Postmodernism And Modernism Essay

INTRODUCTION
I’m convinced that what happens in my plays could happen anywhere, at any time, in any place, although the events may seem unfamiliar at first glance. (Pinter, Harold Pinter: Plays, 2 ix)
Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest post-war generation dramatists, Harold Pinter’s fame rests on not only his popular dramas, poems, sketches, short stories, but also on his political activism which is rooted in his concern for people and their impoverished mental and physical condition in post-war Europe. In fact, it can be said that many of his works are a reflection of his political activism against the abuse of power in the familial, social and political sphere and its somatic and psychosomatic impact on the

. . . But while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude towards a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history {think of The Waste Land, for instance, or of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse}, but presents fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. . . . Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn’t lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let’s not pretend art can make meaning then. Let’s just play with nonsense!

His political concerns arose from his deep-rooted hatred, disgust and contempt against all forms of totalitarian agencies that abused human rights, disrupted peaceful lives and inflicted torture on political dissenters, minority groups, women, the poor, the weaker, smaller nations etc. Like a post-modernist he was concerned with the cons of logo-centrism as it leads to centralization of power, with only a few powerful people to use and abuse it. He was a playwright and a polemicist who advocated the cause of all abjected beings and highlighted the dangers of the social evils prevalent in the society. In a career spanning six decades, he had written for the stage, the radio and the television and also engaged himself as a screenplay writer, an actor, and a director and later as a political activist. His plays are an exploration of human condition when confronted by social problems which are often termed as pathologies of the society. The term ‘pathology’ originates from the Greek pathos which means ‘suffering’ and logia which means ‘study of’ (“pathology”). In medical science, ‘pathology’ is a term which means the anatomical condition of a disease or illness. The term when added with the word ‘social’ refers to the diseases or illnesses of the society. F. A. Pickworth has provided an interesting analogy between medical