This slide is modernist literature paper presentation

1. Topic: Political reading of The Birthday party by Harold Pinter
● Name: Malek Hinaben Ibrahimbhai
● Paper no. : 9 The Modernist literature
● Roll no. : 8
● Semester: MA Semester 3
● Year: 2019-21
● Enrollment no. : 2069108420200026
● Email Id: hinamalek21@gmail.com
● Submitted to: Department of English M.K.
Bhavanagar University

2. Biography of the Author
● He was an English playwright,
known for his So-called
‘Comedies of Menace’, which
humorously and cynically
depict people attempt to
communicate as they react to
an invasion or treat of an
invasion of their lives.
*Harold Pinter*

3. ● As an English playwright
● Harold Pinter's plays are noted for their use of
silence to increase tension, understatement, and
cryptic small talk.
● Pinter’s said-
"I don't know how music can influence writing,
but it has been very important for me, both
jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music
continually in writing, which is a different
matter from having been influenced by it."

4. ● He was born in Hackeny, a working - class neighbourhood in
London's East End, the son of a tailor.
● his parents were Jewish, born in England.
● Pinter lived with 26 other boys in a castle on the coast. At the
age of 14, he returned to London.

5. Introduction of 'The Birthday party’
● The Birthday Party may have been
a theatrical failure in 1958 but by
the time of his death in 2008
Harold Pinter had become one of
the most famous dramatists in the
world.
● This play is fully reading of the
political perspective. We can see
that in these are the character.

6. The play is political perspective
● Michael Billington recounts the strong reactions that critics had to
early performances of The Birthday Party, and examines the way
that Pinter's play engages with ideas about menace, memory and
political resistance.
● The Birthday Party signs of his abiding obsessions. A minimalist
technique with political anger in a way that made a profound
impact in countries that had experienced oppression.
● The Birthday Party is full of Pinter trademarks, it has a larger
significance. In writing a biography of Pinter, I discovered that he
is the poet of memory. It was trifle disingenuous.

7. characters in this play:
Stanely Webber
Petey Boles
Meg Boles
Goldberg
McCann
Lulu

8. Political reading of the characters
● Standly represents underdeveloped.
● He is an artist who had rebelled against the mode of life
which society tries to impose upon its members but the
pressures of society make the artist conform to the prevailing
social manners and mores.
● Society could not tolerate the free - thinking individualistic
artist because it saw him as a threat to its own stability.
● Stanley, he said, was fighting for his life against forces
‘compounded of the shit-stained strictures of centuries of
“tradition”’. That is a major key to the play.
Stanely Webber

9. The Organisation of the play
● That Stanley is accused of having betrayed is not
specifically identified although it may be seen to stem
from a number of possible sources. These are the source
of Criminal , religious, metaphysical or political.

10. ART TRUTH AND POLITICS
● In this essay he talks about political theatre presents an entirely
different set of problems. sermonising has to be avoided at all cost.
Objectivity is essential.
● The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air.
● The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own
taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach
them from a variety of angles…

11. Continue…….
● "In my play the Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of
options to operaté in a dense forest of possibility before finally
focussing on an act of subjugation At last we can say he
charged his play with bleak sense of modernity and modern
relationship.
Shetir takes issue with Edward Albee:
● She argues that Pinter is indeed a "Splendid Writer" not because
he is a "good political activist" or for his "brave political stand
against policies"

12. Citation
● (Harold Pinter in Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton,
2000) - biography of the birthday party
● Knopf, Robert. Theatre Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 1993, pp.
382–384. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3208366. Accessed 1
Dec. 2020.
● Pinter, Harold. “Art Truth & Politics: Excerpts from the 2005
Nobel Lecture.” World Literature Today, vol. 80, no. 3, 2006, pp.
21–27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40159078. Accessed 1
Dec. 2020.
● Pinter, Harold. 'The Birthday Party', in Pinter: Plays One. (London:
Eyre Methuen, 1986). ISBN 0-413-34650-1

13. Thank you