John Millington Synge Research Papers (original) (raw)

Deprivation from the benefits of modern technology and the tools of communication makes the characters in John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1904) turn to such ways of generating knowledge as testimony, perception, memory, and intuition in order to learn about what goes on in the Aran Islands as well as the big world beyond them. Nonetheless, when analysed, the supposed sources of knowledge they seem to depend on cannot prove to be thoroughly reliable, nor can they satisfactorily interrelate and lead to the formulation of a comprehensive epistemology synthesising all these sources because of the inconsistencies within and among themselves. Accordingly, it appears that the inhabitants of the Aran Islands in the play are doomed to live in an atmosphere of uncertainty.

2017, Agentic Power of the Sea in John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea

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.

The sea in Riders to the Sea, is not only to the giver but also the destroyer, it has the power of determining which will it be, therefore the tragedy of the play is caused by the sea playing the role of fate.

In John Millington Synge’s dramas The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker’s Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God’s representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives, worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

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

Haldun Taner’s play Epic of Keşanlı Ali is one of the most significant examples of the works with which it is aimed to bring the national identity to Turkish Theatre in just the same way as the plays of John Millington Synge, who is one... more

2021

The presentation was done at the seminar "Asia and Revivalist Ireland: Postcolonial, Transcultural and Modernist Reciprocal Literary Exchanges" ACLA 2021.