“The Ghostly Terrors of the Nursery”: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Childhood Trauma

This essay contends that emotional oscillations between subordination and emancipation are responsible for the inconclusivity and evasiveness of Le Fanu’s plots, which critics often emphasise but rarely try to explain. The parallels between, on the one hand, the dual structures that pervade Le Fanu’s works and, on the other, the binaries of latent dream thoughts and manifest dream content, the familiar and the uncanny, which Sigmund Freud employs in his explorations of the unconscious, shed significant light on the motivational forces at work in Le Fanu’s oeuvre. Le Fanu uses displacement and condensation, the major operations Freud attributes to dream work, to create an outside world, which reveals itself as an upended world within. This essay tries to demonstrate the psychological significance of central motifs in Le Fanu’s works, such as the double and the closed room. In light of later psychoanalytical insights into the influence of childhood traumatisation on the creativity of writers, Le Fanu appears absorbed by the incorporation of his innermost mortifications and yearnings into the defamiliarisations of his fiction. On the basis of Gothic patterns, he produces psychological fiction avant la lettre. He anticipates George Orwell’s dissection of mental processes in terms of manipulative social engineering, H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastic evocations of a Jungian collective unconscious, and literary interiorisation by modernist techniques, developed not long after Le Fanu’s death by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

Liminal Identities in Contemporary Irish Drama

Desde el período del renacimiento celta y obras teatrales como Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), de William Butler Yeats, el debate de las identidades irlandesas auténticas y des-anglicanizadas frente a las colonizadas y dirigidas por normas externas, en el teatro irlandés, se ha desarrollado largo y tendido con nuevas y diferentes direcciones. En este proceso, la influencia colonizadora y alienante de Gran Bretaña se ha reemplazado por la de los EEUU como el Otro dominante. Teniendo en cuenta este panorama, mi ensayo explora más específicamente el retrato, así como la distorsión, de Irlanda y de lo irlandés en el cine, en dos obras teatrales contemporáneas: Stones in His Pockets (1999), de Marie Jones, y The Cripple of Inishmaan (1998), de Martin McDonagh. Ambas se centran en la representación intercultural de Irlanda y de lo irlandés en las películas de Hollywood. Ambas son metadramas intermediales en el sentido en el que tratan de las producciones cinematográficas como argumento principal. Ambas se analizan usando la teoría de la mercantilización global de Fredric Jameson así como los presupuestos de Jean Baudrillard sobre las realidades simuladas.Since the period of the Celtic Renaissance and plays such as William Butler Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), the debate of authentic and de-anglicized versus colonized and outerdirected Irish identities in Irish drama has long developed in new and different directions. In this process, the colonizing and alienating influence of Britain has been replaced by the United States as the dominant Other. Against this background, my paper will more specifically explore the portrayal, as well as the distortion, of Ireland and the Irish in film in two contemporary plays, Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets (1999) and Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan (1998). Both plays focus on the intercultural representation of Ireland and the Irish in Hollywood movies. Both plays are intermedial or metadramas in the sense that they take film productions as their subject matter. Both plays will be analyzed against the background of Fredric Jameson's theory of global commodification and Jean Baudrillard's arguments on simulated realities

How to Strengthen Irish Studies throughout Europe? A Diagnosis Based on the German-Speaking Countries

Against the background of the larger European situation, this essay will primarily concern itself with the positioning of Irish Studies within the German and Austrian university system. It will also focus on the institutional basis of Irish Studies within German English departments and on career options for scholars specializing in Irish Studies. This survey reveals a surprising discrepancy between, on the one hand, the substantial research and instruction in Irish Studies taking place in German-speaking countries and, on the other, the deplorable institutional situation and non-existent career options. In some respects Irish Studies in other European countries face similar problems. With regard to forming associations and launching periodicals, however, efforts have been made elsewhere in Europe, which German-speaking countries would be well-advised to adopt. Some of these initiatives will be described in the hope that such an assessment will trigger a larger debate

American Literary Short Forms and Their Negotiations of the Local and the Global: A Response

Ce post-scriptum tente de faire deux choses : il délimite les tensions dialectiques élémentaires dans lesquelles s’inscrivent les débats sur l’environnement, la région et la communauté ; il décrit ensuite comment les contributions de cette section spéciale confirment et/ou élargissent cette controverse. La discussion sur l’environnementalisme est à la fois épistémologique et pragmatique, car il est possible d’intégrer l’espèce humaine dans l’écosphère par des gestes de renoncement. L’ancrage écocentriste de l’humanité dans la nature s’exprime par la mise en avant des déterminants régionaux et communautaires de la vie humaine. Alors que les arguments anthropocentristes concernant la domination prétendument inévitable de l’homo sapiens remettent en question la faisabilité de l’écocentrisme, les conceptions dialectiques de la région et de la communauté soulèvent des doutes quant à leur durabilité en tant que sanctuaires de modes de vie authentiques. La fiction régionaliste, les récits de communautés et les “micropièces” de théâtre contemporaines ne touchent pas seulement le débat de l’anthropocentrisme contre l’écocentrisme, ils sont également informés par les conflits contemporains du global et du local. De différentes manières, les contributions à cette section spéciale mettent en lumière des formes d’altérité qui imprègnent les communautés, les régions et les environnements et remettent ainsi en question leur singularité

Gender and the Performance of Local and Global Conflicts in Postmodern and Contemporary Drama: LeRoi Jones, José Rivera, David H. Hwang

Raussert W. Gender and the Performance of Local and Global Conflicts in Postmodern and Contemporary Drama: LeRoi Jones, José Rivera, David H. Hwang. In: Achilles J, Bergmann I, Däwes B, eds. Contemporary Drama In English: Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English. Trier: WVT; 2003: 85-103

Anodal tDCS over left parietal cortex expedites recovery from stroke-induced apraxic imitation deficits: a pilot study

BackgroundTo date, specific therapeutic approaches to expedite recovery from apraxic deficits after left hemisphere (LH) stroke remain sparse. Thus, in this pilot study we evaluated the effect of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in addition to a standardized motor training on apraxic imitation deficits.MethodsIn a rehabilitation hospital, we assessed apraxic, aphasic, and motor deficits in 30 LH stroke patients before and after a five-day standard programme of motor training combined with either anodal (10 min, 2 mA; n = 14) or sham (10 min, 0 mA, n = 16) tDCS applied in a double-blind fashion over left posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Where appropriate, data were analyzed with either t-test, Fisher’s exact test, or univariate/ repeated measures ANOVA.ResultsCompared to sham tDCS, five sessions of anodal tDCS expedited recovery from apraxic imitation deficits (p < 0.05): Already after 5 days, the anodal tDCS group showed levels of imitation performance that were achieved in the sham tDCS group after 3 months. However, the primary outcome of the study (i.e., anodal tDCS induced improvement of the total apraxia score) failed significance, and there was no significant tDCS effect on apraxia after 3 months. Anodal tDCS improved grip force (of the contra-lesional, i.e., right hand), but had no effect on aphasia.ConclusionsData from this pilot study show that repetitive, anodal tDCS over left PPC combined with a standardized motor training expedites recovery from imitation deficits in LH stroke patients with apraxia (relative to sham stimulation). Results suggest that in patients suffering from apraxic imitation deficits a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is warranted that investigates the effects of tDCS applied over PPC in addition to a standardized motor training