444 research outputs found
Harold Pinter and the Performance of Power: Considerations of Affect in Select Plays, Screenplays and Films, Poetry and Political Speeches
No full textThis thesis looks at selections of Harold Pinter's work across multiple media: written dramatic texts, screenplays and poetry, activity in theatrical and film production and his political activism. It has been argued that Pinter's dramatic medium is exceeded by movements, intensities and
forces that operate on and circulate within the corporeal bodies of Pinter's 'audiences'. However, approaches to Pinter to date remain overly focused on representation and hermeneutics and tied to a decidedly idealist conception of being, perception and knowledge. I argue that in order to
appreciate the politics of Pinter's aesthetics, readings of Pinter's work need to move in a more decidedly materialist direction. To do so, I enlist the conceptual tools of Gilles Deleuze and felix Guattari, specifically 'affect'. In bringing affect theory to Pinter I illustrate how 'the direct, mutual involvement of language and extra-linguistic forces,1 must be taken into account at every
critical step, and that meaning need be construed as a material process, the expression of forces
acting upon each other. The diversity of Pinter's work is explored over six chapters with a view to its aesthetic disposition and function, how it enters into noteworthy relations with those who engage with it, and how it establishes conditions that are propitious for transitory but ultimately productive trans formative encounters. Proceeding as such necessitates appraisal of ethical and
political positions in relation to Pinter's expression without distinguishing politics from aesthetics - a trend common to intellectual enterprise. Rather, the three keywords in the title of this thesis - performance, power and affect - function as concepts to advance the argument for Pinter's aesthetics as a politics. In considering the aesthetics of Pinter's work in varied media, this thesis invites the reader to see the strategies by which Pinter intervenes in each area as interrelated and political
The city and landscapes beyond Harold Pinter's rooms
No full textPinter's dramas have been labelled as 'absurd', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic', 'taciturn'.
There has been a constant tendency to reduce the idea of the 'Pinteresque' to language
when Pinter is preoccupied with the tensions between reality and the world of the
imagination. He has, actually and accurately, used theatre as a 'critical act' to denote
the abstracted realities, and he has applied his language to embody his world-view - his
concerns in the contemporary capitalist world.
Pinter has journeyed from the room to the outside world, from the private to the public
social space, and has identified an inescapable sense of pessimism and alienation, and
investigated an alarming world of atrocities. There are cities and landscapes beyond
Pinter's rooms, cities peopled by wandering, displaced figures surveying the self-estranged city that is modern consciousness, and landscapes where his people retreat
into the private realms of memory and fantasy.
This thesis explores the virtual geographies beyond Pinter's rooms through the
vocabulary of some modernist theoreticians and social scientists, as there are significant
parallels between their analytical observations and the poetic perceptions of Pinter, a
practising artist, and the phantom images of his characters.
Pinter's plays and film adaptations tend to portray the city as a colonial present, and the
country as a mythological past. The 1970s' plays portray a community of isolation,
urban decay, dispossession and suffering, through the figure of the 'flâneur' - his
characters' subjective experiences, memories and fantasies in the metropolis. In these
memory plays, men and women have different mental landscapes and desires. To some
extent the city is both a male-constructed world and an image of the twentieth century;
in both senses it is anti-human and in decline.
In his 1980s mature plays, Pinter's lyrical interiors and serene landscapes are colonised
by the metropolis. Here Pinter investigates a universally oppressive space filled with
misery and social dislocation. The city destroys humanity in a decaying modem world.
These plays identify the global city as the locus of existential alienation and as the
centre of political power and oppression - a world of brute masculine power.
The last two plays, in this study explore other wastelands of human isolation and
suffering, and criticise the British suspicion of the 'intelligentsia'. Using scenes that are
ingrained in the contemporary audience's physical memory, Pinter makes the
distinction between being an active participant and being a witness, a 'spectator' in this
alarming world. And thus, he criticises the tradition of mockery of the artistic and the
intellectually curious in Britain, and urges a need for a 'politically curious', at politically questioning theatre-going society
The Concept of "Self" in Some Plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Beckett, Osborne, and Pinter
No full textPhDCentring on Peer Gynt's onion as a symbol of modern
man's "dissolved" self, this thesis is a study of the
changing concept of "self" and its effect on the development
of dramatic technique from Ibsen's Brand and Peer
Gynt, through Strindberg's "dream plays, " to the plays of
the three most influential post-war British playwrights,
Beckett, Osborne, and Pinter.
The aim of this comparative study is not to "prove"
direct influence, but to demonstrate affinities and to
trace the continuing process of the "dissolving self"
from Brand's monumental concept of man as a being essentially
divine, to Beckett's tramps picturing themselves
as worms in a God-forsaken universe, and from Peer Gynt's
uncentred onion self, which still adds up to a tremendous
personality, to Pinter's "classic female figure" who is
divested of personality as well as of self.
The philosophical dissolution of man's essential Godgiven
self and the redefinition of the human personality
in existentialist terms as simply the sum of one's actions,
habits, or roles, has its corollary in dramatic technique,
of which the most radical example is Strindberg's A Dream
Play, where the Dreamer's self is projected on stage, not
as one indelible personality, which is still the case in
Peer Gynt, but as a motley gallery of "dream characters, "
each representing one aspect of the Dreamer's (the poet's)
discontinuous self.
Beckett's Krapp, spooling back the tapes of his
former selves in search of his quintessential "I" and
discovering that the "self" is merely a string of discarded
habits; Osborne's Archie Rice playing for time
against the inevitable annihilation of his inauthentic
comedian's mask by "the man with the hook"; and Pinter's
stupefied Stanley Webber being "crowned" by his persecutors
with a bowler hat, the symbol of conformity, and
hence of non-identity, are all modern counterparts of
Peer Gynt, the "Emperor of Self.
EMPLOYMENT POSITION OF SPORTSMAN
No full textDiplomsko delo obravnava delovno-pravni položaj športnikov. Temeljna pozornost in razprava sta posvečeni vprašanju, ali obstajajo elementi delovnega razmerja iz 4. člena Zakona o delovnih razmerjih v razmerju med športnikom in športnim klubom in ali športniki v Sloveniji izpolnjujejo pogoje za pridobitev statusa delavca. Pri tem avtorica ugotavlja, da bi bilo potrebno upoštevati posebnosti športa kot specifične družbene dejavnosti in omogočiti veljavno sklepanje pogodb o zaposlitvi, z drugačno ureditvijo določenih pravic in obveznosti za športnike. Vseh institutov delovnega prava za ta razmerja namreč ni mogoče uporabiti. V nadaljevanju je prikazan položaj športnikov v Evropski uniji. V tem smislu so analizirane sodbe Sodišča Evropske unije, ki segajo na področje športa in so povezane z uresničevanjem načela prostega gibanja delavcev ter prepovedjo diskriminacije. Prikazana pa je tudi ureditev položaja športnikov v posameznih državah članicah Evropske unije.The main focus of this thesis is the employment position of sportsmen. A particular attention is paid to the elements of the employment relationship, according to Article 4 of The Labour Codewhether they exist in the relationship between sportsman and sports club and whether sportsmen should be given the status of workers. The author establishes that the specificity of sport, as sport constitutes a specific social activity, should be taken into account. Therefore some of the rights and obligations, derived from the employment relationship, should be regulated differently for sportsmen to establish a possibility to enter into employment contracts in accordance with current legislation. Later on, legal regulation of sportsmen of the European Union is presented - the thesis also analyses cases of the European Court of Justice in the field of sports, which are related to the free movement of workers and prohibition of discrimination. Moreover, the legal regulation of sportsmen in particular European Union member states is presented
Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter\u27s Screenplays and the Artistic Process
No full textBest known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter has also written many highly regarded screenplays, including Academy Award-nominated screenplays for The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Betrayal , collaborations with English director Joseph Losey, and an unproduced script for the remake of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of Lolita . In this definitive study of Pinter’s screenplays, Steven H. Gale compares the scripts with their sources and the resulting films, analyzes their stages of development, and shows how Pinter creates unique works of art by extracting the essence from his source and rendering it in cinematic terms. Gale introduces each film, traces the events that led to the script’s writing, examines critical reaction to the film, and provides an extensive bibliography, appendices, and an index.
A highly significant book both for Pinter studies and for the neglected analysis of the genre of film scripts. . . . This pioneering work will be a model for subsequent studies of film scripts. -- Choice
To say that [Steven Gale] is a master of the scholarship on Harold Pinter is an understatement….I have seldom agreed so much with an author’s interpretations of a film artist as I do with [Gale’s]….This is a landmark in scholarship about the adaptation of fiction and drama to film by an author who know his subject (in both senses of the word) inside out. In particular he documents the collaboration of Harold Printer with film director Joseph Losey, which is one of the most celebrated creative associations of a writer and director in cinema history. -- Gene D. Phillips
Such a volume was refreshing to read and gave me faith in scholarship—again. -- Peter C. Rollins
Named a Choice 2003 Academic Title.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1006/thumbnail.jp
Harold Pinter and the language of cultural power
No full textThis book addresses three matters of fundamental importance for an understanding of Harold Pinter's work - how language functions in Pinter's plays, what the relationship is between language and subjectivity in the plays, and what the plays reveal about how language serves as a vehicle for cultural power. Pinter's work rejects any attempt to conceptualize language in terms of reference, expression, or communication. Rather, his plays exhibit a semiotic understanding of language that demands his audience focus not only on parole, the individual speech act, but also on langue, language as structured system that both enables and constrains parole. The langue that Pinter explores is the ensemble of codes, dominant discourses and structures of representation, and fragments of ideology that give voice to cultural power, creating the speaking subject in the image of that powerFor 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 subjectThrough detailed readings of The Birthday Party, The Collection, The Homecoming, Old Times, One for the Road, and Mountain Language, Silverstein argues that what is at stake in these plays is the status of cultural power itself. The plays insistently raise the question, does there exist any possibility for the kind of resistance that can dismantle the network of cultural power, or is that network unassailably monolithic? While arguing that Pinter's plays appear to adopt the latter position, the author emphasizes that these plays still have valuable political lessons to teach. At a moment when much Ideologiekritik naively equates the demystification of ideology and the unveiling of contradictions with the inevitable collapse of that field, Pinter's plays compel us to consider a more viable mode of intervention within cultural formations that seem infinitely recuperabl
Exilic Vision and the Cinematic Interrogation of Britain: The Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter Collaboration
No full textThis interdisciplinary dissertation examines the relationship between exile and collaborative authorship in the films of blacklisted American director Joseph Losey and British-Jewish playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter. During the 1960s and early 1970s, they collaborated on the celebrated British art-house films The Servant (1963, based on the novella by Robin Maugham), Accident (1967, based on the novel by Nicholas Mosley), and The Go-Between (1971, based on the novel by L.P. Hartley), which won the prestigious Palme d\u27Or at the 1971 Cannes International Film Festival. Both Losey and Pinter commented frequently on the synergistic nature of their successful collaboration, but Anglo-American film scholarship tends to often incorrectly interpret the collaboration as a disproportionate alliance of talent with Losey serving subordinately to the Nobel laureate Pinter\u27s dramatic genius. Moving beyond the auteur critics\u27 emphasis on solitary film authorship, this dissertation reads the Losey and Pinter collaboration through the lens of exilic cinema. Losey and Pinter\u27s shared exilic vision--the synthesis of the exiled blacklistee Losey and the British-Jewish insider-outsider Pinter--interrogated a British culture that, during the 1960s and early 1970s, possessed a new allure due, in large part, to the international popularity of the Beatles, James Bond, and the fashion of designer Mary Quant. Yet this veneer of sex appeal and economic prosperity veiled ongoing class and racial tension, gender inequality, homosexual oppression, and a dissolving Empire. Losey and Pinter foreground these socio-political issues through a complex modernist film aesthetic, which challenged the classical Hollywood and British narrative film structure by bending genre conventions and archetypes in The Servant, and later fusing elements of modernist literature and Continental European art-house cinema, particularly the films of the French Nouvelle Vague and Rive Gauche filmmakers, in Accident and The Go-Between. This dissertation analyzes The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between against the socio-political climate of Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the creative and economic alliance between the British and Hollywood film industries during this significant filmmaking period. The goal is not only to illustrate that the Losey-Pinter collaboration cannot be placed easily within a single author paradigm, but also that studies of film collaboration need to consider relevant historical, socio-political, and industrial factors
The Dwarfs: the origin of the pinteresque and Harold Pinter’s drama
No full textAo surgir no panorama teatral britânico, Harold Pinter causou uma impressão tão forte que o termo pinteresque foi criado para englobar as características de sua obra e os seus efeitos no público. Aparente trivialidade dos diálogos, usos de pausas e silêncios, assim como um eminente senso de ameaça estão entre as características levantadas como essenciais ao teatro de Pinter. Parte da fortuna crítica indica a origem de tais características no único romance escrito pelo autor - datado anteriormente à escrita de sua primeira obra dramatúrgica, mas apenas publicado décadas após Pinter se estabelecer como um dramaturgo de renome; contudo, pouca atenção é dispensada à obra nãodramática de Pinter e essa relação ainda não foi bem investigada. Assim, o objetivo desta tese é fazer um estudo aprofundado do romance The Dwarfs (1990), identificando como as características da obra pinteriana se apresentam no romance e suas reverberações na obra dramática posterior. Tal aproximação só é possível haja visto que o romance absorve algumas características tipicamente dramáticas em sua forma. Deste modo, serão utilizadas teorias críticas de Mikhail Bakhtin, Terry Eagleton, Martin Esslin, Anatol Rosenfeld, Peter Szondi e Ian Watt para tal investigação e aproximação entre o romance e a obra dramatúrgica pinterianos. Além disso, uma análise da adaptação do romance feita pelo próprio autor para os palcos, também chamada The Dwarfs (1963) é também realizada para estreitar a relação estabelecida entre a prosa e a dramaturgia de Harold Pinter.When Harold Pinter emerged in the British theatrical scene his work caused such a powerful impression that the term pinteresque was created to comprise the characteristics of his work and its effects on the public. Apparent triviality in the dialogues, use of pauses and silences, as well as a strong sense of menace are among the characteristics addressed as essential to Pinter\'s theatre. Part of Pinter\'s critical analysis identify the origin of such characteristics on the only novel written by the author - dated back to before the writing of his first theatrical play, but only published decades after Pinter became a household name playwright, nonetheless little attention is given to Pinter\'s nondramatic work and this relation has not yet been well investigated. Thus, the objective of this thesis is to produce a detailed study of the novel The Dwarfs (1990), identifying how the characteristics of Pinter\'s work are presented in the novel and their reverberations on the subsequent dramatic works. This approximation is only possible because the novel absorbs some typical dramatic characteristics into its form. Therefore, critical theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Terry Eagleton, Martin Esslin, Anatol Rosenfeld, Peter Szondi and Ian Watt will be used in such investigation and on the approximation between Pinter\'s novel and dramatic works. Furthermore, an analysis of Pinter\'s own adaptation of the novel to the stage, also called The Dwarfs (1963) will be provided in order to strengthen the relation established between his prose and dramatic work
Harold Pinter. Il teatro del potere, il potere del teatro
No full textPlaywright, director, actor, screenwriter and poet, Pinter presents an eclectic profile that leads him to engage in multiple devices (artistic, media and textual) that enrich and make his theatrical production particularly complex. His work as an author spans a long period of time, during which it is possible to recognise an evolution that starts from a studied balance between realism and the dimension of the absurd, to arrive at a temporal horizon in which memory and recollection take on such a relative value that they continually undermine the credibility of the characters' stories and confuse the viewer's perception.
This volume attempts to delve into the legacy left by Pinter's figure and work.
The many contributions in the volume testify to a vitality that is still very much alive and felt with regard to a playwright, but also a director and actor, who changed the way theatre was written and thought about, together with his beloved Beckett, in the second half of the 20th century. For this reason, the volume has been divided into analytical studies on the one hand and a series of testimonies from personalities who, in various capacities and in different forms, have approached the Pinterian universe on the other. The aim is to photograph the Pinter of today and recognise the living traces of his work, which is increasingly less studied and performed in our contemporary world
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