Suchergebnisse

"The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands theorizes how Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. It argues that the rearrangement of the island and creation of multiple states produced two major effects in the North: it incited concomitant fractures within self and society and interrupted experiences of place. In this 'interregnum,' the whole arc of Irish time crystallized, the subject as keenly aware of ancient events as those of today and all while awaiting a more just political future. These conditions are represented in the literature through a self-contradictory poetics that fuses ancient and contemporary literary styles. Age-old Irish tropes are deployed within recognizably postmodern styles in works that rely, particularly, on specter and scrim: haunting, deathly characters and metaphors and perilous, pivotal borders. This spectral borderlands aesthetic captures the peculiar temporality of daily life and takes inspiration, chiefly, from Samuel Beckett. This position is outlined in Chapter One and fully elaborated through sustained analyses of literary writing by Belfast women writers: poet Medbh McGuckian, dramatist and fiction writer Anne Devlin, and novelist Anna Burns. Chapters on each explicate their distinctive deployments of the spectral borderlands: Devlin's self-contradiction, McGuckian's silence, and Burns' doubt"--

This largely speculative review historicises the current era of 'Springs' through the lens of partition. I offer a critique of political modernity and the modern nation-state through analysis of the turn to border politics in colonial conquests, decolonisation efforts, Cold War politics and other instances of international relations across the long twentieth century. The pervasiveness of such plans across late modernity marks the beginning of the end of the nation as a single, reifiable, imaginable structure. With Ireland as exemplar, I posit national dividedness —a generally underestimated paradigm shaping our time— as spurring a decline in state authority and a new, radical "consciousness of streets." Together with other defining political structures, it participates in transforming the postmodern map of nation into a conflicted network, an imagined community as metropolitan circuit. I take recourse to theories of partition and nation and work by geographers, historians and postcolonial theorists including Joseph Cleary, Benedict Anderson, Monica Duffy Toft, Étienne Balibar and Michel Foucault.

This largely speculative review historicises the current era of 'Springs' through the lens of partition. I offer a critique of political modernity and the modern nation-state through analysis of the turn to border politics in colonial conquests, decolonisation efforts, Cold War politics and other instances of international relations across the long twentieth century. The pervasiveness of such plans across late modernity marks the beginning of the end of the nation as a single, reifiable, imaginable structure. With Ireland as exemplar, I posit national dividedness —a generally underestimated paradigm shaping our time— as spurring a decline in state authority and a new, radical "consciousness of streets." Together with other defining political structures, it participates in transforming the postmodern map of nation into a conflicted network, an imagined community as metropolitan circuit. I take recourse to theories of partition and nation and work by geographers, historians and postcolonial theorists including Joseph Cleary, Benedict Anderson, Monica Duffy Toft, Étienne Balibar and Michel Foucault.