Partners in Practice: Contemporary Irish Literature, World Literature and Digital Humanities

This dissertation examines the opportunities and implications afforded Irish literary studies by developments in the newly emergent disciplines of world literature and the digital humanities. Employing the world literature theories of Wai Chee Dimock, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova in the critical analysis of works of contemporary Irish literature and Irish literary criticism produced in the period 1998-2010, it investigates how these theoretical approaches can generate new perspectives on Irish literature and argues that the real “problem” of world literature as it relates to Irish literary studies lies in establishing an interpretive method which enables considerations of the national within a global framework. This problem serves as the entry point to the engagement with the digital humanities presented throughout the dissertation. Situated within debates surrounding modes of “close” and “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) as they are played out in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies, this work proposes an alternative digital humanities approach to the study of world literature to the modes of “distant reading” endorsed by literary critic, Franco Moretti and digital humanists such as Alan Liu (Liu 2012). Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies combining national and international, close and distant and old and new modes of literary scholarship, it argues that, rather than being opposed to a nationally-orientated form of literary criticism, the digital humanities have the tools and the methodologies necessary to bring Irish literary scholarship into a productive dialogue with perspectives from elsewhere and thus, to engender a form of Irish literary scholarship that transcends while not denying the significance of the nation state. By illustrating the manner in which the digital humanities can be employed to enhance and extend traditional approaches in Irish literary studies, this project demonstrates that Irish studies and the digital humanities can be “practicing partners” in a way that serves to advance work in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies

Jaina-Prosopography I: Sociology of Jaina-Names

The sociology of Indian names is still in its infancy. The present article explores theoretical and pragmatic solutions for two elementary difficulties, faced by all prosopographies and text-encoding initiatives, namely, the creation of standardised lists of names, and the accurate identification of individuals. Its central concern is the analysis of the structure of Jaina names, particularly monastic names, which entail an entire sociology of the Jaina tradition, and require custom-made coding schemes to be accurately represented in a prosopological database. After analysing the classification of name-types in Jaina-scriptures, compared with contemporary semantics and pragmatics, and methodological conundrums of coding Jaina householder and monastic names, a suitable coding scheme is proposed, and a “naming formula” for Jaina monastic “full names” from the perspective of functional grammar. The study will finally show, at hand of the example of the names of Mahāvīra, that problems of identification of individuals on the basis of Jaina monastic names are similar to problems of identification in Jaina biography or the iconography of the Jinas