Harold Pinter and the twilight of modernism / Varun Begley.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction. A last modernist ; 'someone called Pinter' ; Resistance ; Negation, autonomy, commitment ; Politics ; Popular culture ; Immanent criticism ; Cultural studies ; Moonlight and modernity. -- The politics of negation. Reading The birthday party ; The aesthetics of resistance: The caretaker ; Anti-Oedipus: The homecoming. -- The modernist as populist. Reading The dumb waiter ; A slight ache and the question of radio ; Betrayal and mass culture. -- Towards the postmodern. The memory plays: Pinter among the radicals ; A poetics for thugs.

"Examining plays from 1958 to 1996, Varun Begley's Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism argues that Pinter's work simultaneously embodies the modernist principle of negation and the more fluid aesthetics of the postmodern." "Pinter is arguably one of the most popular and perplexing of modern dramatists writing in English. His plays prefigured, then chronicled, the crumbling divide between modernism and its historical 'others': popular entertainment, politically committed art, and technological mass culture. Begley sheds new light on Pinter's work by applying the methods and problems of cultural studies discourse. Viewing his plays as a series of responses to fundamental aesthetic and political questions within modernism, Begley argues that, collectively, they narrate a prehistory of the postmodern."--Jacket.

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