Browsing by Author "Mooney, Sinead"

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    Delirium of Interpretation: Surrealism, The Possessions, and Beckett's Outsider Artists
    (2019-06-21) Mooney, Sinead
    Samuel Beckett, then a largely unknown member of the Joyce circle, translated a selection of texts for a section entitled “Surrealism and Madness” for a surrealist special issue of the Parisian journal This Quarter in 1932. Among them were three excerpts from André Breton and Paul Éluard’s “simulations” of madness’ L’Immaculée Conception in which the authors, using automatism, simulated the verbal styles of various forms of mental illness. This essay argues that, despite an ambivalent attitude to surrealism as a movement, these translations are a key source for Beckett’s interest in the irrational and in verbal deviance, and are in fact precursors to the anomalous, self-engrossed “outsider artists” of Beckett’s mature work.
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    ‘Demented Particulars’: Traces of Godot and the Provincial Theatre Archive'
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018-03-29) Mooney, Sinead
    In response to the recent 'archival turn' within Beckett studies, this article argues that the value of the ephemera located in less prestigious repositories of Beckettian materials situated within small theatre collections, public libraries, and city and county council records – scrapbooks, prompt books, financial records and stage managers reports – is of value to scholars of Beckett and theatre historians alike in that these archives move away from the author-centred archives of Reading and Dublin to ones that expose the material conditions of performance and give indications of how a celebrated avant garde work such as Godot fared beyond the metropolitan centres of Paris and London to audiences in Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester. Here, little regard was paid to Godot’s Left Bank credentials, this essay traces the ways in which the play was first made to conform to institutional structures, and more broadly how these Godots from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s charted the decline of the old repertory system and the policy changes instituted through the Arts Council and local authorities that directly impacted on theatre in the provinces from the 1960s onwards. It argues further that these networks of less regarded collections represent the vast, invisible ‘dark matter’ that binds together theatre studies as a discipline in the traces they reveal of backstage conditions integral to the producing of performance itself.
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    Edna O'Brien
    (2018) Mooney, Sinead
    Although recent critics have taken Edna O’Brien’s work far more seriously than her early detractors, her aesthetic achievements continue to be undervalued, and a certain confusion still attends the question of precisely what kind of writer she might be, even after the publication of seventeen novels, nine short story collections, numerous plays and screenplays, two biographies (of Joyce and Byron) and two memoirs. An uneasy critical vocabulary of disorder, excess and mutability for a long time surrounded her oeuvre, which was under- regarded by scholars. Amanda Greenwood still finds it necessary as late as 2002 to preface her monograph on O’Brien by stoutly defending her subject against charges of being merely a ‘repetitive chronicler of romantic love’. More recently, O’Brien has been critically recuperated as a writer whose work mounts a ‘challenge [to] her nation’s particular brand of gendered nationalism’. It is difficult not to conclude, however, that O’Brien’s considerable body of work remains productively, even challengingly, ‘untidy’, and that there is something about her writing which, even as it garners international fame and awards, nonetheless flouts claims to literary ‘respectability.' This essay argues that form and content are particularly closely bound for O’Brien, and analyses the manner in which many of the misreadings and critical divergences that her work has attracted since 1960 concern misunderstandings of her explorations of a compromised female subjectivity amid the conventions of a denatured or destabilized romance plot whose adequacy as an encoding of women’s experience is continually raised even as it is posited.
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    'Radish, One Per Night': Early Godots in the Regional Theatre Archive
    (2017-01-01) Mooney, Sinead
    This essay considers the construction and reception of Waiting for Godot in British regional repertory theatre between 1956 and the early 1970s, arguing that the disruptive potential of the play, as registered by the London reviewers, was recontextualised, and for some time largely contained, by the framing of the play within the repertory system and its associated discourses. Résumé Cet essai étudie l’ interprétation et l’ accueil d’En attendant Godot dans le théâtre de répertoire régional en Grande Bretagne entre 1956 et le début des années 1970. L’ article avance l’ hypothèse que le potentiel novateur de la pièce, bien repéré par les critiques londoniens, a été recontextualisé et, pendant quelque temps, largement contenu par l’ encadrement de la pièce au sein du système de théâtre de répertoire et des discours qui lui sont associés.
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