Crossing the Border between Reality and Fiction in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Authors

  • Florentina Anghel

Keywords:

reality, fiction, British contemporary drama, the process of creation, fiction transposed into reality, border-crossing

Abstract

Martin McDonagh is a contemporary British writer with Irish parents and his play The Pillowman unrolls in an unidentifiable totalitarian setting, tackling problems related to author-work-reader relationship. The paper focuses on reality-fiction interaction at the level of the process of creation and on the impact of the work of art on the readers. McDonagh’s play is a warning against the influence the audience may have on the writer and against the impulses a work of art raises in a reader, presenting the entire process as a cyclic movement having reality as a starting point and return to reality.

References

Belsey, C. 2005. Culture and the Real. London and New York: Routledge.

Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakarvorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fowles, J. 1970. The Aristos. New York: New American Library.

Freud, S. 1990. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: WW.Norton & Company, Ltd.

Freud, S. 1972. “Creative writers and day-dreaming”. In D. Lodge (ed.) 20th Century Criticism. London: Longman, 36-42.

Kalb, J. 2005. Profound Pathologies: A Defense of The Pilowman. [Internet]. Available at: http://www.hotreview.org/articles/profoundpath_print.htm [31.1.2010].

McDonagh. M. 2003. The Pillowman. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc.

O’Brien, F. 2002. The Third Policeman. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press.

Pinter, H. 2004. One for the Road in The Longman Anthology of Drama and Theatre. London: Longman.

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Published

25-06-2021

How to Cite

Anghel, F. (2021). Crossing the Border between Reality and Fiction in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman . Philologia, 8(1), 99–106. Retrieved from http://philologia.org.rs/index.php/ph/article/view/197

Issue

Section

Nauka o književnosti/Literary Studies