The aesthetics of Harold Pinter's dramatic art

2018

Abstract. Introduction. The problem of political and mental disorder, which has been addressed to by many writers, – and the expressive figure of the British playwright, director and screenwriter, a poet Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is no exception. Apparently, his theatrical and acting performance has dwelled upon many issues, similarly significant to social and interpersonal spheres of life, since he stated that these may be diverse parts of similar mental activities. Methods. The complex descriptive analysis and historic cultural methods have been selected as the main tools to approach the issue under discussion. It also uses hermeneutic analysis and intertextual method in accessing the main Pinter’s style characteristics. Results and discussion. His writing blends violence, menace and terror, intimacy and authoritative oppression. The author build his own language of the highest metaphoricity up, arguing upon the concepts of gender and language, being and non-being, misogyny, total...

A Kaleidoscope of Harold Pinter's Plays, 1992

Critics have tried to approach Pinter’s plays from a variety of changing perspectives, which emerge as a result of the playwright’s inventiveness. Pinter who aims at and achieves perhaps the most original innovations in dramatic form best exemplifies the range and diversity of the contemporary English drama. In consequence, he has created a distinctive personal style. Any attempt to make an exhaustive study of Harold Pinter at this stage would be futile; selection was inevitable. This dissertation will concentrate on eight plays by the playwright under discussion to demonstrate the refinement and development of his technique which was unprecedented and therefore shocked everybody in 1960s but is highly appreciated now. Ankara : Faculty of Letters and Institute of Economics and Social Sciences, Bilkent Univ., 1992.

International Journal of Research, 2015

The present paper attempts study playwright .Pinter is regarded as a representative of Absurd Drama. Pinter observes the comic side of the Absurd. As Pinter's dramas are drama of language, attempt has been made to an analysis of some dialogues of his plays from the absurdist point of view. Pinter, a modern dramatist who has exerted tremendous influence on the other writers .So a reassessment of the writer is an enriching and valuable experience .The paper also attempts in positioning Pinter's play in the contemporary milieu.

2019

Harold Pinter was the most influential, provocative, and poetic dramatist of his generation. Moreover, he was best remembered by his ability to create dramatic poetry out of everyday speech, which was considered as his greatest contribution to modern drama. The greatest power of most of Pinter’s plays originates from the truth of a character’s feeling that always lies in the unspoken words or in what is known as “Pinter’s pauses”. For Pinter, the drama is not inherent in the speech of the characters existed on the stage but rather in the unknown world in the invisible end of most of his plays. The main aim of this research is to highlight the progress of Pinter's dramatic writing from the modernist features, which were familiar with the audience at that time, to the postmodern principles in order to portray the dilemma of the contemporary man. Through his innovative Pinteresque technique, Pinter reveal the typical postmodern human predicament in his dramas. Strikly speaking, Pin...

Literary critics classify Harold Pinter's drama under the heading of the absurd just because it deals with a drama where characters experience a dull meaningless life in which nothing happens. No action seems to take place. Boredom and futility top man's life. However, I take the view that the absurdity of Pinter's drama is of another type. It is a linguistic absurdity, where language-this essential characteristic of our being-is distorted, tweaked to make the text means. The aim of this paper is to argue for the absurdity of Pinter's drama at the level of language by drawing on pragmatic theories namely, Austin and Searle's Speech Act Theory (1962, 1969), Grice's Cooperative Principle (1975) and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1986). Key pragmatic features that characterise interactions in Pinter's drama are not only highlighted but also discussed and described.

published in The Dhauli Review 2016 Link http://dhaulireview.com/newdhauli/showcontent.php?id=8&aid=131 Harold Pinter,Playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet noted for his political polemics has shaped the vocabulary of modern drama. Not only in his plays but in his speeches the Nobel British Dramatist has been a serious critic of state brutalism irrespective of the national boundaries. His plays oscillate between two poles – the apex of power and the abyss of the torture. There are layers of meanings in his plays hinting at different levels of power play. The boredom of the torturer, the fun that he gets out of inflicting pain on the victim, the celebration of power by the man/men who run the country, the ignorance of the killer about the organization who hires him for a job all contribute to the making of "pinteresque " .

2015

I wish to thank wholeheartedly Cos Tonmoy who shared his ideas on postmodernism with me and lent me a number of books and materials. I would like to extend my thanks to my friends Asif Newaz, Maroof Ibn Mannan, Borhan Uddin and Parvin Akter who motivated me at times of distress. Finally, I want to thank my father for his endless support and my mother, who prayed for me and encouraged me throughout my project with great enthusiasm. vi

This article introduces Pinter as an early practitioner of the Theater of the Absurd as well as an existentialist. In his plays The Dumb Waiter, The Room and Birthday Party absurd is presented in its different aspects and faced by different characters. Sometimes this absurdity is funny but the dramatist's aim is to get into reality. Another aspect of Pinter's plays is existentialism. His Pinteresque characters show his multi-dimensional way of looking at life.

This paper actively deals with the notion of silence as an element of absurdity in Harold Pinter’s play “The Dumb Waiter” (1960). In order to discuss this with greater detail, it is important to understand what absurdity is and how it is linked to the theatre of the absurd as well as its connection to the disenfranchised condition of human existence that ails modern man’s psyche obstructing his route to communication and purpose. Moreover, this paper elaborates on how silence is an element of absurdism diligently offering up a list of five main critics and their critiques and assessment over the language of silence employed by Pinter as an element of absurdity, and they include: “Poetics of Silence” (1970) by James R. Hollis, “Harold Pinter and The New British Theatre” (1997) by D. Keith Peacock, “Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo” (2005), “Language and Silence” (1987) by Martin Esslin, and “A Question of Timing” (1995) by Martin S. Regal. Taking all of this into consideration, an analysis of Harold Pinter’s script will be implemented on the basis of silence as an active partaker in this play of absurdism posing a number of five main quotations that best represent Pinter’s formation of silence as not only a dramatic device, but a much more intense entity with its own voice and motives.

2017

This thesis offers a comprehensive critical examination of the intersections between Pinter’s political output – most notably his drama – and contemporary ethical thought. In order to so, I build on the recent few discussions of Pinter’s ethics by arguing that the ethical has always been a critical focus at every stage of Pinter’s work. In short, this study challenges both the earlier tendency that takes Pinter as an Absurdist and the late one that regards him as purely political. I shall then seek to explore the nexus between politics and ethics in various Pinter texts that deal explicitly or suggestively with the political. In order to so, I shall look at the question of alterity as that which structures the irreducible gap between ethics and politics in Pinter’s work. In particular, I approach the conception of otherness in Pinter in the double sense of the unknowable and that which always already inhabits the same. In either case, alterity, for Pinter, I argue, appears as a disr...