J.M. Synge Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

- by Kylie Dalton
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- Irish Literature, Irish Theatre and Drama, J.M. Synge, Dion Boucicault

Synge's 'Riders to the Sea' cannot be called a tragedy, for the conflict in the play is not between humans but between man and nature. The result of such a conflict is always destined to the victory of latter. Hence the outcome is... more

- by Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
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- Drama, Tragedy (Philosophy), J.M. Synge, Tragedy
- by Professor David Bolt
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- Disability Studies, James Joyce, Blindness, Disability Theory

One-act play of John Millington Synge (1871-1909) Riders to the Sea (1904) is about the life in the Aran Islands, power of nature and death. While the life endowed with the sea determines the fate of Irish islanders, their dependence on the water surrounding the Aran Islands brings death, too. The sea both provides life and causes death in the play. However, agency of the sea is not just bound to this dualistic nature in Synge's work. The vision of the mother Maurya about the deaths of her two sons, Michael and Bartley, upon the sea evidences that agentic power of the water is not only affiliated with its ontological presence, but also its epistemological capacity which is about the narrative ability of matter. This paper sets out to scrutinise agency of the sea in Synge's Riders to the Sea in terms of material ecocriticism and new materialisms.

- by Kübra Vural Özbey
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- J.M. Synge, New Materialism, New Materialisms, John Millington Synge

This essay explores the impact and influence of the Symbolist theatre and, in particular, of the dramas of Maeterlinck and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, on Fernando Pessoa and W.B. Yeats. It examines the way in which the principles underlying the theatre produced by those playwrights and that movement met with the aesthetic aspirations and philosophical inclinations of the two poets, which led them to engage with those principles and their enacting dramatic devices in their poetic drama. It also analyses points of contact between their works and works by those playwrights, their critique of their practices and efforts to surpass what they perceive as being their limitations and to make original contributions to the development of that strain of Symbolist theatre in the twentieth century. Palavras-chave Fernando Pessoa, O Marinheiro, Drama Estático & Extático, Yeats, Synge, Maeterlinck, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Teatro Simbolista. Resumo Este ensaio explora o impacto e a influência do teatro simbolista e, em particular, dos dramas de Maeterlinck e de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, sobre Fernando Pessoa e W.B. Yeats. Examina a forma como os princípios subjacentes ao teatro produzido por aqueles dramaturgos e aquele movimento foram ao encontro das aspirações estéticas e as preocupações e inclinações filosóficas de ambos os poetas, o que os levou a dialogarem com esses princípios e as suas estratégias de encenação nos seus dramas poéticos. Analisa, igualmente, pontos de contacto entre as suas obras e com as obras daqueles dramaturgos, a sua crítica das práticas que aqueles desenvolveram e esforço para ultrapassar o que percebem ser limitações e para oferecer contribuições originais para o desenvolvimento dessa linha de teatro simbolista no século XX.

This thesis addresses the complex relationship between fathers and sons in three highly successful literary texts that grapple with Irish nationalism: Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People. Each text comes from a different historical moment, but each of these moments is distinguished by major change, a change so paradigm-shifting as to be worthy of the adjective millennial. While multiple literary critics have paid huge attention to the figure of Ireland as mother—and, indeed, Ireland in other female roles (Old Woman, beautiful young queen, fabulous Sky Woman)—few have interrogated what dynamic father-son relationships "say" in stories, whether novels or plays, conscious of shifting political, social, and cultural realities in Ireland. It is with in this vacuum that I propose the literary device, the father and son trope, as an effective means for developing a discourse on the power struggle that is colonialism.

- by Marla Bruner
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Colonialism, Masculinity
- by Mousir Khan
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- J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World

Written in the late reaches of a dominant colonial tongue, the plays of J.M. Synge and Derek Walcott have created spaces of linguistic autonomy in English for minoritarian expression. Famously, Walcott has commented that he feels close to Irish writers, especially Synge, because “they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean” (1979, 288). Following this connection and the accumulating scholarly work connecting these cultural traditions, this paper examines how Synge’s early play Riders to the Sea (1904) and Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin (1954) adopt mourning and ghosts to intensify and change language. I argue that the plays’ ghosts emanate from the unreadable archive of the ocean as figures of unforgotten absence. Their hauntings provoke a mournful linguistic renewal but, crucially, provide characters no consolatory recompense. In other words, language emerges new but empty-handed from mourning beside the haunted sea; it expresses nothing but its own survival in the face of a memento mori and, in so doing, changes immeasurably.

- by Leif Schenstead-Harris
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- Irish Literature, Caribbean Literature, Ghosts, Derek Walcott

J.M. Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’, set in a cottage off the West of Ireland, is inspired by the author’s trips to the Aran Islands. The people he finds were “steeped in Catholicism and an elder paganism” (250). In a struggle against what seems to be insurmountable circumstances, the Aran family in the play have relied on faith to guide them, but superstition, however, has the upper-hand.

- by Mica Garrett
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- J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea

The parricide in The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge indicates the demise of protagonist's alienation from his "I" stemming from the father's domination. By this familial conundrum in the image of son/father-contextually of Ireland/England as well-the play gives a portrait about a conflict between two dichotomic "I"s, in which parental "I" annexes the other. So, while annexation of the father elevates his own authentic "I", it perforce rules out the son's "I" by imposing a constructed identity. In other words, liminal receptiveness of ontological "I" is pushed to the periphery by the authority. This leads to son's alienation from his own "authentic self", which, as a personal observation, is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger's Dasein that is lost in the hegemony of "dictatorship" culminating in an alienation of self under the banner of Distantiality (Entfremdung). This essay aims to reach a conclusion about the importance of symbolic parricide in exploring the dualities of the son and the father; relatedly Ireland and England; as well as interchangeable the other and "I" with reference to Dasein and Distantiality.

- by Oğuzhan Ayrım
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Martin Heidegger, Parricide
- by Giulia Bruna
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- Literary Journalism, Scottish Literature, Irish Studies, Reception Studies

Review of Mary Burke’s “Tinkers” by John L. Murphy in Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2011): 181-82.

- by Mary Burke
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- Ethnic Studies, William Butler Yeats, Romany Studies, Minority Studies

This paper draws on the history of the reception of evolutionary theory in Protestant Ireland to situate the innocent but paradoxically bohemian islander of J.M. Synge’s prose masterpiece, The Aran Islands. It suggests that Synge desired to construct Aran as an Eastern, pre-Celtic space outside the capitalist and evolutionary nexus. For Synge to acknowledge that this West of Ireland island group was anything less than a tabula rasa was to admit his fear of the menace posed to the Orientalised “primitive” native islanders by Darwinian theory and the forces of Western modernity.

- by Mary Burke
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Darwinism, Darwin
- by Gregory Castle
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, William Butler Yeats, Masculinity Studies
- by Mary Burke
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- William Butler Yeats, Identity (Culture), Minority Studies, Irish Theatre
- by Dario Calimani
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- Theatre of the Absurd, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge
- by Kathleen M Gough
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- Irish Studies, Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Drama

A comparison of the disturbances that erupted in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin during the opening run of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 with the response to the 1913 premiere in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde ballet and orchestral work, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps). There are startling similarities between the audiences’ actions at the Abbey and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and only six years separate the two events. What is even more extraordinary, when one considers that the two disturbances have not been read side by side, is that a list of the factors that contributed to the Paris riot are remarkably similar to the socio-political context often provided by contemporary scholars in relation to the Dublin fracas. The riots that met Playboy of the Western World became one of the landmarks of Irish theatre history, and are usually interpreted in terms of competing definitions of a national theatre. However, by putting the 1907 Playboy riots in the context of the very similar response to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Synge’s work is placed in the context of a modernist understanding of primitivism and aesthetic shock. This prompts a new understanding of what became known as ‘peasant drama’ in the early Abbey theatre, seeing it not as a form of realism, but as a critique of previous dramatic forms.

Bruna’s J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival advances a wide-ranging reassessment and illumination of Synge’s early twentieth-century travel texts, suggesting that his accounts, always alert to the effects of colonisation, uncover the modernity of the rural Irish, in opposition to more typical nationalist Revival-era accounts of the Irish peripheries, which often idealised the Irish peasantry and Irish islanders as dwellers in archaic cultural time. More…

- by Mary Burke
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- J.M. Synge, Irish Cultural Revival, J. M. Synge's Dramaturgy, Irish travel writing

The radical linguistic, literary and cultural realignment that occurred in the period 1880–1940 emerged from the traumatic changes of the earlier period. Among the most significant events of nineteenth-century Irish history was the gigantic shift from a largely monolingual Irish-speaking population to a largely monolingual English-speaking population. ‘Language shift’, the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon one vernacular for another, is both complicated and multifaceted, and depends on internal recruitment.

(Syracuse University Press, 2017)
Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge’s nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination.
'J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival' is the first comprehensive study of Synge’s travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge’s nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge’s writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.

- by Giulia Bruna
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- Irish Studies, Travel Writing, Periodical Studies, Ecocriticism
- by Aidan Beatty
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Travel & Tourism, Irish History

Sean Hewitt's review of J.M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival by Giulia Bruna

- by Giulia Bruna
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- Irish Literature, J.M. Synge, Irish Cultural Revival, Irish Literary Revival

Throughout his life, W.B Yeats believed that that his innate 'timid and sensitive nature' needed to be hidden from society. Few, save those in his immediate family, knew his true character and to this day it remains well concealed and mysterious. Ellmann writes in "Yeats: The Man and the Masks" that Yeats's image was 'enveloped for the world's view in the habiliments of arrogance and power' (174). His volatile nature shall be analysed in depth in this article, with reference to Yeats's autobiography and other biographical sources. This will support an academic case study I will make involving Joseph O'Connor's contemporary Irish novel "Ghost Light". Yeats is a character in Ghost Light; however, in contrast to Joyce's Ulysses, he is an active participant in the main narrative and his unreasonable behaviour is given close scrutiny. I argue that Yeats is wearing one of his conceptual 'Masks' during the dark and unpleasant period of his life detailed in Ghost Light. From his play The Player Queen (1910) onwards, the 'Mask' would develop into a significant aesthetic concept which would permeate his prose writings (including A Vision) and late poems. Yeats's 'Mask' is a concept similar to a 'pose' which artists assume and project. In his case, this involved living in a desolate tower in the West of Ireland, wearing a monocle (O'Connor 2010: 79), a sweeping cape and walking with a stride like Hamlet.

- by Jonathan McCreedy
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- William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ibsen, J.M. Synge

Why did Synge vehemently predict the disappearance of a language that he loved and could speak with no small fluency? Brian O Conchubhair’s ground-breaking Fin de Siècle na Gaelige (2009) situates the Gaelic Revival within the broad contexts of contemporaneous European intellectual, social, and literary trends. I show that Synge’s understanding of evolutionary theory (and particularly of Spencer’s misapplied phrase, “survival of the fittest”) suggested to him that a linguistic tradition rooted in “a small island placed between two countries which speak [English]” was not fit for survival. In writing of Irish, Synge deploys the vocabulary of early nineteenth-century linguistics, which depicted language as an organism that grows and decays. For an author forever affected by his initial traumatic encounter with Darwin, the understanding that Irish was a biological entity — and that as such it was subject to the laws of evolution — was potentially alarming. The implication of Synge’s use of horticultural vocabulary to discuss the contemporary linguistic status of Ireland (“blossom”, “decay”, “old roots”, “new growth”) is that the heightened Hiberno-English utilized in his plays is a vigorous hybrid resulting from the grafting of an Irish language shoot onto the stronger stock of English. In Darwinian terms, Hiberno-English is the “new and improved form” that inevitably replaces the outmoded “old forms” of enfeebled Irish and what Synge considered to be the inadequate English of a colonized people. The popular concept of the perfected nature of the hybrid plant underlines such references to Hiberno-English. In contemplating the future of Irish, Synge ultimately overcomes the nihilism that evolutionary theory had imparted in him during his youth; “pure” Irish might become extinct, but its rhythm and energy would survive in the literary Hiberno-English of Playboy of he Western World and its ilk.

- by Kübra Vural Özbey
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- Irish Drama, J.M. Synge, Deirdre of the Sorrows

Béaloideas 84 (2016): 84-103.

- by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
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- History, Irish Studies, Folklore, Travel Writing

Irish University Review 46.2 (2016): 243–259.

- by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
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- History, Folklore, Theatre Studies, Travel Writing

Bruna, Giulia. “John Millington Synge's Travel Journalism: Reporting from the Fringes of Revival Ireland.” Global Literary Journalism. Exploring the Journalistic Imagination. Eds. Richard Keeble, John Tulloch. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.... more

- by Giulia Bruna
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- Literary Journalism, Irish Studies, Travel Writing, Irish Literature
- by Stephanie Pocock Boeninger
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- Irish Studies, J.M. Synge

The first play that J.M. Synge completed, When the Moon Has Set, is the most autobiographical of his dramas and provides fascinating insight into his early life, his sensitivity to Ireland’s urban/rural divide, and his views regarding his own social class. The play was repeatedly rejected by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre (precursor to the Abbey), and most critics share their negative feelings about the work; however, those who have dismissed When the Moon Has Set as an unsatisfactory “apprentice” piece may have been too hasty. As W.J. McCormack has pointed out, Synge “never abandoned” the play, and, over the years, he completed various one- and two-act versions, as well as a putative three-act one. What’s more, he left behind copious notes related to the play. Since there is no definitive version of the text, I compiled a “super draft” from all of the Synge manuscripts housed in the archives at Trinity College Dublin. The result is a new two-act version, which is superior to the widely-circulated (excessively truncated) one-act version, or even the anthologised (wildly sprawling) two-act one. I produced and directed this new version as a rehearsed reading at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre in 2013, with a cast of professional actors, and I subsequently published the script on www.ClassicIrishPlays.com, my Irish Research Council-funded plays database. In this autoethnographic essay, I explore the (inevitably subjective) artistic and editorial choices which I made throughout this practice-based research project. My analysis of these choices will provide those attempting to judge the success of my new version of the script – or those seeking to create their own version of the play – with a clearer understanding of why I made various authorial decisions.

- by David Clare
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- Irish Studies, Irish Literature, Irish Drama, Irish Theatre