style in secondary school. We started from the idea of applying
textbook text in non-linguistic school subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History)
in the role of linguo-methodological text for educational treatment of the functional
scientific style. By this we achieve: (1) contextualization of Native Language teaching;
(2) integration of Serbian Language teaching with other school subjects. Methodological management of the school class was designed in accordance with the following
recommendations: (1) with appropriate scientific and problem-oriented tasks, we
should activate students knowledge of grammar and lexicology; (2) teaching should
be focused on encouraging the student to identify linguistic characteristics of the scientific style, aimed at achieving certain stylistic traits of the functional scientific style.
Methodological approach to functional scientific style thus organized can contribute
to the development of functional-stylistic competences of students. In addition, it
also contributes to students training in mastering academic language, which they will
encounter in university courses.
Keywords: Serbian Language teaching, functional-stylistic competence, functional
scientific style, stylistic trait, linguistic characteristic, textbook text, methodological
processing, contextualization of Native Language teaching.
189

811.111232243
eljka Lj. Babi1

Univerzitet u Banjoj Luci
Filoloki fakultet
CHANGING THE NATURE

OF SPEAKING ASSESSMENT2
The question whether the task of assessing speaking as a separate skill within the scope of
language-related courses at English departments is done holistically has rarely been raised in
the region. There is a kind of feeling that just by testing what has usually been known as fluency, accuracy, discourse management, or certain lexical and grammatical structures, we are
able to give some kind of judgement about the performance itself. By ignoring in practice the
necessity of continuous assessment and relying on applying the one test one mark principle,
sometimes there is very little attention paid to the personality factors of the examinees. This
paper is an illustration of a small project of trying to approach the assessment (and testing) of
speaking at universities from another angle as a collaborative effort of teaching assistants.
Key words: validity, reliability, washback, rubrics, collaborative assessment
INTRODUCTION
There is almost an unwritten rule about starting investigation of
communicative competence by defining what communication is. For the
purpose of this paper, we have chosen Morrows (1977), in which he gives
seven features which characterize communication, and these propose that
communication

is interaction-based
is unpredictable in both form and message
varies according to sociolinguistic discourse context
is carried out under performance limitations such as fatigue,
memory constraints, and unfavorable environmental conditions
always has a purpose (to establish social relations, to express
ideas and feelings)
involves authentic, as opposed to textbook contrived language
1 zbabic@blic.net
2 Rad je predstavljen u vidu usmenog saoptenja pod nazivom: Am I doing it the right way? assessing
speaking na 9. konferenciji ELTA-e: Teaching-Learning-Assessing: Strengthening the Links koja je odrana
na Filozofskom fakultetu u Novom Sadu, 8. i 9. aprila 2011. godine.
191
eljka Lj. Babi
is judged to be successful or unsuccessful on the basis of actual

outcomes (Morrow, in Rivera 1984: 39).
These features were proposed a long time ago, and therefore changed
and adjusted many times up to now. Nevertheless, these have been taken
as the starting point for a small pilot project focused on introduction of
alternative type of assessment of speaking, for it seemed suitable to test
some of the points in a particular real-life situation in this case, in the
English majors classroom.
Having in mind the fact that the project has been a pilot one and trying to establish whether some new approach(es) towards assessing speaking with students who usually do not want to speak unless being asked
questions would actually work, some considerations where put in front of
the teachers involved in creation of rubrics for assessment. This research
has used self-designed rubrics adapted from Mertler (2001) design retrieved on the following web-page (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.
php) and added as the Appendix. The rubrics used show that the speech is
graded through holistic scoring (Bachman, 1990), even though, with some
of the students, objectified scoring may have worked better.
Trying to put these features into something which seems useful
and applicable to our teaching assistants and students needs sometimes
presents enormous amount of effort, which has to be put into effect with
so many appropriate adaptations that it usually means introduction of a
whole new approach to assessment.
This paper has generally been focused on testing a collaborative
approach towards speaking assessment. The preliminary aim was to see
whether there would be any progress with students participating in the
project, but the main aim was to test the assessment itself through looking
at relability, validity and washback.
DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH
AND THE METHODOLOGY USED
Assessing speaking proves to be a challenging job for every teacher,
because one has to know how to deal with those who are timid, shy, or just
too lazy to talk. Using the fact that it is mandatory for teachers to spend
several classes a term at other teachers lectures, we have tried to use some
of those for assessing speaking, the chosen classes being literary classes.
Having in mind the fact that classes are quite large, varying from 20
to 35 students, the focus has been put on assessing students who usually do
not want to participate in speaking language classes and for whom literary
teaching assistants have reported to have participated in discussions held
in their classes quite successfully. The idea has been to observe (and later
give scores) for speaking performance of those students, because of the in192
/ , ,
Changing the nature of speaking assessment
congruent reports about individual performance of some students during

informal conversations between members of the teaching staff.
The setting of the researched classroom has been as following: students are not aware of being assessed, and they know that the TA is obliged
to sit in the classroom, so the tension and the affective filter are put to the
lowest level possible, even though one is quite aware of the fact that they
cannot be as relaxed as they are in normal classes. The literature teaching assistant treats the visiting teaching assistant as any other student,
so the atmosphere is completely relaxed. During the discussion about a
certain poem, literary text or novel, students show their fluency, vocabulary knowledge, grammar, even willingness to participate. After the class,
teaching assitants discuss the performances and rate them.
This is a time consuming task, and at surface, seems futile. The main
focus is on performance which is subjective, both to the teachers opinions
and to mood the students are in that day. Still, it gives a perspective to each
of the assessors what they personally are paying attention to and, maybe, what they are missing. Two people sometimes hear the same thing in
two different ways, usually paying attention to different things. The most
important thing is that, from the validity point of view, one uses spoken
language to measure the stage to which the other forms of exercises have
brought the speakers performance.
Positive sides sometimes can be seen on focusing on language itself in
subjects such as literature. We have done some preliminary research which
showed that literature teachers paid very little attention to language. They
have mainly been focused on students rote learning of as many literary
concepts as possible, which had (as the result) responses that sometimes
were even on the border of being unintelligible, and which they still graded
high, focusing only on what they understood had been said. By having this
kind of peer assessment (teacher-to-teacher), we have been able to discuss
the good and the bad sides of both the approaches and to use literature oral
responses for improving speaking skills by administering the same rules
to each of the speaking tasks. The students grades on language speaking
tests have gone up (as well as on literature), because, after some classes
dedicated to consciousness-raising and obvious newly-acquired self-confidence and interest, they have been able to perform in a better way. There
has been quite a lot of negative energy present from those who gained bad
grades on speaking part of the final exam, because it has been quite difficult to explain to them what went wrong with their literature oral exam
(which they previously used to pass with flying colors). But, at the end of
the school year, the positive effect was seen in that they had to improve
their speaking performance in order to pass the exam, even though we
should emphasize that the method used was pretty radical. Still, as far as
acquisition was concerned, when these two speaking tests were compared,
the results were the same. If the grades varied, it was because the student
did not prepare well for the literary part.
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eljka Lj. Babi
It must be added that, after introduction of this type of assessment,

every year there is a number of students who have strong, negative opinion
administered to ways of teaching of English literature, for they say more
attention is paid to grammar than to literature itself. Even though it is usually the people who are a pace behind the rest of the group who complain,
we have felt the need to draw the attention to this issue.
CONCEPTS USED IN RESEARCH
Returning to the theoretical side which lies beneath this test, we will
introduce basic concepts which were used in research of the test usefulness:
1. validity,
2. reliability and
3. washback.
Bachman and Palmer (1996) refer to validity as to whether a test
measures what it is supposed to measure. Out of different types of validity,
the following ones are being emphasized as the issues researched:
a) content validity, which measures if the test covers all aspects of
what it claims to measure;
b) face validity, which measures whether the items in the test seem
as realistic, authentic uses of what is being measured;
c) construct validity, which measures if all the items seem to be
measuring the same thing;
d) concurrent validity, which measures if the students score on
other measures of the construct such as listening or reading
comprehension the same way they do on the test they are using.
Reliability is connected with the trustworthiness of the test results.
Bachman and Palmer (1996: 19) define it as consistency in measurement. One can differ between:
a) test/retest reliability, which measures the scoring results of the
same test during a short time-frame with no instruction or feedback between testing;
b) internal consistency, which is a measure of consistency where
by splitting a test into two parts and comparing them, the user is
lead to believe that the items are most likely measuring the same
thing;
c) inter-rater reliability, where two raters evaluating language use
should agree with each other in assessment results.
194
/ , ,
Washback (or backwash) encompasses the effect(s) of testing on teaching and learning, be it(them) positive or negative. Negative effects include
teaching only for the test and memorizing possible test questions. If the
test is valid, then positive effects include focusing teaching upon what is
important. This is, sometimes, a debatable way of approaching the problem (being used, among others, by Hughes 1989). Bachaman and Palmer
(1996: 30) insist that the washback should be considered as all the dimensions included into the processing of learning and teaching, thus including
educational and societal systems of the students in the scope of the term.
DATA DISCUSSION
Let us now discuss the qualities of test by describing concepts separately.
1.VALIDITY
We can say that concurrent validity is present when this type of assessment is concerned, for final grades went higher on both literature and
language tests. The scores on both tests have been alike, and I think one
of the reasons for that is the fact that previously the students have been
unaware of differences in approaches to speaking. They approached it as if
it had been executed in their mother tongue, which sometimes resulted in
incoherent set of fragmented utterances.
Both literary and language teaching assistants have been focused on
certain vocabulary/grammar issues, which are chosen according to the syllabus needs, so I would suggest that there is construct validity present up
to some point, and what is more important, the presence of positive washback is seen in making students use the knowledge of the acquired forms
which have been in the focus.
It is quite difficult for me to justify content validity, for it is not always easy to find such texts (especially when dealing with literature from
Anglo-Saxon times), so all the aspects needed are definitely not covered
(especially vocabulary). Again, it is quite difficult to measure actually what
has been taught, so these would also be reasons for my doubts in the presence of content validity. Still, this should not be considered as an excuse
for the evident justification on the part of content validity. The main idea
behind it has been that it was a pilot project at first and there were many
students who had to be covered by the research, so certain modifications
to the original postulates of the research had to be made.
Teaching assistant have developed their own scale of performance,
and the following is rated: presentation, participation, promptness/selfconfidence and vocabulary/grammar. The emphasis has always been put
on authentic literary texts, so, in that way, we can say that face validity is
195
eljka Lj. Babi
present. Still, the language used is sometimes quite difficult, which, with
some students, has resulted in negative washback.
At this point, one has to mention the issue of inter-rater reliability.
Even though there had been an intention to check the scale(s) which teaching assistants use when assessing speaking, this was not done due to frequent changes of teaching assistants working on the specific programme.
To be more precise, the most difficult problem has actually been in trying
to find and discover reasons for giving particular grades to particular students. Even though professors working on language and literature subjects
developed holistic rubrics for grading students, somehow one had the feeling that they were not used as they were supposed to have been done.
2. RELIABILITY
As far as inter-reliability is concerned, teaching assistants give their
marks according to scale and compare them after giving a mark for each of
the parts. The marks are very rarely in disproportion, and I have noticed
that it has usually been because of the subjectivity of one of the examiners.
Inter-rater reliability was very difficult to achieve, almost impossible, due
to frequent changes of teaching assistants who have been teaching both
the language and literary courses.
My opinion is that internal consistency within of the test is really
difficult to justify, because the text used (or topics) are chosen according
to syllabus, so the only connection between them is the literary period
they come from. Again, if we look at the statistics, there seems to be quite
a lot of agreement between the tests administered by different teaching
assistants. We have to voice some reservations towards the results, because
there was no certain proof that different tests were actually constructed by
different people.
Retest reliability can also be questioned, because it depends on students preparation for classes, even the mood they are in at the moment
of the implementation of assessment tasks and their willingness to participate in discussions. The blame for that cannot be always put on students,
because I have found myself in numerous situations where I have chosen
to avoid posing questions to someone who seemed timid and shy.
3. WASHBACK
We can say that positive and negative washback are strongly connected with what has been said above.
There are quite strong cases of negative washback present with those
students who complain about being assessed and made doing exercises
which are not to be marked. They are focused on learning for grades sake,
not their own. This is quite understandable from my point of view, because a lot of students are put under tremendous pressure to gain as higher
196
/ , ,
grades as possible, so that they think they would lack time for addressing
other important issues when doing these kinds of exercises.
Positive washback is seen on improvement in oral presentations and
attitudes of students towards language and literature. In this way, students
are made aware of how they can connect their language knowledge with
the needs of literary oral essay/oral presentation. During speaking, they
are encouraged to use vocabulary presented in the classes, so that they
gain self-confidence and fluency. By showing them the importance of connecting things, the influence of negative washback is diminished, for certain examples have shown that once you pointed out in which ways the
exercises used would help in improvement of their skills, students asked
for more such classes.
To be honest, the most positive washback seen on the part of students was evident in the fact that the very presence of teaching assistants,
who were treated as students in classes, in a way had put quite a lot of
students at ease. The presence of someone to whom they usually attach
a completely different role seemed to have woken up most of the people
who mostly spoke only when they had to. As soon as teaching assistants
who attended the classes started being treated as a part of the group, the
students accepted them as such, and have tried to help them with difficult
passages, encouraged them, even answered certain questions for them
the surprising part being the fact that the helpful students were those who
usually were silent during classes. Later, teaching assistants stated that if
nothing else, these classes helped enormously in building of confidence
and trust useful for their own classes.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
It would be very easy, after discussing some of the findings of the
pilot research of this specific type of speaking assessment, to draw a conclusion that it was very useful and that such type of assessing speaking
had really worked out perfectly. Still, at the beginning, it was clearly stated
that such assessment was applied onto a limited number of students. Furthermore, the only decisive point on whether someone would be tested or
not was the impression(s) shared by teaching assistants that some students
were better, more active, more talkative, more coherent, etc. during the
classes where literature had been taught than at language classes directed
at speaking. That is probably the reason for such good results. Again, due
to lack of time, and the fact that a formal kind of assessment had to be
administered in the form of the final test, there is a question open whether
all this was necessary. The honest answer from my part is YES. It is easy
to justify this answer. There are benefits to both students and teaching
assistants. Getting personally involved in creating assessment tools in a
way puts teachers closer to needs and circumstances of their students. The
197
eljka Lj. Babi
gap which exists between them is narrowed immensely and this can be
seen as a good starting point towards the common goal learner-centered
assessment. Students benefit because they feel understood and they also
see the connection between different courses that they have to take. The
usual complaint of why learning literature in such a way seems selfexplanatory, because this is a practical proof that everything in English
classes should be, and definitely is, connected. There remains a lot of ifs
and whens. Still, being a pilot project, the feeling at the end of the research
is that a lot can be learnt from these small attempts to emphasize the need
to change the face of present-day assessment habits as far as speaking is
concerned.
References:
, 1996: L. F Bachman, A.S. Palmer, Test usefulness: Qualities of
language tests. u: L. Bachman and A. Palmer. Language testing in practice. Hong
Kong: Oxford University Press, 17-43.
2001: C. A. Mertler, Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom.
Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). http://PAREonline.net/getvn.
asp?v=7&n=25. 03.03.2004.
1977: K. E. Morrow, Techniques of evaluation for a notional syllabus. London:
University of Reading Centre for Applied Language Studies.
1984: C. Rivera, Communicative Competence Approaches to Language
Proficiency Assessment: Research and Application. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
2003: K. H. Sook, L2 Language assessment in the Korean classroom. Asian EFL
Journal. http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/dec_03_gl.pdf. 07. 03. 2004.
1989: . Hughes, Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Appendix
Oral Performance Rubric: Teacher/Student Conference

Teacher Name: _________________________________________
Student Name: _________________________________________
198
/ , ,

CATEGORY
Presentation
Utterances
self-initiated.
Utterances
mainly selfinitiated.
Utterances
not always
self-initiated.
Needs
encouragement.
Has
difficulties
with all
tasks.
Participation
Willing to
participate,
needs no
encouragement.
Willing to
participate if
directly given
a certain task.
Willing to
participate
if asked by
a teacher
of fellow
colleague.
Trying
to avoid
participation by
using short
answers.
Needs to be
encouraged
constantly.
Promptness/
selfconfidence
Absence of
hesitation.
Some
hesitation
present.
Answers most
questions
with little
hesitation.
Noticeable
hesitation
when
answering
the
questions.
Frequent
and long
hesitations.
Vocabulary/
Grammar
Adequate
vocabulary
and grammar,
almost
native-like.
A few minor
errors present Major errors
Adequate
but they do
noticeable
vocabulary
not influence
throughand grammar.
communiout.
cation.
Score
Major
errors
which
influence
communication.
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Ivana Miti
Summary / In this paper, using the analytical, corpus, contrastive and comparative
method, we analyse the adjective lexical antonyms which are incurred as a result of
associations on materials excerped from Asocijativni renik (Piper i dr. 2005). The aim
of this paper is to examine the extent to which the frequency of occurrence of certain
related associations with the meaning of the adjective and the degree of conflict
among members antonyms pairs, and to study the way how the mental lexicon works.
It was concluded that with real antonyms, antonym, in most cases occurs as the first
association. With unreal antonyms, as first association occurs synonum, not antonym.
Keywords: antonym, association, frequency, mental lexicon
: 25. 2013.
2013.
216
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821. 1402. 09
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217
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K ljupkoj ovejoj glavi kad konjsku slikar bi iju
Nadovezati htio pa arenim prekriti perjem
Udove sabrane odsvud, da ribom grdno se crnom
Prikae milolika ena odozdo
Zar biste prijateljski na ocjenu slike prili bez smijeha?( 1979: 63)
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Umeti prvi je, glavni, u pravilnom pisanju zakon.
Grae e mnogo ti moi pokazati sokratski spisi,
Voljko e rijei nadoi za dobro smiljenom graom. ( 1979: 69)
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1979: M. Beker, Povijest kwievnih teorija (od antike do kraja devetnaestog
stoljea), izbor tekstova i povijesni uvod M. Bekera, Zagreb:SNL.
1997: . . , , : .
2003: . . , , : .
1968: , /,
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2002: , , :
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1987: . . , ,
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231
Mirjana D. Bojanic/ The narrative theories in the antique Greece

Summary/ This paper presents a diachronic overview of narrative theory in antique
Greece. In introduction is related the origin of narrative and the first narrative theories.
In the middle are two major theories of ancient Greece, Platos and Aristotles, and
Horatios theory as one of the most important of the antique Romans period. The
narrative theories are observed through the key elements of narrative in the works
of the above authors. There are similarities and differences between these narrative
theories. The final part of the paper emphasize the importance of the ancient narrative theories in terms of the present.
Key words: narration, mimesis, composition, fabula,Platon, Aristotle, Horatio
: 12. 2013.
2013.
232
/ , ,

821.111-2.09 .
. 1
- ,

MOTHER CLAPS
MOLLY HOUSE
, in-yer-face
, , , ,
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Mother Claps Molly House
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1 stojkovic_natalija@yahoo.com
233
in-yer-face theatre ( , ).

,
In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001)
,
. : In-yer-face theatre is the kind of theatre which grabs the audience
by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message2 (
2001). ,
( 2001), ,
,
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/ ,
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, , Shopping and Fucking, ,
. ,
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,
, queer),

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he Observer, ,
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2 In-yer-face
( ..)
234
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( 2001).
, Mother Claps
Molly House ,
,
.
,
, , ,
- . Molly house
18.
,
. , ,
, (
18. 40) , ,
,
queer. molly , , , . Mother (Mrs. Tull), ( 18. ).
clap , Mother Clap
, :
.
(a play with songs), Mother
Claps Molly House
,
,
, ,
, .
, , .
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,
235
,
( 2008: 10).
, , ,

.

.
, : Enterprise shall make you
human/ Getting, spending spark divine/ This my gift to you poor human:
/ Purse celestial, coin divine3 ( 2001: 5). ,
, , ,
, : No good Lord int
gonna carry off man of industry, man of business. Its the makers, its the
savers, its the spenders and traders who are most blessed. Int no love like
the Lords love of business4 ( 2001: 10).
,
18.
.
(God of Enterprise)

,
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236
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,
. (Princess
Seraphine)
, Mother int body and babies. Mothers in your acts5 (
2001: 51). ,
,
,
. - ,
molly house,
, .
Post-War British Drama Looking back in Gender, , , in-yerface , . : We
are in a more dangerous world than that of the 1950s, with no sense of a
history which has let characters down, and certainly none of the political/
utopian optimism of the 1970s. The action homes in on individuals who
cling together in groupings which scarcely even imitate a dysfunctional
family, let alone a traditional family model6 ( 2001: 236). , (
) , ,
Observer, (
, ) , , ( 2001).
, , , .
5 . . ( . .)
6 50-, , / 70-.

, . (: . .)
237
,

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, , 2001. , ,
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18. , ,
-

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,
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. ,
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.
, ,
, 21.
, .
,
Homosexuality and contemporary society in Mark Ravenhills
Work : This extreme positivism sharply contrasts with the dull
and gloomy atmosphere of the 2001 generation. Steyn formulates this as
follows: The playfulness of the molly house is wholly absent. Sex is joyless
relief, mechanical copulating, jaded brutish humping (35). Indeed, sexual
intercourse has become a banal, everyday activity7 ( 2009: 58).
7
2001. :
. , , -
238
/ , ,
,
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, :
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2011: 128).
:
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(35). , , .
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239
, ,
, (...) , ,
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( 1978, 72). ,
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.
(1990: 76)
: :
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,

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. , , (When Im dressed in trousers
I get awful vicious8 ( 2001: 9)),
. ,
,
, ,
. , , 8 , . ( . .)
240
/ , ,
, . ,
,
.
,
, : Oh, its all games here. Mother
Clap? Thass a game. Princess? Game. Were all playing, int we? Best well
ever have9 ( 2001: 78).
, ,
, , :
. (...)
,
, ( 1993: 336).
2001. , ,

.
,
, , ,
. ,
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,
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18. , , : The pain of love is hard
to bear/ The joy of love is strong/ And lovers come and fuck and leave/ But
9 , . ? . ? . ,
? . ( . .)
241
business carries on10 ( 2001: 103). ,

, . ,
,
. -/-/-, ,
,
, .
, : , ,
, ,
.
queer
,
,
,
: Dunt need me mollies a-skipping and a-fucking around me no
more. Good game while it lasted and it filled me purse fit to bursting. So
now we can move on. Away from this world. And on to the new11 (, 2001: 105).
, , , ,
,

.
.
,
, .
, ?,
(1997: 72). , ,
,
.
10 / / , , / .
( . .)
11 ?
. .
. . ( . .)
242
/ , ,
:
2001: . , : ,
: 92.
1993: . , , : .
2001: M. Wandor, Post-War British Drama: Looking back in Gender,
London: Routledge.
2009: G. De Buck, Homosexuality and contemporary society in Mark Ravenhills
Work, Ghent: University of Ghent Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.
1997: . , , : .
2001: Kellaway, Kate. Guys, dolls and dressing up: An Interview with
Mark Ravenhill. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2001/aug/19/features.
review27>. 02.05.2013.
2001: M. Ravenhill, Mother Claps Molly House, : M. Ravenhill, Plays:2,
London: Metheuen.
2008: M. Ravenhill, Introduction, : M. Ravenhill, Plays: 2, London:
Metheuen.
2001: Sierz, Alex. In-Yer-Face Theatre. <http://www.inyerface-theatre.com/>.
31.04.2013.
1978: : , : .
Natalija I. Stojkovi /
The theatrical poetics of Mark Ravenhill, one of the most staged authors of contemporary British in-yer-face theatre, represents an unusual blend of humor, grotesque,
the absurd, occasional violence, and specific thematic fields problematizing the norms
of modern society through rich dramatic metaphors. Aiming to provoke intense emotions in the audience, Ravenhills experiential theatre works on deconstructing
the ideologies internalized within the deepest inner being of the human, by using
powerful dramatic-poetic metaphors characteristic of in-yer-face theatre. In relation to this, the paper aims to analyze the complex relationship between sexuality
and consumerism in the 21st century global society, which Ravenhill deals with in
his play Mother Claps Molly House by displaying it on a historical axis connecting
the two chronotopes in which two separate groups of characters act in parallel: the
world of London in the 1720s, and that of London at the birth of the 21st century.
Using the events in the 18th century as the metaphorical stem of one specific aspect
of consumerist ideology pertaining to sexuality (more precisely in this context: male
homosexuality), the author creates parallels placing the two stories within temporal
continuum representing the development of consumerism a shapeshifting ideology which perfidiously persists by adapting to the historical contexts, continuing
to exploit the marginalized subjects. With the theoretical basis leaning mostly on
Foucault, Virilio, Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, this paper, therefore, analyzes the
ways in which Ravenhill manages to deepen the too often neglected issue of sexuality controlled by the mechanisms of consumerist ideology, adding to it a historical
dimension and providing fertile ground for reinterpretation.
Key words: sexuality, consumerism, in-yer-face theatre, homosexuality, control,
identity, game
: 3. 2013.
2013.
243

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Nemanja Lazarevi /Masters of Serbian poster in the last-century thirties

In the twentieth century, the presence of all mainstreams in European art were applied
and developed in the poster design. However, the poster is hardly mentioned in the
literature which provides detailed description of Serbian art in the first half of the
twentieth century. Among a small number of poster designers a few masters stand out
such as Mihajlo Petrov, Duan Jankovi, M. Babi and Pavle Bihali.A thorough future
study of this form of applied arts should include the following question: how many
anonymous and gifted people were preoccupied with the poster design at the time.
: 6. 2013.
2013.
251
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2013.
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: 1. 2013.
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XIV / 51 / 2013.

aslav Nikoli, Assistant Professor, PhD

Vladimir Polomac, Assistant Professor, PhD

Nikola Bubanja, Assistant Professor, PhD

Jelena Arsenijevi, Assistant, PhD

prof. Persida Lazarevi di Giakomo, Full Professor, PhD

Jelenka Pandurevi, Assistant Professor, PhD

Svetlana Kalezi, Assistant Professor, PhD

Ivan Maji, Assistant Professor, PhD

Ostap Slavinski, Assistant Professor, PhD

Borjan Janev, Assistant Professor, PhD

Aleksandar Jerkov, Associate Professor, PhD

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

TESICH AND TOLSTOY.................................................................. 17

STEVE TESICH: RECOVERING THE (AMERICAN) DREAM

eljka Lj. Babi

CHANGING THE NATURE

Marginalisation of Art in the Late

Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar1

TESICH AND TOLSTOY

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Steve Tesich, interview by Dejan Stojanovic, in the Serbian Magazine Views

On April 1, 2013, the Internet site Countercurrents posted a short

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

but of course not an economic one. And now, economy is prevailing.

Tesich and Tolstoy

Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

tiable-I-get-it-God in his head has made a mouse-trap of his mind.The

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Tesich and Tolstoy

A Confession (1879); A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (1880); The Gospel

Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

1980. Touching Bottom, Samuel French, New York.

Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

political correctness. Thus ironically the tribute ostensibly paid to Tesic

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

The age of pictorial reproduction has not brought about essential

In Act I, beneath their apparrent agreement to use the looted art

 Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

This inborn musico/biophilia can be associated with the ethics of

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

formely a mere form of words, now an utterence so lovely that it hurts to

Marias correct paraphrase what you miss is simply the drama of

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich

Contributing to the Nothingness Cromwell embodies are his lies.

Marginalisation of art in the late plays of Steve Tesich