French - Book Chapters
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Item Proust’s House of Fiction(Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2022-09-13) O'Donovan, PatrickItem Chant du corps interdit: The theatre of Hélène Cixous(Legenda, 2014) Noonan, MaryIn this chapter, I would like to establish that Hélène Cixous developed a form of theatre that performed the enmeshing of writer and writing - the embodiment of text, the textualization of body - in the space of the voice. Some consideration of her theoretical writings will pave the way for a discussion of her theatre.Item Women and scarecrows: Marina Carr’s stage bodies(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Noonan, Mary; Etienne, Anne; Dubost, ThierryThis chapter considers the theatre of Marina Carr in the light of the feminist thought of French writers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in particular their work on the cultural representations of the feminine-maternal body. Taking the play Woman and Scarecrow as a case-study, the chapter examines Carr’s undermining of the visualist bias of conventional theatre, and demonstrates the extent to which she privileges the auditory in an attempt to confer on the stage a female voice and body.Item Auditory perception and auditory imagination in the late plays of Marguerite Duras(Brill Rodopi, 2018) Noonan, Mary; Noonan, Mary; Pagès-Pindon, JoëlleThis chapter examines the scenic strategies Marguerite Duras developed in the plays India Song, Savannah Bay and L’Éden Cinéma in order to position the spectator in a place that enables her to inhabit her auditory imagination for the space of the play – to move, through the activity of listening to voices and non-verbal sounds, between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ auditory realms. The ‘outer’ space that is represented on the Durassian stage as frustratingly inaccessible figures the ‘inner’ space to which Duras’s text directs the spectator-auditor unremittingly. Drawing on Didier Anzieu’s theory of the ‘skin-ego’, the primitive psyche constructed on the basis of ‘psychic envelopes’, the analysis presented here demonstrates that in her later plays, Duras generates a form of listening that breaks down the univocal defences of language and leads both actor and spectator to an intense apprehension of loss on the threshold of symbolic representation.Item The not-so-singular life of Albert Nobbs(Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2020-05-09) Noonan, Mary; Cronin, Bernadette; MagShamhráin, Rachel; Preuschoff, NikolaiThe short story “Albert Nobbs” by the Irish novelist George Moore first appeared in A Story-Tellers Holiday, in 1918. In 1977, a play, La Vie Singulière d’Albert Nobbs, adapted from the Moore story, was written and directed by the French theatre director Simone Benmussa, and performed at the Théâtre d’Orsay, Paris. The play was subsequently translated into English by Barbara Wright, and later again made into a film starring Glenn Close in the titular role. The story of Albert Nobbs, therefore, is one of multiple adaptations and translations. In this chapter, Noonan first considers the techniques Benmussa used to make a play that exposes the coercive nature of narrative within patriarchy, and the relationship between performance and gender. She goes on to show that Benmussa ransacks the original text to serve her own ends. Drawing on Julie Sanders’s work on the relationship between adaptation and appropriation (Sanders Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge, London, 2006, 2016), Noonan frames Benmussa’s Albert Nobbs in the context of works of literary appropriation—works that seek both to foster historical understanding and insist on a radical break with tradition. However, in the case of Benmussa’s Albert Nobbs, appropriation of George Moore’s original narrative enables an intense form of creative play, where multiple versions of Albert become manifest on the stage, creating a space of fluidity between source text and appropriation, past and present, fiction and theatre.