Digging the Liminal Spaces: Chronotopic Representation of Liminality in Seamus Heaney’s North and Station Island

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
Maryam Soltan Beyad ◽  
Ehsan Kazemi
Keyword(s):  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Irish Identity

AbstractChallenging the established poetic idea of Ireland as a unified whole, new Irish poetry encourages a perspective toward homeland alongside with a corresponding revision of Irish subjectivity as liminality. Introduced by Homi Bhabha as a postcolonial cultural term, the idea privileges hybrid cultures and challenges solid or authentic ones. Moreover, this liminal rationale entails a corresponding chronotopic rendition, as Bakhtin intends to theorize it, whereby the notion of spatio-temporality assists the poet in rethinking the Irish identity. An archeologist shrouded as a poet, Heaney’s early work, North (1975), is an attempt to reterritorialize the Motherland while Station Island (1984) represents the deterritorialization of the land, a collection in which Heaney proposes an alternative notion of Irish identity. The present study seeks to show how Heaney’s aforementioned poetry collections manifest a transition from a patently nationalist reception of land to a tendency to liminal spaces. Hence, a critical juxtaposition of these two works bears witness to an endeavor to move beyond the solid, reductionist perspective of the unified Ireland into a state of liminality with respect to Bhabha’s idea of hybridity. Furthermore, it is argued how Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope can accommodate to the accomplishment of such a poetic project.

Power through Intersubjectivity: Representing the Resilient Child in Urban Survival Narratives

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Yvonne Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Social Discourse ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Spark Gap ◽  
Urban Survival ◽  
Resilient Child

The problematic relationship between urban dislocation, the proscribed spaces of urban childhood, child marginnalisation and the societal invisibility of under-age citizens is widely thematised in contemporary children's literature. This article examines how childhood agency, as a form of power, becomes aligned with resilience through intersubjectivity in the narrative representations of marginalised child subjects in Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown (1987) and Julie Bertagna's The Spark Gap ( 1996 ). Depictions of child homelessness, which construct resilience in the determination to survive experiences of marginalisation, dislocation and loss, offer an opportunity to examine representations of child subjectivity. This discussion centres on the role of intersubjectivity as an alternative construction to some humanistic frames that privilege the notion of an individual agency divested of childhood's limitations. It identifies the experiential codes which more accurately reflect the choices available to young readers, where liminal spaces of homelessness that first establish social and cultural dependencies are re-interpreted through depictions of relational connection among displaced child subjects. The discussion suggests that these multifocal novels construct dialogic representations of social discourse that affirm intersubjectivity as a form of agency.

Samuel Beckett's Disruptive Translations of ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Trask Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Self ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Poetic Translation

Self-translators are often granted freedoms in their translations unimaginable for standard translators. Whereas a standard translation usually prizes sameness (or invisibility as Lawrence Venuti argues), the self-translator may instead highlight difference or disruption. A burgeoning subfield of criticism has outlined the ways in which one of the most famous of these self-translators, Samuel Beckett, makes use of his role as translator to further the reach of his work beyond the constraints of a monolingual text. Whereas most of this criticism has taken aim at Beckett's prose and theater, this essay asks what can be gleaned about Beckett's translation style from his early poetry. Here I focus on Beckett's four-line, untitled poem which begins ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’ (‘I would like my love to die’). Originally published in 1948 in the bilingual journal Transition Forty-eight, this poem would go on to be edited, translated, reedited, and retranslated over the course of nearly thirty years. The various iterations and translations of the poem are not always harmonious and instead force the reader to consider more deeply the themes of the poem and to question the role of translation. I read the poem in light of Beckett's 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ as well as consider it in response to W.B. Yeats' 1899 poem ‘He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead’. By situating the poem in this context, I argue that this poem is a manifestation of Beckett's argument in the essay that poetry must take into account the division between poet and object. His short poem demonstrates this division as well as that between original and translation and thus allows us a window onto his translation project at large. Considering Beckett's poetic translation permits us to consider how a complementarity of intention towards language does not necessarily entail complementary translations.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

Broun, Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots

2001 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-262
Author(s):  
Tadhg O'keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Irish Identity

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

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