English Language and Literature (Peer-reviewed publications): Recent submissions
Now showing items 181-200 of 207
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Recharging the Canon: Towards a Literary Redefinition of Irishness
(Edwin Mellen Press, 2005)By adding volumes four and five as a supplement to its anthology, Field Day was both acknowledging its own attenuation of a tradition, and at the same time, valuing at another dimension, the very plurality of traditions ... -
Ireland in Theory: the Influence of French Theory on Irish Cultural and Societal Development
(Peter Lang, 2004)This essay argues that the advent of French literary and cultural theory, specifically the work of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, has been responsible for some of the accelerated social changes that Ireland has ... -
Winterwood: A Portrait of the Artist as a Postmodern Pariah
(Peter Lang, 2008)Postmodernism is often seen as following sequentially from modernism but I would agree with Lyotard’s contention that postmodernism is actually ‘a part of the modern.’ Lyotard goes on to state that a work ‘can become modern ... -
The Body Politic: The Ethics of Responsibility and the Responsibility of Ethics
(Oxford University Press, 2008)This chapter examines Heaney’s translations of Antigone in terms of its being a vehicle for an ethical interrogation of the laws and loyalties and of the contrast between the loyalty to one’s tribe and a broader intersubjective ... -
"Identities in the writer complexus": Joyce, Europe and Irish identities (Pre-published version)
(Rodopi Press, 2003)This chapter examines forms of negative identity in terms of two intersecting verbal axes: Joyce‟s own term, gnomon and Jacques Derrida‟s term hauntology. Both terms gesture towards forms of negative identity which are the ... -
The Force of Law in Seamus Heaney's Greek Translations
(Careysfort Press, 2008)This essay examines the use of law in Heaney’s Greek translations: The Burial at Thebes, and The Cure at Troy. For Derrida,, the founding moment of law, in a society or culture, is never a moment ‘inscribed’ in the history ... -
Anastomosis, attenuations and Manichean allegories: Seamus Heaney and the complexities of Ireland (Pre-published version)
(JCPCS [Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies], 2001)This essay discusses the nature of postcolonial versions of Irishness and deconstructs the Manichean categories of selfhood and alterity which feature in both colonial and postcolonial discourse. Using some ideas from ... -
The Epistemology of Nationalism
(Taylor & Francis [Routledge], 1997)This article poses a number of questions: Is nationalism an ideology, a philosophy, an epistemology or a faith? Is cultural nationalism a seminal constituent of nationalism in general, or is it just a subset of political ... -
A Nation Once Again Towards an Epistemology of the Republican Imaginaire
(University College Dublin Press, 2003)The epistemological structure of Irish republican ideology is examined through the theoretical perspective of Jacques Lacan. This paper extrapolates this position into a societal and group matrix. The Lacanian imaginary ... -
More than a language … no more of a Language’: Merriman, Heaney and the Metamorphoses of Translation
(Irish University Review, 2005)This essay examines transformative force of translation, by reading Merriman through the refractive lens of Seamus Heaney’s The Midnight Verdict, the juxtaposition of Merriman’s text with that of classical tragedy, itself ... -
The Place of Writing: Place, Poetry, Politics in the Writing of Seamus Heaney
(Hermathena,Trinity College Dublin, 1998)This chapter examines Heaney’s use of classical imagery as a literary device through which he can address issues of political and cultural identity in Northern Ireland. It looks at heaney’s prose, early poetry and some ... -
Seamus Heaney’s Prose: Preoccupying Questions
(University of Ulster, 1999)This essay examines Seamus Heaney’s prose writings, wherein he discusses poetry as a mode of knowledge, which can explore the fractured aspects of identity and can shed light on aspects of what it mens to be human. Heaney’s ... -
The Language of Empire and the Empire of Language: Joyce and the Return of the Postcolonial Repressed
(Four Courts Press, 2007)This chapter examines the importance of language in the imperial project and the importance of language as a deconstruction of that project. It looks specifically at the language of James Joyce and argues that his work ... -
Derrida, Heaney, Yeats and the Hauntological Redefinition of Irishness
(Veritas, 2003)This essay begins by deconstructing the logo of the Centre for Migration studies as a way of outlining a differential perspective on Irish identity. Eschewing the traditional view of identity as sameness, this article ... -
At the Frontier of Language: Literature, Theory, Politics
(Minerva, 1996)This essay examines the problematics of language and identity. Beginning with a deconstructive reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Broagh’, it moves on to deconstruct the signifier of Ulster, showing how the use of this term, ... -
Decommissioning the Canon: Towards a Deconstruction of the Givens of the Literary Canon
(Teaching Social Justice: Intercultural and Development Education Perspectives on Education’s Context, Content, 2003)This essay examines the differences between high and popular culture, looking at Joyce and Heaney as synecdoches of cannon-creation and a resultant decommissioning of that canon. This is done through a deconstructive ... -
Seamus Heaney and the Ethics of Translation
(Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2003)This essay deals with two of Heaney’s major translations, Sweeney Astray and The Cure at Troy, are connected in terms of their ability to enunciate the voice of the other as well as to convey increasingly more complex ... -
‘What ish my nation?’: Towards a Negative Definition of Identity
(Minerva, 1999)This chapter examines Derrida’s distinction between law and justice, looking at the heritage of Pascal and Montaigne and examining issues of ethical and political responsibility in the process, taking some examples from ... -
The Body as Ethical Synecdoche in the Writing of Seamus Heaney
(Irish Academic Press, 2006)This essay examines the imaginative use of images of the violently abused body in the writing of Seamus Heaney. Looking at The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes, this essay also looks at real bodies – victims of the ... -
'Kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse...': Catholicism, deconstruction and postmodernity in contemporary Irish culture (Pre-published version)
(Columba Press, 2006)This chapter will examine the changing role of the Catholic Church as structure in contemporary Ireland, seeing this altered role as part of a larger process of societal change across the western world. Indeed, what is ...