Book Chapter: The Return of the Repressed: Saussure and Swift on Language and History

Departures in linguistics are nothing new of course. Ideas come and go, facts appear and disappear along with the theories which first brought them to light, trends shift and alter. The language used to describe the history of the field, a field which once constituted a new departure in its own right, is replete with the language of innovation: breakthrough, advance, progress, and even revolution are familiar enough epithets. In the face of all this novelty then the question must be, how to do something new? The answer which is proposed here might appear somewhat odd for the intention is to make a new departure by going back rather than advancing. The return will be to the work of Saussure and the aim will be to take one of his claims and to re-read it. By doing so it is hoped not only to offer an alternative view of Saussure\u27 s work and its influence, but also to obtain an important insight which will open up new possibilities in linguistic study. To that end the second half of the paper will be dedicated to an application of this insight in an examination of Swift\u27s Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), which treats of the politics and processes of the standardisation of the English language

Memory and Forgetting in a Time of Violence: Brian Friel’s Meta-History Plays

In the 1980s, Brian Friel, one of Ireland’s most successful twentieth century dramatists, authored two plays – Translations and Making History – which were concerned with major events in colonial history. Given the context in which the plays were written – Northern Ireland was in a state of war at the time – ­the playwright’s choice of topics (the introduction of the National Schools and the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth century and the failed Gaelic revolt against English rule and the Flight of the Earls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was both pointed and politically contentious. Yet, the argument of this essay is that rather than presenting versions of the past which conform to the ideological imperatives of a particular political stance, Friel’s plays are much more interesting and significant in that they provoke a whole series of questions around the issue of historical representation. One of the most important of those questions is the applicability of the criteria truth and falsity in historical and other modes of interpretation. The essay concludes with a consideration of the politics of memory and forgetting in contemporary Northern Ireland

The Art of Memory: The Murals of Northern Ireland and the Management of History

The online archive Murals of Northern Ireland, held in Claremont Colleges Digital Library and covering the period from the late 1970s to the recent past, shows how the nature and function of murals in Northern Ireland have changed. In Derry and Belfast, they are the focal point of a tourist trail that has been established in the decade or so since the official end of the conflict following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Now figured as \u27heritage\u27 and commodified in various forms -- postcards, posters, books and guided taxi tours (Fig. 1) -- the murals have become a source of revenue and profit for a number of organizations: ex‑prisoners\u27 associations, artists\u27 collectives, local community groups, and traditional commercial projects. The impulse behind some of the tours appears to be genuinely educative; in others, crassly exploitative. One West Belfast tour, for example, exhorts its customers to \u27touch the peace wall, or write your name on it, like millions of others, famous and otherwise, after all it is longer than the Berlin wall!\u27, while another offers a \u27welcome to the biggest outdoor art gallery in the world\u27, and yet another promises to \u27get into the heart of the areas that bore the brunt of the conflict\u27 while guaranteeing \u27the opportunity to take photographs and a brief stop at the souvenir shop\u27. While it is easy to sneer at the blatant selling of \u27history\u27 at £8 per head for an hour and a half\u27s tour, it should be remembered that the locally based organizations provide employment and wages in some of the most economically deprived areas of Western Europe. Although this commodification is a long way from the directly war-related function of the earliest murals (Fig. 2), it is by no means the only change that deserves attention. Two others are: the attempt by the state to influence the development of murals in both republican and loyalist areas; and the shift in the nature of republican murals, particularly in Belfast, and the political difficulties that this poses for the republican movement — or at least that part of the republican movement that signed up to the peace process and is now involved in the political administration of Northern Ireland

When Saturday Comes: The Boundaries of Football Rudeness

There seems then to have been a modification to the \u27structure of feeling\u27 associated with this aspect of rudeness in British society. But there is one place in Britain which has been almost automatically linked with forms of rudeness which are socially unacceptable; a location where offensiveness, crudity, insulting behaviour and nastiness constitute not so much the exception as the norm. Or at least this is how it appears in the social imaginary. The aim of this chapter will be to explore this arena in order to determine what it reveals about both British society and its boundaries of rudeness. The site to be considered is the Premiership football ground, when Saturday comes

Book Chapter: The Politics of Language

The most familiar account of the connection between language, mind, and identity, however, comes to us in the work of the post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte and Humboldt. And it is with the legacy of their thought that I will be concerned here

Book Chapter: That Obscure Object of Desire: A Science of Language

The task will be to bring to light the repressions necessary to sustain the new science of language and its newly found object and to examine its alleged scientific neutrality