Staging Ethnography: John M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and the Problem of Cultural Translation

Castle, Gregory

doi:10.1353/tj.1997.0060

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…For George Cusak (2002), for example, the villagers in the play produce an allegory of Irish nationalism (573), an assessment which also hints at the possible cause of the Riots. Gregory Castle (1997) similarly states that the Irish nationalists resented the negative portrayal of the Irish peasantry as they instead wanted to see "plays that dramatized political sentiments and that represented myth and legend as revolutionary and patriotic allegory" (266). The peasant communities in the west of Ireland represented the moral and political ideals for Irish independence, but the dramatic make-up of the stage world, while definitely constructing an allegorical dimension, did not allow room for a pro-Revival depiction of such ideals.…”

Section: Jameson: Symptoms Allegory Ideologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“That’s a grand story:” Reading J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a postnational allegory

ÇİMEN

2022

RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi

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The concept of “national allegory” formulated in Fredric Jameson’s work on the third-world literatures has been the subject of much critical debate, especially in the context of postcolonial studies. The dispute surrounding the term is closely tied to Jameson’s controversial suggestions such as the view that “all” third-world literary texts inevitably fall into the category of “national allegory”. The “nation” in this sense provides the main conceptual framework out of which literary texts imbued with “allegorical resonances” develop by specifically addressing the nation state. Jameson’s formulation acquires further significance when it is reciprocally held with his concept of the “political unconscious”, which refers to the implicit political aspect behind creative works. Jameson suggests that artistic works are the products of unconsciously felt political and cultural conditions laid out by latent historical and economic realities. J.M Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World lends itself to a Jamesonian reading in that the Irish efforts to achieve independence from British rule are transmuted into the dramatic world of the play in the form of an Oedipal tension between a father and a son. However, the play does not put forward a simplistic allegory of the nation since the text itself avoids reproducing a picture of a clear-cut nationhood. This essay argues that Synge’s play addresses a “postnational” condition transcending the militant nationalist ideologies and produces a “postnational allegory” in which the suggestive background points at a new rationale for defining the nation with a call for imagining a nomadic “beyond”.

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Section: Jameson: Symptoms Allegory Ideologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“That’s a grand story:” Reading J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a postnational allegory

ÇİMEN

2022

RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi

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“…Christy's heroism, once it is revealed to be verbal only, precipitates his downfall; but it also, curiously, suggests another form of heroism (and this is what rescues Christy in the eyes of Pegeen and many viewers): like the bards celebrated in Revivalist legend, Christy struts off stage with the boast that he will go "romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day" 18 .…”

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Spectres of Fiction: New Political Contexts for The Playboy of the Western World

Urban¹

2020

etudesirlandaises

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It's the truth they're saying, and if I'd that lad in the house, I wouldn't be fearing the loosed khaki cut throats, or the walking dead 1. Spectres of Fiction: New Political Contexts for The Playboy of the Western World Études irlandaises, 45-1 | 2020 WIDOW QUIN. Do you know what? That man's raving from his wound today, for I met him a while since telling a rambling tale of a tinker had him destroyed. Then he heard of Christy's deed, and he up and says it was his son had cracked his skull […].

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Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge

Lecossois

2020

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Irish Revivalist playwright J. M. Synge is often regarded as a realist. Yet what happens when his work is analysed through wider performance studies and situated alongside less familiar historical contexts? By addressing this question, Hélène Lecossois offers new and valuable perspectives on Synge's plays while at the same time engaging with the complexity of his treatment of a range of performance practices – from keening at rural funerals to the performances of 'native villagers' in the entertainment section of International Exhibitions. What emerges from her study is a dramatist acutely aware of the ability of theatre in performance to counteract relentless forward-moving narratives of modernity. Through detailed, contextualized case studies, the book simultaneously makes meaningful contributions to performance studies and opens up theoretical questions of performance relating to the status of the object on stage, the body on stage and theatrical time.

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Staging Ethnography: John M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and the Problem of Cultural Translation

Cited by 4 publications

References 11 publications

“That’s a grand story:” Reading J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a postnational allegory

“That’s a grand story:” Reading J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a postnational allegory

Spectres of Fiction: New Political Contexts for The Playboy of the Western World

Performance, Modernity and the Plays of J. M. Synge

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