"A valley of the broken alphabet": Gaps and fractures in contemporary Irish poetry.
Item
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Title
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"A valley of the broken alphabet": Gaps and fractures in contemporary Irish poetry.
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Identifier
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AAI3213160
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identifier
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3213160
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Creator
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Falci, Eric.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Catherine McKenna
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Date
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2006
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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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Literature, Modern | Literature, English
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Abstract
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In this study I read four contemporary Irish poets in order to examine the strategies of hybridity and between-ness in their work. By looking closely at the poetry of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Ciaran Carson, I show that their work does not simply find itself to be hybrid by way of its cultural position, but rather actively cultivates hybridity as a central means of aesthetic and formal operation. In each chapter I focus on a particular structure of between-ness within each of the four poets' body of work. While Irish poetry has been readily adapted to postcolonial and historicist critical models, it has never rested easily within their often monolithic tenets. It is a basic premise of this project that a poem is not a simple articulation of an ideology, or a culturally reflective surface. A poem can register and disavow various ideologies within its process of "thinking." Poetry, and particularly contemporary poetry, is able to slip in and out of discursive positions, revealing, hiding, and revising its transactions by way of its form.;While the central chapters of this study are devoted to four contemporary Irish poets, there is frequent recourse to the history of poetry in Ireland. For Irish poets, perhaps more than for American or British poets, poetry is a crucial space for historic and cultural activity. From the earliest moments of "historical Ireland," poets have occupied an ambiguously central place in cultural life. In my introduction I look at the cultural position of the poet in Ireland and how Irish poets have negotiated this rough terrain. Like the place-name poems (dinnsheanchas) that are ubiquitous in early Irish manuscripts, history for poets in Ireland is a revisionary narrative that changes with every telling and occupies not only a historical time and place, but is also a space-between-the-telling. The contemporary poems that I investigate are both places of historical rest and changeable spaces in which this rest is upset and reconfigured.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
