The slight ache: Harold Pinter and modernity

The theatre of Harold Pinter reflects a period of cultural transition. Pinter is an established figure in the modern canon, yet his work raises problems of meaning, medium, and reception that anticipate postmodern culture. The dissertation first discusses Pinter's relation to Brecht, Beckett, and other figures in modern drama. At the same time, I argue, to write the genealogy of Pinter simply in terms of literary modernism is to ignore those strains of even his theatrical work that operate in the registers of the popular media.; A second source of complication is the neat coincidence of Pinter's career and the post-1956 development of British political theatre. I contrast Pinter's work with what are usually taken to be the politically more committed modernisms in British drama of the 60s and 70s. The dissertation situates both Pinter and socialist theatre within a problematic of artistic commitment. Here different responses to the modernist problem of political art are for a final moment juxtaposed, while already imbricated in changing fields of mass culture and new forms of intellectual and social life.; The dissertation argues that what is still needed is a grasp of Pinter's essential modernity, a method that will consider his work not as an eccentric, mystifying British anomaly, but instead as a response, within the context of postwar Britain, to the political and aesthetic questions posed by modernism generally. The dissertation therefore takes the form of a series of discussions of Pinter in relation to a broader theory of culture. The hope is to open Pinter to unexpected filiations, and to cast light on problems of understanding and defining modernity.