Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: an Introduction

As this is an introduction it offers no sustained argument but contextualizes the 17 contributions to this volume. Looking at Ireland in Europe in 2000 - 2017 we may think (once again) that things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, but maybe the notions of “centre” and “apart” have to be rethought. With the failure of Irish politicians and the Irish ecclesiocracy, the onslaught of global predatory capitalism taking over agricultural acreage, industrial production and people’s internetted minds, artists and writers take it upon them to reflect on the darker sides of our “individual” egos and move the focus to the many bandwidths of human interaction. Humour and contradiction are recurring “tools” to help protagonists break out of stereotypes: in McDonagh “the art of codding” is part and parcel of his grotesque “comedy of menace” with which he radically questions the human being’s ability to find truth; Nancy Harris’ No Romance offers a more feminine kind of grotesque. Humour is also found in “Ceasefire Cinema” and in John Ford’s representations of hurling in his films, as well as in the three contributions on Joyce. About Wilde Ellmann said “contradictoriness was his orthodoxy”, but that also works to a certain extent for Trollope who considers himself a “reluctant colonialist”, for Bowen who focuses on the big House in her writing as it was disappearing in her life, and for the here “Lilies”, protagonists in three novels who are sent out to the US by an exclusionary (sectarian or nationalistic) logic from which their resilience in the new context liberates them. Finally, the contribution on Dermot Healy’s “creative eclecticism” offers the perfect illustration how “boundaries” only make sense if they strengthen the sense of passage and transition, dynamizing the idea of the “dividual” being who can develop as s/he compares and combines different communal values.

ISBN:9783868217421

Jaar van publicatie:2018

Toegankelijkheid:Closed