ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and the Reagan presidency, two versions of America saw performance and publication: David Marner's Glengarry Glen Ross and Jean Baudrillard's America. At first glance, Marner and Baudrillard seem more than an ocean apart, their visions of late-twentieth-century Western culture radically different. After all, Marner has been called the most American of playwrights, while Baudrillard has been accused of writing an America no American would recognize. Marner is seen as having a moral strategy, Baudrillard a fatal strategy. Marner is seen as privileging the subject, Baudrillard the object. Nevertheless, by reading Glengarry Glen Ross against America we discover that both writers are constructing surprisingly comparable performances of America toward the end of the second millennium. We discover spectacles that are theatrical, visionary, and apocalyptic, as well as revelatory of a post-commodity culture in an astral landscape.
