Suchergebnisse

The influence of musical traditions on Ciaran Carson's work has long been noted. Carson's use of fugue forms, especially in For All We Know (2008), however, suggests a different, and perhaps more political, relation to form than can be found in his earlier collections. As can be seen with comparison to the work of Paul Celan, Carson uses fugue to navigate through what Pierre Nora calls the 'fundamental opposition' between memory and history. The doubling and repetition inherent to fugal forms provide a way to reconceptualise the past, highlighting the interrelation of multiple corresponding voices. Carson, like Celan, uses fugue to approach historical moments that resist language, and in so doing reconceptualises the demands the past makes on the present, and the ability of language to reflect those demands.

Abstract
Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks's Culture series and portions of Gray's "Lanark," classical utopias such as Gunn's "The Green Isle of the Great Deep," or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins's "The Missionaries," utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence.

A presentation/performance at an event in Tobermory, on Mull as part of Rachel Maclean's exhibition, 'The Weepers', at An Tobar/Comar. I discuss my long history of work interrogating this paradigm and performed a series of Scottish songs, selected from the last 300 years. "From Tartan and tweed to sheep souvenirs and see-you-Jimmy hats, a panel of speakers will explore historic and contemporary efforts to package and present Scottish Heritage. What effect has this had on the people of Scotland and their national identity? How do we differentiate an 'authentic' Scottish experience from an 'inauthentic' one? And from National politics to local tourist industry - from our arts and culture - what is at stake in selling Scottish heritage?" An evening event that takes as its starting point the new film by Rachel Maclean, The Weepers, commissioned by Comar. Exhibited at An Tobar, Maclean's film draws from tropes of Gothic Horror fiction, medieval settings, ancestral curses, supernaturalism, dream visions, and descension into madness. Yet it also plays to a prevailing romanticism of the Scottish Highlands and the much caricaturised Hebridean figure - red haired and drenched in tartan; hospitable to the last; pragmatic, comic, yet bound up in deep-rooted superstition.