New World Order Of Postmodernism In The Plays Of Harold Pinter

The book reconnoiters the New World Order of Postmodernism in five plays The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965) and Celebration (2000) of Harold Pinter. With culturally structured, incomprehensibly manipulated, dual and fragmented characters, Harold Pinter analyses the ambiguities of political system. It is perhaps the System that forcibly drags Stanley to a world of systems in The Birthday Party. The situation of Ruth in The Homecoming clearly indicates the inevitable grip of this System. The last play Celebration overtly ridicules the very political system we approve of wherein the strategy consultants and the corporate people define the organized mechanism of this SYSTEM! The internalization of power which the power structures of societies and politics possess, appears largely in his plays, providing postmodernism its duality. Pinter offers us a true picture of our postmodernist culture an apocalyptic world at the edge of civilization.

The book reconnoiters the New World Order of Postmodernism in five plays The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965) and Celebration (2000) of Harold Pinter. With culturally structured, incomprehensibly manipulated, dual and fragmented characters, Harold Pinter analyses the ambiguities of political system. It is perhaps the System that forcibly drags Stanley to a world of systems in The Birthday Party. The situation of Ruth in The Homecoming clearly indicates the inevitable grip of this System. The last play Celebration overtly ridicules the very political system we approve of wherein the strategy consultants and the corporate people define the organized mechanism of this SYSTEM! The internalization of power which the power structures of societies and politics possess, appears largely in his plays, providing postmodernism its duality. Pinter offers us a true picture of our postmodernist culture an apocalyptic world at the edge of civilization.

The book is a study of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, arguably the two most eminent British playwrights of the past sixty years or so, from a perspective of what it describes as a poetics of postmodern drama. Arguing for the application of Linda Hutcheon’s model of postmodernism to the study of drama, Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama shows that postmodern drama should be seen as a self-consciously contradictory and double-coded phenomenon, one which simultaneously inscribes and subverts the conventional categories of dramatic representation. In spite of its indebtedness to Beckett’s Absurdist and Brecht’s Epic theaters, postmodern drama should not be conflated with either. This is primarily because postmodern drama retains a critical edge towards contemporary reality in a manner which Hutcheon very aptly terms as a ‘complicitous critique’. The book demonstrates that both Pinter and Stoppard are pre-eminently postmodern in their treatment of issues such as the human subject, the notion of truth, historical verifiability and linguistic reference. Pinter’s preoccupation with non-referential modes of language-use, the role of power in the construction of the subject, and unreliable memories is as potent a way of disrupting the representational status of drama as Stoppard’s repeated recourse to devices such as parody, theater-within-theater and the fictional treatment of history.

Scrutinizing the critical tendency to label texts or writers as "postmodern", scholar Stephen Watt argues that "reading post modernly" merely implies reading culture more broadly. In contemporary drama, Watt considers postmodernity less a question of genre or media than a mode of subjectivity shared by both playwright and audience. 6 illustrations.

Updated edition of this popular Companion examining the wide range of Pinter's work, and his continuing impact and influence.

"The evidence assembled, Julius concludes his hard-hitting dissection of the landscapes of contemporary art by posing some important questions: what is art's future when its boundary-exceeding, taboo-breaking endeavors become the norm? And is anything of value lost when we submit to art's violation?"--BOOK JACKET.

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human? Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation. Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

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.