Reunion, a Novella by Fred Uhlman (1971) adapted to the Cinema by Harold Pinter for Jerry Schatzberg (1989): from (auto)biography to politics

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his memory plays Harold Pinter staged his own aesthetic revolution by breaking out of the traps represented by the Comedies of Menace. Pinter, as Noël Coward said, is a genuine original and a superb craftsman. In Old Times, he drastically breaks our traditional understanding of “time” and “memory”, endowing memory with a special quality. It becomes a net which can be weaved randomly. From the perspective of spatial theory, the paper aims at analyzing the temporal characteristics and spatial characteristics of Old Times and exploring the inner world of modern people. It comes to a conclusion that characters create the past story according to their psychological or tactical needs of the moment; in other words, memory is the means of psychological domination. The play also intends to reveal something universal: the sense of crisis and loneliness. Deeley and Anna trap themselves in power struggle because they see each other as a threat to their relationship with Kate. So it suggests that each man is an island.

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Harold Pinter

The Yearbook of English Studies ◽

10.2307/3507044 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 363

Author(s):

Hersh Zeifman ◽

Arnold P. Hinchliffe

Keyword(s):

Harold Pinter

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A Brief History of Clive Barker

New Theatre Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0266464x07000218 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 295-303

Author(s):

Clive Barker

Keyword(s):

Harold Pinter ◽

History Of ◽

The Way

I was born in Middlesbrough in 1931, and it's been uphill all the way since then. To a certain extent my life has been a process of being sold a dream which has never been realized, along with many other people in my generation, from Henry Livings and Harold Pinter through Wesker and Arden to John McGrath. We were the wartime generation, the last generation to remember what life was like before the war and during it.

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Aggressive Language in Literature: A Pragmatic Approach

Arab World English Journal ◽

10.24093/awej/vol12no4.16 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 224-242

Author(s):

Hanan Abdul-kareem Kadhim ◽

Wafaa Sahib Mehdi Mohammed

Keyword(s):

Speech Acts ◽

Psychological State ◽

Pragmatic Approach ◽

Harold Pinter ◽

Qualitative And Quantitative ◽

Human Interactions ◽

John Osborne ◽

Quantitative Analyses ◽

Pragmatic Paradigm ◽

Negative Form

Aggression is a negative form of an anti-social behavior. It is produced because of a particular reason, desire, want, need, or due to the psychological state of the aggressor. It injures others physically or psychologically. Aggressive behaviors in human interactions cause discomfort and disharmony among interlocutors. The paper aims to identify how aggressive language manifests itself in the data under scrutiny in terms of the pragmatic paradigm. Two British literary works are the data; namely, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956), and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter (1957). This paper endeavors to answer the question of how aggressive language is represented in literature pragmatically? It is hoped to be significant to linguistic and psychological studies in that it clarifies how aggression is displayed in human communications linguistically. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to verify the findings. It ends with some concluding remarks, the most important of which are: insulting, belittling, ridiculing and threatening are prevalent speech acts; simile, hyperbole, metaphor and repetition appear due to Grice’s maxims breaching while the use of taboo words, calling names, or abusive words are the impoliteness strategies that are distinguished in the data.

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From Room to Tomb: Moonlight

ELOPE English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries ◽

10.4312/elope.9.1.63-75 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 63-75

Author(s):

Dilek Inan

Keyword(s):

Full Length ◽

Harold Pinter ◽

New Horizons

In 1993, a decade of directly political plays was followed by Moonlight, which in the Guardian’s words would “come as a shock to those who have lately pigeonholed Harold Pinter as a writer of bruising polemic” (Billington 1993, 1). Although Moonlight made history as Pinter’s first full length work for the theatre since Betrayal, it should rather be seen as an interval from politics where the playwright re-explores the interior landscapes of his early work, where he returns to the pastoral as a landscape of retreat and fantasy. Indeed, the play’s title suggests a pastoral realm. The heroine retreats into Nature through linguistic idealisation. Moonlight can best be comprehended as Pinter briefly leaving politics to explore new horizons – “his own private griefs and anguish in the most nakedly and unashamedly emotional of all his plays” (Billington 1996, 338). This paper evaluates Moonlight as a reworking of Pinter’s own roots thematically, stylistically and spatially.

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