Post WWII developments -- - PowerPoint Presentation

1. Post WWII developments--1948 Butler Education Act guaranteed (and made compulsory) free secondary education up to the age of 15. Rise of new working-class intelligentsia in literature, class mobility through university education.--1953 Age of TV in Britain commences. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is broadcast live on the BBC. --1954: first nuclear power station in Soviet Union. --

2. --1956 Suez Canal Crisis in Egypt=humiliation for Great Britainthe traditional values of patriotism, family, good manners seem absurd to a post-war generation. But no new values have taken the place of old values. Anger and frustration comes from the conviction that life cannot be meaningless and absurd as it seems. --1957: Space Age begins, first artificial earth satellite installed by Soviet Union. --1960: laser is built. --1961: first man to orbit earth. Invention of silicon chips. Launch of first commercial satellite.

3. Harold Pinter 1930-2008

4. • born 1930 in Hackney, East London• Jewish Eastern European ancestry, father was a tailor• greatly influenced by his high school English teacher and friendships at Hackney Downs School• evacuated from their home during the Blitz in 1940-41. Biographer Billington writes that this experience left him with memories of “loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss…” • began writing poetry at age 12, first published in school magazine in 1947, in 1950 in Poetry London• in 1948 was called for National Service but registered as a conscientious objector, was fined for refusing to serve• attended Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms, but hated it, pretended a nervous breakdown and left in 1949

5. • from 1954-1959 acted under the stage name David Baron • married to actress Vivien Merchant from 1956-1980, and then historian Lady Antonia Fraser from 1980-2008; one son Daniel Brand, a musician and writer• composed 27 screenplays, including The Last Tycoon (1976) adapted from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman from the novel by John FowlesInfluenced by the absurdists Beckett and the French playwright Eugéne Ionesco• diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2001, underwent chemotherapy, continued to act and write poetry in addition to political activism• Nobel prize in literature in 2005 • died of liver cancer in 2008

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7. „His territory is typically a room (refuge, prison cell, trap) symbolic of its occupants’ world. Into this, and into their ritualized relationship with its rules and taboos, comes a stranger on to whom—as on to a screen—the occupants project their deepest desires, guilts, neuroses. The breakdown that follows is mirrored in the breakdown of language.” –Norton Anthology

8. „He has said of language: ‚The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen…” –Norton Anthology

9. “…since the majority of politicians, on the basis of the evidence available to us, are not interested in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.” 11:19 Nobel lecture „Art, truth and politics”

10. “A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it…you’re out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection, unless you lie, in which case of course you have constructed your own protection…” Nobel lecture

11. “We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections, but sometimes a writer has to smash that mirror, for it is on the other side that the truth stares at us.” Nobel lecture

12. „From the very outset, the defining quality of a Pinter play is not so much fear and menace –– though they are undoubtedly present –– as a yearning for some lost Eden as a refuge from the uncertain, miasmic present„—Michael Billington

13. The Birthday Party (1958) closed after only eight performances but was rescued by the critic Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times who said that, „…Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.” based on Pinter’s own experience at boarding house while acting in EastbourneThe Dumb Waiter (1959) premiered in Germany and then at Hampstead theatre club in London in 1960

14. “In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focusing on an act of subjugation. “ Nobel lecture

15. According to Pinter's official biographer, Michael Billington, in Harold Pinter, echoing Pinter's own retrospective view of it, The Birthday Party is "a deeply political play about the individual's imperative need for resistance."

16. Hemingway's The Killers [1927],one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz KafkaAlso compare with the chapter „The Devil” in The Brothers Karamazov

17. Main characters:MegPeteyStanleyMcCannGoldbergLulu

18. Mel Gussow quotes Pinter as stating: "The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I've ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, 'Stan, don't let them tell you what to do.' I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now.”

19. “…the central image and central metaphor, the dumbwaiter, while "despatching ever more unlikely orders," serves as "both a visual gag and a metaphor for manipulative authority" –Michael BillingtonMain characters:BenGus

20. “[Pinter] had – and still [in 1996 through to the time of his death in 2008] has – an acute sense of the fragility of earthly happiness and of the terrors that haunt us even from infancy" --Billington