Harold Pinter's Politics

Harold Pinter's Politics PDF Author: Charles Grimes
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640500
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Harold Pinter's Politics examines the expression of Pinter's political beliefs across every aspect and era of his artistic career. The fierce political stances of this important dramatist have been embodied in plays, screenplays, and his career as a theatrical director. Traditionally associated with absurdism, minimalism, and the dramatization of uncertainty, Pinter's name is now a byword for anti-authoritarian and anti-American politics. This transition has been in evidence from the earliest phases of his writing; all of Pinter's work emerges from his political views. His uniqueness as a political artist is that he is pessimistic about changing his audience or making it see its complicity in the horrors of the modern world. These horrors are dramatized through images of torture and oppression culminating in moments of silence that index the full extent of the destruction unleashed by the forces of power against dissidence.

Harold Pinter's Politics

Harold Pinter's Politics PDF Author: Charles Grimes
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640500
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Harold Pinter's Politics examines the expression of Pinter's political beliefs across every aspect and era of his artistic career. The fierce political stances of this important dramatist have been embodied in plays, screenplays, and his career as a theatrical director. Traditionally associated with absurdism, minimalism, and the dramatization of uncertainty, Pinter's name is now a byword for anti-authoritarian and anti-American politics. This transition has been in evidence from the earliest phases of his writing; all of Pinter's work emerges from his political views. His uniqueness as a political artist is that he is pessimistic about changing his audience or making it see its complicity in the horrors of the modern world. These horrors are dramatized through images of torture and oppression culminating in moments of silence that index the full extent of the destruction unleashed by the forces of power against dissidence.

The Late Harold Pinter

The Late Harold Pinter PDF Author: Basil Chiasson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137508167
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume is the first to provide a book-length study of Pinter’s overtly political activity. With chapters on political drama, poetry, and speeches, it charts a consistent tension between aesthetics and politics through Pinter’s later career and defines the politics of the work in terms of a pronounced sensory dimension and capacity to affect audiences. The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his plays, into the foreground. Intended for students, instructors, and researchers in drama and theatre, performance studies, literature, and media studies, this book celebrates Pinter’s later life and work by discerning a coherent political voice and project and by registering the complex ways that project troubles the divide between aesthetics and politics.

Art, Truth and Politics

Art, Truth and Politics PDF Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571301304
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Arts, Truth and Politics is Harold Pinter's lecture on receipt of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Various Voices

Various Voices PDF Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802138248
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most important playwrights of our day," Harold Pinter is the author of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker--just a few of his plays that have become seminal works in our literary canon. In Various Voices, Pinter presents his own selections from over fifty years of prose, poetry, and political writings, offering insight into the man and his oeuvre. Now in paperback, this edition includes recently written new poems and prose. His nonfiction selections span "A Note on Shakespeare" (1950) to "An Interview with Mireia Aragay" (1996); the short stories begin with "Kullus" (1949) and end with "Tess" (2000); and the poetry ranges from "School Life" (1948) to "They All Rang" (1999). The political writings illustrate the lucidity of Pinter's views on human-rights issues.

Party Time ; And, The New World Order

Party Time ; And, The New World Order PDF Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802133526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Born in London in 1930, Harold Pinter holds an undisputed place in the front ranks of contemporary playwrights. These two plays, Party Time and The New World Order, work in chilling tandem, each demonstrating the inevitable brutality that comes with a total conviction of right. Party Time is a terrifying portrait of the culpable indifference of a privileged class, of the cruelty engendered in its members by political disruption, and of their merciless extinction of dissent. At an elegant cocktail party, a stylish bourgeoisie discusses country clubs and summer homes, while below in the streets a sinister military presence protects them from the unmentionable horrors of poverty, vulgarity, squalor. In The New World Order, two interrogators harass a man whom they condemn for his questioning of received ideas, and whom we know only as threat to their closed vision of democracy.

Mountain Language

Mountain Language PDF Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822207771
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
THE STORY: Furthering the theme of political consciousness expressed so forcefully and eloquently in his earlier play One for the Road, the author's present play takes place in an anonymous country where individual liberties have been forfeited to the state. Set in a prison where the inmates are forbidden to speak their own language, the play is comprised of four terse, arresting scenes which make masterful use of nuance and subtle understatement (with sudden bursts of violence) to create an overwhelming sense of terror and shocking futility. In one scene uniformed officers taunt and belittle the women who have come to visit their men, who are political prisoners; in another a mother and son are allowed to speak only in the language of the capital, which they do not know; in the third scene a young woman accidentally sees a guard holding a limp, tortured man whom she knows to be her husband; and, in the final scene the old woman reunited with her bloody, trembling son and, though told she may now speak, she has been silenced so long that she cannot, or will not, do so. Quintessentially Pinteresque in its skillful use of pregnant pauses, resonant images and nightmarish utterances, the play is both enthralling theatre and a stirring reminder of what can happen when the power of the state becomes all-encompassing and the rights of the individual are forfeited, whether through neglect or weakness of will.

The Birthday Party, and The Room

The Birthday Party, and The Room PDF Author: Harold Pinter
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802151148
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
In "The Birthday Party", a musician becomes the victim of a ritual murder. Everyone implacably plays out the role assigned to them by fate. "The Room" becomes the scene of a visitation of fate when a blind Negro suddenly arrives to deliver a mysterious message.

The Plays of Harold Pinter

The Plays of Harold Pinter PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788194751236
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description


Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power

Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power PDF Author: Marc Silverstein
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752364
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
For all their attempts to "own" language, Pinter's characters discover that words constitute alienable property; that language forms, de-forms, and re-forms subjectivity; that, as a system preceding the individual, language carries embedded within it the values, desires, and imperatives of the Other - the dominant cultural order. By introducing questions of subject position and ideology into his discussion, author Marc Silverstein shows how the plays exhibit a political dimension largely ignored by the bulk of Pinter criticism, which attempts to classify his oeuvre as a form of absurdist drama. It is Silverstein's contention that Pinter does not concern himself with the fate of the individual lost in an incomprehensible and meaningless universe (the "absurdist" Pinter), but instead explores the vicissitudes of living within ideological, discursive, and social structures that always exceed the subject.

Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism

Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism PDF Author: Varun Begley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0802038875
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The Frankfurt School's discourse on modernism has seldom been linked to contemporary drama, though the questions of aesthetics and politics explored by T.W. Adorno and others seem especially germane to the plays of Harold Pinter, which span high and low cultural forms and move freely from hermetic modernism to political engagement. Examining plays from 1958 to 1996, Varun Begley'sHarold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism argues that Pinter's work simultaneously embodies the modernist principle of negation and the more fluid aesthetics of the postmodern. Pinter is arguably one of the most popular and perplexing of modern dramatists writing in English. His plays prefigured, then chronicled, the crumbling divide between modernism and its historical 'others:' popular entertainment, politically committed art, and technological mass culture. Begley sheds new light on Pinter's work by applying the methods and problems of cultural studies discourse. Viewing his plays as a series of responses to fundamental aesthetic and political questions within modernism, Begley argues that, collectively, they narrate a prehistory of the postmodern.