Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 s
Table of Contents
Introduction A last modernist 'someone called Pinter' Resistance Negation, autonomy, commitment Politics Popular culture Immanent criticism Cultural studies Moonlight and modernity 1: The Politics of Negation Reading The Birthday Party The aesthetics of resistance: The Caretaker Anti-Oedipus: The Homecoming 2: The Modernist as Populist Reading The Dumb Waiter A Slight Ache and the question of radio Betrayal and mass culture 3: Towards the Postmodern The memory plays: Pinter among the radicals
