Aggressive Language in Literature: A Pragmatic Approach

Aggression is a negative form of an anti-social behavior. It is produced because of a particular reason, desire, want, need, or due to the psychological state of the aggressor. It injures others physically or psychologically. Aggressive behaviors in human interactions cause discomfort and disharmony among interlocutors. The paper aims to identify how aggressive language manifests itself in the data under scrutiny in terms of the pragmatic paradigm. Two British literary works are the data; namely, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956), and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter (1957). This paper endeavors to answer the question of how aggressive language is represented in literature pragmatically? It is hoped to be significant to linguistic and psychological studies in that it clarifies how aggression is displayed in human communications linguistically. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to verify the findings. It ends with some concluding remarks, the most important of which are: insulting, belittling, ridiculing and threatening are prevalent speech acts; simile, hyperbole, metaphor and repetition appear due to Grice’s maxims breaching while the use of taboo words, calling names, or abusive words are the impoliteness strategies that are distinguished in the data.

Aggressive Language in Literature: A Pragmatic Approach

Aggression is a negative form of an anti-social behavior. It is produced because of a particular reason, desire, want, need, or due to the psychological state of the aggressor. It injures others physically or psychologically. Aggressive behaviors in human interactions cause discomfort and disharmony among interlocutors. The paper aims to identify how aggressive language manifests itself in the data under scrutiny in terms of the pragmatic paradigm. Two British literary works are the data; namely, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne (1956), and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter (1957). This paper endeavors to answer the question of how aggressive language is represented in literature pragmatically? It is hoped to be significant to linguistic and psychological studies in that it clarifies how aggression is displayed in human communications linguistically. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to verify the findings. It ends with some concluding remarks, the most important of which are: insulting, belittling, ridiculing and threatening are prevalent speech acts; simile, hyperbole, metaphor and repetition appear due to Grice’s maxims breaching while the use of taboo words, calling names, or abusive words are the impoliteness strategies that are distinguished in the data.

The Absurd Representations of Pinter’s Women: A study into the representation of female characters in the plays of Harold Pinter

<p>This thesis is concerned with analysing the representation of the female characters found in a sample of Harold Pinter’s plays. The plays examined are The Homecoming (1964), Betrayal (1978) and Celebration (1999). Through a close reading of the texts and reference to past interpreters this work attempts to locate Harold Pinter within the theatrical topography, concentrating on his convergence with the Absurdist genre. This research then assesses the extent to which Pinter’s characters exhibit the conventions pertinent to the genre and Pinter’s unique playwriting style, with particular reference to the dissonance in representation present between male and female characters. To conclude, the project reacts to the inequality present in Pinter’s depiction of female characters, which informs the construction of a theatrical play script, titled Cleanskin.</p>

The Absurd Representations of Pinter’s Women: A study into the representation of female characters in the plays of Harold Pinter

<p>This thesis is concerned with analysing the representation of the female characters found in a sample of Harold Pinter’s plays. The plays examined are The Homecoming (1964), Betrayal (1978) and Celebration (1999). Through a close reading of the texts and reference to past interpreters this work attempts to locate Harold Pinter within the theatrical topography, concentrating on his convergence with the Absurdist genre. This research then assesses the extent to which Pinter’s characters exhibit the conventions pertinent to the genre and Pinter’s unique playwriting style, with particular reference to the dissonance in representation present between male and female characters. To conclude, the project reacts to the inequality present in Pinter’s depiction of female characters, which informs the construction of a theatrical play script, titled Cleanskin.</p>

7. The ingathering

“The ingathering” surveys modern Jewish literature after the Second World War beyond Israel and the United States and meditates on the multilingual aspect of Jewish literature. This includes the work of Alberto Gerchunoff and Jacobo Timerman in Argentina, Clarice Lispector and Moacyr Scliar in Brazil, Elias Canetti in Bulgaria, Dan Jacobson and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, and Harold Pinter and Howard Jacobson in the United Kingdom. Jewish writers are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, a position that allows them a unique perspective full of nuance. Therefore, modern Jewish literature is truly global, in regard to not only its authors but also its multifaceted audiences.

“You Are Older, although You Do Not Know That”: Time, Consciousness, and Memory in “A Kind of Alaska” by Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

<i>“A Kind of Alaska”</i> is a one-act play by the British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter (1930–2008), based on the book <i>Awakenings</i> by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933–2015). This play, first performed in 1982, is centered around the character of Deborah, a middle-aged woman, struck by <i>encephalitis lethargica</i> (“sleeping sickness”) at the age of 16, who wakes up after 29 years of apparent sleep following the injection of an unnamed drug. This article analyzes how Pinter’s drama investigated the mysterious and fascinating relationship between time, memory, and consciousness. The term “awakenings,” chosen by Sacks himself, clearly refers to the restoration of voluntary motor function in patients with postencephalitic parkinsonism who responded to levodopa. However, it also suggests that these patients had an impairment of awareness. Actually, beyond the acute phase, subjects with postencephalitic parkinsonism were not sleeping but severely akinetic and therefore probably aware of the passage of time. Oliver Sacks probably did not entirely recognize the intrinsic contradiction between prolonged sleep (with consequent impairment of awareness and subjective “time gap”) of the acute lethargic phase and the severe akinesia with preserved awareness of the time-passing characteristic of postencephalitic parkinsonism. This confusion was further compounded by Harold Pinter in his play.

Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes

This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period.

A Paradigmatic Critique of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker

Harold Pinter lived and wrote his plays after the World War period. In this period scholars were associated with the portrayal of unrefined and crude factors of warfare which were, directly and indirectly, related to the people of that time. They also depicted how governments were exploiting common people in the name of safety and warfare. Despite the fact that Pinter's plays are not actually about warfare or the circumstance of Wars, his plays have the impressions of warfare in various shades. His plays display various levels of human existence. There is an exploration of mental, social, financial, human relationship, and the existential methodology of existence with ludicrousness in his plays. Pinter’s relationship is with the real elements of human existence and activities. He denies the idea of realism in his plays and says that “If you press me for a definition. I would say that what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism” (The Essential Pinter, 11). He always tried to depict concrete and particular idea in his plays through concrete characters. He never wrote his plays for any kind of abstract idea. He is associated with realism in the matter of approach of depiction to the crude and drastic realities of the time. He has represented the post-war British socio-political issues, sensibilities and psychological as well as mental states of the human mind.

Nombres impropios

Halleluja! It works. We blew the shit out of them. Harold Pinter Cuál es la guerra justa. Ninguna música deja de sonar patriótica en la parodia, ni las banderas retienen categoría de símbolo, pero todos disparan desde su escondrijo o vuelo no tripulado. Cómo los hombres de espíritu pierden la independencia en medio de los gritos de cuervo de la diplomacia. Escribir es la cuestión, Adorno El Viejo, viendo Kabul, Sabra, El Tinduf o Katyn. Todos, nombres impropios. Pronunciados en la distancia no ocurre nada, aunque en el centro del horror su peste suena. El costo estándar del minuto de guerra no importa. La tortura no. La electricidad en la planta de los pies, espinas bajo las uñas, la bolsa en la cabeza, la picana creada en Francia para Argelia, en USA para Vietnam, en URSS para Polonia. Perfeccionada en el Cono Sur a fuerza de desaparecidos. Universal en Asia y África para llegar a Abu Ghraib. Qué deja de ser una guerra ahora, declarada o no, si cada avión sin matrícula ni bandera porta a sus torturadores en el limbo del cielo prometido a los culpables....