caa a22 4500 378900285 CHVBK 20180305123516.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e200401 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/zaa.2004.52.1.53 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/zaa.2004.52.1.53 Osterwalder Hans Dreamscapes: Harold Pinter's The Room and Franz Kafka's "Auf der Galerie” [Elektronische Daten] [Hans Osterwalder] The kinship between Pinter and Kafka is patently obvious and has been pointed out by numerous critics, the dreamlike quality of the texts of these two masters of menace and mystery being one of the aspects of their work on which there is a critical consensus. Therefore Freud's trail-blazing early work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) provides tools for shedding light on some of the obscurities of the two writers. This essay picks out Pinter's first play The Room (1957) and Kafka's short story "Auf der Galerie” (1917) to demonstrate that the basic dream mechanisms of displacement and condensation are the creative principles underlying these two surrealist texts. The Lacanian angle of these two concepts is taken into account, but the reading stops short of Lacan's radical conclusions about the ‘free-floating signifier' and ‘impassable primordial difference.' The other extreme avoided here is the neat Freudian pigeon-holing indulged in by some early psychoanalytical critics. Freudian concepts do contribute to an understanding of this kind of text, but there is always a residue of ambiguity © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/1(2004-01), 53-62 52:1<53 2004 52 zaa https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.1.53 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.1.53 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Osterwalder Hans NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/1(2004-01), 53-62 52:1<53 2004 52 zaa CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter