23 research outputs found
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Heaney and the neighbour: poetry between politics and ethics
In this essay I argue that Heaney uses the figure of the neighbour to examine questions of otherness and cultural difference and their relationship to history and politics. The neighbour is of course a figure that has played a central role in Western philosophy and theology for centuries, from the Gospels and Kant to Freud and Lacan. It is also a concept to which Western poetry often returns, particularly in the work of Herbert, Clare, Eliot and Auden. Heaney too belongs to this tradition, in that his oeuvre contains many poems which consider the relationship between neighbours, and do so in ways profoundly suggestive for consideration of the relationship between historical events, social structures, cultural difference and psychic affect. In my essay I argue that Heaney sketches a profoundly materialist conception of subjectivity in its relationship with the Other. In doing so I contrast Heaneyâs treatment of the neighbour, with its emphasis on questions of politics and locality, to the treatment of the neighbour in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas
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Beckett beyond the avant-garde: the case of âCasket of Pralinen for a daughter of a dissipated Mandarin"
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Beckett, Sade, The Avengers: Patrick Magee and character acting in the 1960s
Patrick Magee was Samuel Beckettâs close collaborator and friend who, through his monologues on BBC radio in the early 1960s, shaped the parameters of a generic Beckettian character, one that can still be detected in the production, reception and understanding of Beckettâs work today. Yet it has not been sufficiently understood that Mageeâs performances emerge from a wide and shifting field of biographical, aesthetic, professional and economic forces, given his centrality not only to Beckettâs reception, but to many other areas of performance, from classic West End theatre to horror film, counter-cultural provocation to iconic Sixties television series.
Mageeâs distinctive realization of Beckettâs anonymous, isolated, seemingly ancient voices took place in the context of his sustained experiment with the nature and function of character across several media, and in this essay I think through the nature and consequences of this mobility. To do so I focus on his career from 1958 to 1964, that is to say, from the small part he played in the first airing of Beckettâs play All that Fall on the BBC Third Programme, to the Royal Shakespeare Company summer season at the Aldwych in London, which featured Magee as leading man in all four plays staged, including Beckettâs Endgame and Peter Weissâs Marat/Sade
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'Room to rhyme': Heaney, arts policy and cultural tradition in Northern Ireland 1968-1971
Drawing on extensive research in Arts Council and government archives in Belfast and the
collections of Heaneyâs manuscripts at Emory and the National Library in Dublin, this essay
reconstructs for the first time Northern Irish state cultural policy at the height of the crisis
years 1968-1972. It also examines the response of a major poet to this policy, through a
genetic mapping of the complex development of Heaneyâs poem âThe Last Mummerâ,
between 1969 and its publication in 1972. The poem responds to the mumming plays
practiced at Christmas when troupes of young men, or âRhymersâ would enter and perform in
the homes of both communities in the North. This tradition also informed âRoom to Rhymeâ,
the Arts Council sponsored 1968 tour of several towns in Northern Ireland by Heaney and
Michael Longley and the folk musician Davy Hammond. The make-up of the performers on
the tour, the itinerary and accompanying booklet, suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of
the Arts Council Northern Ireland to assert a role for itself, and for culture, in the political
thaw of the time. In the years immediately after the tour, however, major confrontations
between civil rights marches and police, widespread sectarian rioting and ultimately troops
on the streets, resulted in even more extreme polarization in the North. As this essay shows,
Heaneyâs manuscripts from this period provide a valuable resource for the examination of the
relationship between poetry, the public sphere and notions of cultural tradition in early 1970
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Absorption and theatricality: on Ghost Trio
Samuel Beckettâs 1976 Television play Ghost Trio is one of his most beautiful and mysterious works. It is also the play that most clearly demonstrates Beckettâs imaginative and aesthetic engagement with the visual arts and the history of painting in particular. Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, On Ghost Trio demonstrates Beckettâs exploration of the relationship between theatricality, absorption and objecthood, and shows how his work anticipates the development of video and installation art. In doing so Conor Carville develops a new and highly original reading of Beckettâs art, rooted in both archival sources and philosophical aesthetics
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Warding off an epitaph: had I a thousand lives
Essay considering the representation of Irish history and its commemoration in Medbh McGuckian's poetry collection 'Had I a Thousand Lives'