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Title
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Specter and Scrim: Partition and Postcoloniality in the Literature of Northern Ireland
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6ab551580fac:11161
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identifier
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11507
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Creator
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Fadem, Maureen E.,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | European history | Aesthetics | Historical Literature | Ireland | Irish Literature | Northern Irish Literature | Postcolonial Literature | The Troubles
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Abstract
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This dissertation concerns the political history of Northern Ireland, its literature and its "Troubles." My project recognizes the paradigmatic weight of partition, the theoretical gap it represents, and the need to fully explicate this key political structure of modernity. It utilizes a cross-disciplinary methodology that allies postcolonial and poststructural theory, Irish and Partition Studies, in developing a theory of the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by the partition on which decolonization was predicated and the Northern territory created. The project is structured in two parts: Part I is a theoretical piece outlining, in two chapters, outlining theory of partition in Ireland and the poetics of historical literature from the North. Part II, including three additional chapters, provides illustrations of these ideas through analysis of recent Northern Irish literary work in multiple genres: drama, poetry and fiction.;In Chapter One, "Ontologies of Partition and the Unimaginable Imagined Community," I demonstrate the three key effects of division in Ireland: to undermine the idea of the nation and coherence of national identity; to produce a society in mourning; and to "quarantine" the subject owing to the ontology of waiting and sense of national incompleteness. The plan's aims, to reinvent nation-states and incarnate novel "imagined communities" (Anderson), are untenable. Under pressure of division, experiences of place radically alter and Irish citizens, particularly in the North, find themselves part of an "unimaginable" collectivity. The division has functioned as a rupturing trauma, confusing self-other relations and locating members between an array of simultaneous Irish "nations"---existing, imagined, remembered and "willed." It is this dissonance in and of the nation, I conclude, that explains why the struggles partition was to end continue.;Chapter Two, "'Au contraire': The Troubled Poetics of Northern Irish Literature," identifies this politics of location in imaginative work representing the Northern statelet and history of the Troubles. Literature from the region captures the critical registers of national life through the fusion of a postmodern sensibility with traditional Irish tropes, predominantly a poetics of specter and scrim in the peculiarly ghostly, haunting disposition of image, figure and metaphor and the provocative deployment of world and realm borders. Divined with evident influence of Samuel Beckett---who first articulated the "meaning" of divided Ireland---it is a bordered, spectral postmodernism that brings to light the ontological deathliness of partitioned Irishness. Three literary critical chapters delineate this method in work by contemporary Belfast women writers working in multiple genres: dramatist and fiction writer Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns. Each author's distinct poetics is explicated: Devlin's use of self-contradiction as primary mode, McGuckian's poetics of silence, and Burns' narrative method of infusing the historical novel with specifically historical doubt.;In Chapter Three, "Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin's 'Other at the Edge of Life,'" I offer a reading of the work's self-contradictoriness as an echo of the break in the national community spurred by geopolitics. The incongruity suffusing her work allegorizes the North as a ruptured, traumatized part-nation, a "no place" with a fully undecidable subject. In developing this politics of location, Devlin deploys a profusion of ancient metaphors: the banshee, the Shan Van Vocht, and a variety of world-scrims as bordered, deathly spaces of struggle and compression. Chapter Four, "Partition, Postcoloniality and the Postmodern: Outlining Silence in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian," interprets the poems as paradoxical embodiments of silence that disclose the enigma of history, memory and voice haunting the "partitioned" postcolonial author: in the crisis of wordlessness; in the impulse toward and away from silence and speakers betraying a powerlessness to speak; and in poems driven to transcend the cocoon of language and function as a visual art. Whereas McGuckian's literary work relies, paradoxically, on silence, Burns' novel of the Troubles is founded, also contradictorily, on self-questioning. Chapter Five, "Broken Nations, Troubled Histories, Anxious Authors: Specter and Doubt in Anna Burns' No Bones," argues that, through the affective work of a poetics of doubt, the history of the Troubles is refracted and ultimately conveyed. This chapter shows how, by hovering in the epistemological between of doubt, her narrative returns to the "moment of violence" (Pandey) in order to phenomenologically resurrect the past and "revives" the Irish dead as a way of symbolizing both the compound losses of empire and concomitant need for postcolonial reparations.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
