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The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. Join Dr James Little for an online webinar.
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. These sessions are aimed at staff and students interested in hearing more about emerging new work within Scottish and Irish Studies. As always the series is highly interdisciplinary with papers from early career scholars in a range of Arts and Humanities disciplines.
17th October: Dr James Little (University College Dublin) '"If you don't stop quick, I'll put you inside!" Teresa Deevy’s Carceral Homes'
At the opening of Teresa Deevy’s 1932 play Temporal Powers, Min’s husband Michael threatens her with incarceration in a small cavity at the back of the ruin in which they live: ‘If you don't stop quick, I'll put you inside!’ (2011: 8). When Min is later locked up in this hole by Michael, she becomes one of a series of Deevy’s female characters for whom home becomes a space of literal imprisonment. While such confined spaces have been read as symbols for a culturally isolated Ireland (Leeney, 2010: 172), this paper ranges across Deevy’s dramatic oeuvre to argue that her carceral homes present the domestic sphere as part of Ireland’s network of coercive confinement (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2012).
The paper will examine three Deevy plays – Temporal Powers, The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) and Katie Roche (1936) – in order to map the carceral spaces that confine Deevy’s female protagonists. The paper will discuss acts of violence carried out against these characters as well as economic restrictions on their independence in order to make a case for the home as carceral institution, setting her work in the long tradition of literature that figures the domestic as a prison (Fludernik, 2019). However, rather than viewing Deevy’s carceral homes as metaphoric spaces of confinement, I will argue here that her realist dramaturgy depends on the audience’s shared awareness of home as an actual site of gender-based incarceration.
James Little is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, where he researches cultural representations of coercive confinement. His publications include Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (2020), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas (2021) and the co-edited volume Ireland: Interfaces and Dialogues (2022). Together with Christina Morin and Cóilín Parsons, he is founding editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies. In January 2024, he will take up the position of Assistant Professor in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia.
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- Dr James Little
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Seminars are entirely online and can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. If you'd like to receive a link to the event and are not a member of research staff or a research postgraduate student in the schools of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture or Divinity, History, Philosophy, and Art History please contact Dr Sarah Sharp (sarah.sharp@abdn.ac.uk).