‘An insistence in my mind’: Pinter’s Writing Ethic

Waters, Steve (2020) ‘An insistence in my mind’: Pinter’s Writing Ethic. In: Harold Pinter. Methuen Drama . Methuen/Bloomsbury, London, pp. 107-120. ISBN 978-1-3501-3362-4

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Abstract

This chapter is a playwright’s attempt to identify the specific power and singularity of Harold Pinter’s achievement, by means of looking closely at the scattered yet telling accounts of his writing process he offers. In so doing, I challenge Michael Billington’s endeavour in his seminal The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996) to unify Pinter’s plays under a legible, humanist rubric. Instead, in order to account for the extraordinary power of his work up until A Kind of Alaska (1982) , I take him at his word, acknowledging his refusal to explain the mysteries behind his work and his wider repudiation of ideologies beyond it. To that end I track how his aesthetic runs counter to the main currents of British new writing from the 1950s to the 1970s and treat Old Times (1971) and No Man’s Land (1975) as emblematic of this writing ethic, as allegories...

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Creative Writing Research Group
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	19 Jan 2022 08:30
Last Modified:	23 Jan 2022 06:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/83059
DOI:	10.5040/9781350133662.ch-6

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