Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - Mária Kurdi: "You just have to love this world." Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee.

MÁRIA KURDI " YOU JUST HAVE TO LOVE THIS WORLD. ARTHUR MILLER'S THE LAST YANKEE In 1983, when he was 77, Samuel Beckett wrote a playlet under the provokingly mysterious title What Where. Concise and precise as it is in its sharply edged wording, it pulls the strands of the majority of the writer's earlier work together and presents them in a way that suggests added implications, "creating a new illusion of their own."

1 Introduced by V's sentence, "We are the last five.", the playlet centers around games, circularity, repetitiveness, humans' torturing one another, as well as the threat of senselessness. Almost ten years after the inception of What Where, also at the age of 77, another giant of the contemporary stage, Arthur Miller produced The Last Yankee, a short play of merely two scenes. Dissimilar though the two late dramatic works are, Miller's is also full of resonances from the writer's other works and even serves as a kind of summary of what has preceded it, while opening up a comparatively new vista at the same time. A connection with the former works becomes established by the very title of Miller's play, as it so emphatically promises to be concerned with America and its people. In more particular terms, it is, again, the deceptive and even destorting nature of the American Dream that seems to haunt the 1 Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 157. 63