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This chapter studies the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd, which is based on the precepts of Antonin Artaud, and goes on to describe Artaud as the bridge between the present Theatre of the Absurd and the pioneers of the concept. It then identifies the five major dramatists of the absurd: Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. The chapter focuses on the works of these dramatists – except for Beckett – and views the Theatre of the Absurd in (Soviet) Russia and in east Europe (during the Cold War).

This chapter reviews the relation between the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and the tragic and argues that though Samuel Beckett's drama can't be pinned down as being either tragic or anti-tragic, Harold Pinter's The Caretaker has a strong claim to be a major modern tragedy. Beckett is without doubt the major figure associated with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. Waiting for Godot might be said to go beyond the tragic, at least in any conventional sense, and to deny the audience anything resembling catastrophe or catharsis as that would provide an inauthentic emotional consolation. It is possible that Pinter in The Caretaker is presenting a kind of counter-argument to the view that human beings are always free to overcome their past selves and create themselves anew.

This chapter takes its title from an episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visits a tawdry book stand seeking salacious titles, most of which are concealed from view. Using this trope of the hidden, a characteristic of the Freudian uncanny, this chapter explores uncanny affinities between—and eruptions of—hidden Irishness and Jewishness in selected works of John Banville, Brendan Behan, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and Howard Jacobson. The chapter also makes the case for a “multidirectional” historical memory that juxtaposes such widespread traumas as the Great Famine and the Holocaust, in the process continuing a long tradition of paralleling Irish and Jewish diasporic experiences. One test case of multidirectional reading is provided by Bernard MacLaverty’s adducing of parallels between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Shoah. The chapter and book conclude with a summary of more recent representations of immigrant America by Brian Friel and Gish Jen.

The 1960s was the start of a new cinema in Britain, a neo-modern remake of 1920s modernism for the sound era: 1963 with the release of The Servant was as momentous as 1929, and the expatriate eye was an integral part of modernism's second wave, the aesthetic dominant in the rise of the British neo-modern an aesthetic which can be called the aesthetics of the parallax view. In general, the writing is native, and the fusion of expatriate eye and insider's text counts for so much — John and Penelope Mortimer with Otto Ludwig Preminger, Harold Pinter with Joseph Losey, Edward Bond and Mark Peploe with Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthony Burgess freely providing his brilliant novel for Stanley Kubrick, Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet with Paul Dehn adapting John Le Carré. This chapter examines Joseph Losey's films The Servant and Accident; Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, The Passenger, and Profession: Reporter; Alain Resnais's Providence; and Chris Petit's Radio On.

The Comfort of Strangers (GB/Italy1990), directed by Paul Schrader and written by Harold Pinter (from the short novel by Ian McEwan), who had supplied the 1960s with its premier parable on power and sexuality in The Servant, was no success with audiences or critics, the latter nearly completely missing the obvious redux on a sexualized and cannibalistic fascism that arrived in the 1970s with Visconti, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, and Pasolini. This chapter argues that like The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1971), as well as their heirs from Fassbinder's German Woman trilogy to Szabo's Mephisto (1981), Schrader’s The Comfort ofStrangers locates a sociopolitical tension between high and low art.

Kant’s “transcendental aesthetic” is a touchstone of modern philosophy regarding affect, sensation, and space and time, as well as aesthetic theory. It postulates that the mind senses space and time without the presence of any external object. Space and time are the mind’s self-affection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty contests the disembodied nature of Kant’s postulate by examining the ambiguities of touching/being touched/touching oneself. Intriguingly different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty by Daniel Heller-Roazen and Judith Butler are shown to address the otherness in self-affection. It is then argued that self-arousing passions such as jealousy are turned outward in Aristotle but inward in modern settings; Harold Pinter’s Betrayal dramatizes jealousy’s involuted rage, an affecting of oneself rather than a violence inflicted on another. A juxtaposition of Poe and Freud brings to light the question of affect and self-affection in aesthetic theory itself. Does reception retrace the artwork’s creation, or are the motives and gratifications of creation radically divergent from the gratifications and affects in reception? Heidegger’s approach to mood, emotion, or state-of-mind as attunement questions the Kantian inside/outside in perception and feeling. Beyond that, it sits at the heart of such central concepts as the “ontological difference,” “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand,” and the temporality of Angst.

This concluding chapter recounts Harold Pinter's speech after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature on December 7, 2005. He provides a remarkable distinction between the realms of art and the real, entailing the practical repudiation of his edgy postmodern doctrine of an almost half-century before. His distinction between truth-telling and lying could not capture the complex sifting and crafting of information during the buildup to Iraq war. That more complex relation between language and the real was suggested most baldly in journalist Ron Suskind's story in a summer 2002 interview with a “senior adviser to Bush,” Karl Rove. He said that people are now “in the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”

This chapter takes up a Jewish joke about dirt on the forehead of house-breakers, a logical exemplum about dirt on the foreheads of logic students, and T.S. Eliot's “Ash Wednesday.” In each case, the unseen mark of death must be inferred from the dirty foreheads of others. The structure of inference-one person must read death from the dirtiness of two others-is also manifest in Kafka's The Trial, which makes adult commonness the essence of death, and Pinter's The Birthday Party, which make dirtiness visible as the inferred sign of adulthood.

This chapter weaves Kant’s concept of reflective judgment into Adam Smith’s conception of an inner person he called ‘the impartial spectator’. Smith argues that all trade (of the amiable and hence civilizing form) is grounded in our capacity for sympathy. Whilst this is in part self love and so vanity, Smith argues we can learn to become praiseworthy (rather than just praised) by inculcating within us an imagined spectator whose role is to critically assess our feeling, thought, and action. In discussing the play Celebration by Harold Pinter, whose central characters are two strategists, Holt considers the viability of Smith’s ideas in relation to the strategic capacity for self presentation and hence judgment.