Author Description

This book addresses three matters of fundamental importance for an understanding of Harold Pinter's work - how language functions in Pinter's plays, what the relationship is between language and subjectivity in the plays, and what the plays reveal about how language serves as a vehicle for cultural power. Pinter's work rejects any attempt to conceptualize language in terms of reference, expression, or communication. Rather, his plays exhibit a semiotic understanding of language that demands his audience focus not only on parole, the individual speech act, but also on langue, language as structured system that both enables and constrains parole. The langue that Pinter explores is the ensemble of codes, dominant discourses and structures of representation, and fragments of ideology that give voice to cultural power, creating the speaking subject in the image of that power. For all their attempts to "own" language, Pinter's characters discover that words constitute alienable property; that language forms, de-forms, and re-forms subjectivity; that, as a system preceding the individual, language carries embedded within it the values, desires, and imperatives of the Other - the dominant cultural order. By introducing questions of subject position and ideology into his discussion, author Marc Silverstein shows how the plays exhibit a political dimension largely ignored by the bulk of Pinter criticism, which attempts to classify his oeuvre as a form of absurdist drama. It is Silverstein's contention that Pinter does not concern himself with the fate of the individual lost in an incomprehensible and meaningless universe (the "absurdist" Pinter), but instead explores the vicissitudes of living within ideological, discursive, and social structures that always exceed the subject. Through detailed readings of The Birthday Party, The Collection, The Homecoming, Old Times, One for the Road, and Mountain Language, Silverstein argues that what is at stake in these plays is the statu