Description

• Title:
  The Silencing of Dissent: Harold Pinter’s Bleak Political Vision
• Creator:
  Mirowska, Paulina
• Contributor:
  Kazik, Joanna;
  Mirowska, Paulina;
  University of Łódź, Institute of English Studies, Department of Studies in Drama and Pre-1800 English Literature;
  Paulina Mirowska is a lecturer in drama in the Department of Studies in Drama and Pre-1800 English Literature, Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. Her academic interests include modern and contemporary British and American drama, British political theatre/drama, the language of modern drama, and, in particular, the problem of verbal aggression and manipulation. Her research specialty is the work of the modern British playwright, screenwriter, director and social activist Harold Pinter. In 2011, she received her PhD in British literature from the University of Łódź. Her doctoral dissertation centred on the micropolitical dimension of Pinter’s dramatic writing. Her current research focuses on Anglo-American interplay in recent drama.
• Description:
  The article centres upon one of Harold Pinter’s last plays, Celebration, first performed at the Almeida Theatre, London, on 16 March 2000. Similarly to Party Time, a dystopian political play written almost a decade earlier, Celebration pursues the theme of a sheltered zone of power effectively marginalising a social “other.” This time, however, Pinter adopts the mode of comedy to dramatise the fragile and circumscribed existence of dissent and the moral coarseness of complacent elites. The article traces a number of intriguing analogies between Celebration and Pinter’s explicitly political plays of the 1980s and 1990s dealing with the suppression of dissident voices by overwhelming structures of established power. It is demonstrated how – despite the play’s fashionable restaurant setting, ostensibly far removed from the torture sites of One for the Road, Mountain Language and The New World Order – Pinter succeeds in relating the insulated world of Celebration to the harsh reality of global oppression. What is significant, I argue here against interpreting the humorous power inversions of the social behaviour in Celebration as denoting any fundamental changes in larger sociopolitical structures. It is rather suggested that the play reveals the centrality of Pinter’s scepticism about the possibility of eluding, subverting or curtailing the silencing force of entrenched status quo, implying perpetual nature of contemporary inequities of power. I also look at how the representatives of the empowered in-group in the play contain transgressing voices and resort to language distortion to vindicate oppression.;
  Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Międzynarodowe;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2019.06.10;
  2013
• Type:
  Book chapter
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf;
  image/jpeg
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Kazik J., Mirowska P. (red.), Studies in English Drama and Poetry vol. 3. Reading subversion and transgression, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2013;;
  Studies in English Drama and Poetry;;
  3
• Subject:
  silencing of dissent;
  Harold Pinter;
  Bleak Political Vision
• Identifier:
  Mirowska P., The Silencing of Dissent: Harold Pinter’s Bleak Political Vision, [w:] Studies in English Drama and Poetry vol. 3. Reading subversion and transgression, Kazik J., Mirowska P. (red.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2013, s. 79-91, doi: 10.18778/7525-994-0.07;
  978-83-7525-994-0;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/28798 ;
  10.18778/7525-994-0.07
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  seek permission
• Type:
  text