| Harold Pinter(1930-2008)is a prominent contemporary British playwright and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.His plays are famous for their absurdity,and the scenes of the plays are usually in a closed room in London.Pinter’s dramas mostly describe the material and spiritual life of the characters in urban spaces,which can be classified as urban dramas.The spaces constructed in the plays,such as rental room,basement,dwelling room,mental hospital,office,and station,are typical urban heterotopias.The Room,The Caretaker,and Victoria Station are Pinter’s typical representatives of urban drama,in which the urban spaces are full of contradictions and tension,writing the power dispute and marginalized “other” in the heterotopias.Michel Foucault regarded urban space as a heterogeneous space,believing that the city itself is a space of heterogeneity.The rental room,basement,dwelling room,mental hospital,office,and station in the plays are heterotopias different from the mainstream of the city.The characters in those heterotopias are the people with low social status,like immigrants,tramps,madmen,outcasts,and so on,who are the “other” in the city.So this thesis takes the above three plays of Pinter as research objects,through the detailed reading of the text and adopting Michel Foucault’s space theory and the theory of the “other” to implement the study.This thesis is divided into six parts.The first part introduces Pinter’s life and his main achievements,the literature review at home and abroad,and the related theories adopted in the thesis.The second chapter analyzes the heterogeneous forms of the rental room and basement in The Room,which are full of threat and crisis and they are disciplinary spaces for the “other”.The third chapter studies the abnormal forms of the residential house and mental hospital in The Caretaker,and analyzes the construction of “other” consciousness of old tramp and madman.The fourth chapter analyzes the heterogeneous forms of office and station in Victoria Station,exploring the “other” consciousness of the Controller as a loser of dreaming colonization and the Driver as a wanderer of being colonized.The fifth chapter explores the motivation and significance of urban heterotopias writing in Pinter’s dramas by connecting to his unique life experience,Jewish identity,and historical background.The sixth chapter is the conclusion.The study finds that the constructions of the urban spaces in the plays have a distinct form of heterotopias,which deviate from the mainstream of society.There are four types of heterotopias in the three plays,including heterotopia of crisis,heterotopia of deviance,heterotopia of compensation,and heterotopia of illusion.The characters on the marginalization of the city struggle to survive in these heterogeneous spaces,which exposes the survival plight of “others” in the modern western society,thus the object’s consciousness of the “other” is constructed and the exclusion and indifference to the “other” by the mainstream of western society are revealed;and the dark side of the bright international metropolitan London is pictured with the absurd spaces,absurd relationships,absurd lives and absurd spirits of people,which are very heterogeneous.The writing of urban heterotopias and“other” consciousness reflects Pinter’s unique life experiences as a Jewish immigrant descendant in London and the social problems in Pinter’s time.Also,it shows Pinter’s humanistic care for the marginalized group and progresses the dramatist’s sense of responsibility.And it implies the playwright’s appeal to people to accept differences and respect “others” in order to eliminate alienation and coexist harmoniously. |
