From “dead saint” to “lyreless Orpheus”: post-traumatic narrativization of myths and fairy tales in John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering

In The Sea (2005) and The Gathering (2007), John Banville and Anne Enright incorporate modernist and postmodernist intertextuality into accounts of bereavement. While the shattered existence of the protagonists is seemingly devoid of religious belief, they mobilize the palimpsestic immemorial past of mythological and fairy-tale intertexts to make sense of broken realities. The narrators’ self-portraits and invocations of lost people and places, oscillating between reminiscence and mythification, underscore postmodernism’s play with canonical stories. Both authors use mythological syncretism to express their characters’ quest for meaning: while Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods invade The Sea’s modern-day “Atlantis” (132), The Gathering is peopled with subverted Christian and Irish figures. However, rather than restoring coherence, myth and fairy-tale tropes are suffused with desperate irony, and the magic spell woven by mythological counterpoints turns out to be a post-traumatic, grimacing reflection of the characters’ troubled psyches, or an obfuscating screen. By interweaving and debunking seminal myths and tales, Banville and Enright give life to personal myths that bespeak the characters’ deep-seated sense of loss and disenchantment. The reader is thus left wondering if, by filling the gaps of post-traumatic memory with mythological rewritings, these defamiliarizing narratives of bereavement convey potential solace or reinforce their protagonists’ post-traumatic loss of landmarks.

Gendering Placement in Displacement: Transnational Im/mobility and the Refugee Camp in Emer Martin’s Baby Zero

This article concentrates on the analysis of the space of the refugee camp in Emer Martin’s third novel Baby Zero (2007), critically appraising this space as a fundamental site of transnational im/mobility simultaneously “homing” those who have been violently expulsed from their home, as well as retaining them as a measure of containment of migratory flows. As such, the camp will be posed here as a relevant example of the necropolitics (Mbembe) that extremely precarise the lives of displaced populations thrusting them into bare lives (Agamben), while concurrently pushing forward a much needed insight into its gendered inflections. This examination will evidence not only that “placement in displacement matters” (Hyndman 25), but also that placement in displacement is profoundly gendered and brings with it distinct forms of violence that feed on the extreme social vulnerability of women and girls in conflict zones and also in refugee settlements.

Poetic Emergencies: Senses of Ending in Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata”

Paul Muldoon’s lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford demonstrate a sustained interest in how poems might be said to “end”. On several occasions, he returns to Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “The End of the Poem” and its argument that a poem’s conclusion is a kind of “emergency”, a source of anxiety for the poem as a whole. This essay proposes that Muldoon’s engagement with Agamben and ideas of ending responds to his own poetic work, and especially to the elegies of his 1994 collection “The Annals of Chile”. The essay offers “Incantata” as an exemplar of Muldoon’s thinking about poetic endings, situating it within the context of modern elegy to show how a poem’s awareness of its own closure can shape its approaches to subject matter, form, and temporality.

In Dialogue with Writing. Clare Boylan’s Non-Fiction

In 1993 Clare Boylan edited a collection of essays by diverse writers on the act of writing entitled The Agony and the Ego. The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored. Here, Boylan takes the double stance of an outsider, as a critic, and of an insider, as a writer, and her concern with other writers’ work highlights her own preoccupation with writing and creativity, thus providing an interesting insight into her own fiction too. Besides writing seven novels and three collections of short stories, Clare Boylan also produced personal, autobiographical and critical pieces in a variety of essays and newspaper articles. She also showed a rigorous stance as editor in the thorough and engaging Literary Companion to Cats (1994). In particular, Boylan’s non-fiction work includes essays on Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane, as well as an introduction to Maeve Brennan’s posthumous novella The Visitor. Her critical work shows rigorous attention to texts and imagery, but also patterns of affinities with the writers she takes into account. The purpose of this essay is to analyse samples of Clare Boylan’s critical work vis-à-vis her own fiction. Significant cross-references can be identified which cast new perspectives on her literary work.

Forms of a Posthuman Fantastic in Mia Gallagher’s Shift

In posthuman philosophy the human subject is not regarded as an entity but a relational process. Yet the historical construct of “the individual” remains the (unconscious) reference point in human perception, feeding ego- and anthropocentrism. This article will argue that in their call to revise the static ideal of the individual entity posthuman philosophers find “allies” in fiction. More specifically, the fantastic is a genre which offers great possibilities to drastically reshuffle basic tenets of perception. Mia Gallagher’s Shift offers a spectrum of fantastic stories in which protagonists relate to human and nonhuman agents such as animals, minerals, air and water. But, in this posthuman theory and fiction, not only human beings are deconstructed into relational nodes; the categories that constitute them are no independent concepts either, but mere interactional factors. This article’s analysis of Gallagher’s short stories focuses on the ways in which self and other, nature and culture, life and death, feminine and masculine, interior and exterior worlds interact.

“Propaganda for peace”: a Gramscian reading of Irish and Spanish Civil War photography

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Ireland’s ruling party were faced with the challenge of maintaining political hegemony. Revealing the old fault lines of the Irish Civil War, the opposition cast the government’s Non-intervention policy as pro-Communist and anti-Catholic; a refusal to support Spanish insurgents in what was perceived by the majority as their defence of the Catholic faith. Following McNally, this paper utilises Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explore political equilibrium in the contexts of the Irish and Spanish conflicts. The notion of the “organic intellectual” enables a Gramscian reading of war photography, finding common visual language in the works of Robert Capa and W.D. Hogan as they contributed to national and transnational projects of hegemony. Through such a reading, the author finds cultural compatibility between the conflicts and casts the Irish revolutionary period in new international light.

Brian Friel in Spain: An Off-Centre Love Story

Spanish theatres are not prolific in the staging of Irish playwrights. However, the Northern Irish writer Brian Friel (1929-2015) has been a curious exception, his plays having been performed in different cities in Spain since William Layton produced Amantes: vencedores y vencidos (Lovers: Winners and Losers) in 1972. The origin of Friel’s popularity in this country may be attributed to what many theatre directors and audiences considered to be a parallel political situation between post-colonial Ireland and the historical peripheral communities with a language other than Spanish: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia; the fact is that the number of Catalan directors who have staged works by Friel exceeds that of any other territory in Spain. However, despite the political identification that can be behind the success of a play like Translations (1980), the staging of others with a subtler political overtone, such as Lovers (1967), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Molly Sweeney (1994), Faith Healer (1979) and Afterplay (2001), should prompt us to find the reason for this imbalance of representation elsewhere. By analysing the production of the plays, both through the study of their programmes and interviews with their protagonists, and by scrutinising their reception, I have attempted to discern some common factors to account for the selection of Friel’s dramatic texts.