Violence and ontological doubt in "The stoat"

This paper first considers textual variations of John McGahern’s short story “The Stoat” from its original publication in Getting Through to the revised version in Collected Stories. Then, by focusing on a repeated passage on a rabbit and a stoat, the author reads their story as a narrative of dislocation and doubt. The narrator attempts to make sense of his relationships with others (mostly his father) and his place in the world through an allegorical animal tale. The inadequacy of that imaginative allegory to provide an understanding of the world is due not only to the narrator’s youth and inexperience, but also to the violence in the allegorical narrative. The world of violence cannot be made completely whole

Violence and ontological doubt in "The stoat"

This paper first considers textual variations of John McGahern’s short story “The Stoat” from its original publication in Getting Through to the revised version in Collected Stories. Then, by focusing on a repeated passage on a rabbit and a stoat, the author reads their story as a narrative of dislocation and doubt. The narrator attempts to make sense of his relationships with others (mostly his father) and his place in the world through an allegorical animal tale. The inadequacy of that imaginative allegory to provide an understanding of the world is due not only to the narrator’s youth and inexperience, but also to the violence in the allegorical narrative. The world of violence cannot be made completely whole

Energy In/Out of Place

This book, and the online workshop that preceded it, are attempts to intensify the sense of place within our scholarship and in our scholarly practices. They are formed from the efforts of five research teams examining energy cultures in five different locations around the world. Team members weren’t necessarily experts on their given places, but many were bound to these sites through time, kith, and kin

Brian Friel and the Field Day Theatre Company : a marriage of artistic vision and cultural activism

This thesis examines the work of Irish playwright Brian Friel during the period in which he wrote plays specifically for the Field Day Theatre Company, a cultural enterprise he founded with actor Stephen Rea in 1980. Because Field Day is equally active in publishing political pamphlets as it is in producing plays, I use the texts of the fifteen pamphlets (outlined in Appendix A) as the main critical resource for analyzing Friel's dramatic efforts during the 1980's in order to establish a dialogue between the theatrical stage and the political arena. With the production of Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, it becomes obvious that this dialogue has changed, if not ended, and the basic conclusion I have drawn is that although the decade spent with the Field Day Theatre Company provided Brian Friel with the material and space for the creation of his finest dramatic efforts to date, that era of artistic and cultural/political activism is over and Friel has moved on to a new stage in his career. -- Chapter One focuses on Translations, produced as the inauguration of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, and the first set of pamphlets published in the volume Ireland's Field Day. -- Chapter Two continues to examine the early period of Friel's association with Field Day. Although The Communication Cord is in many ways a response to much of the text of Translations, it remains firmly imbedded in the theatre company's cultural/political agenda and is, in my opinion, representative of a theatrical culmination in Friel's career. -- Chapter Three looks at Making Historv (1988), a play more akin to the theoretical pamphlets in the second wave of Field Day publishing than it is to the dramatic brilliance of The Communication Cord. The play marks a significant shift in theatrical technique for Friel and is a sign of what is to come. -- Chapter Four concerns the break-up of the Friel/Field Day association as the two can be seen as taking very different approaches to their previously shared goals. The final set of Field Day pamphlets are as fundamentally different from the first six in their theoretical and practical approach to the Irish situation, as Dancing at Lughnasa differs from Translations in both style and content. -- Appendix A is a complete list of the Field Day pamphlets, with bibliographic references

Rebel narratives : the Irish gunman in fiction and film

This project investigates the many representations of Irish gunmen in narratives, both in print and on the screen. While the Irish gunman is often perceived as a figure of romantic legend and patriotic idealism, the character - as he exists within narrative - is more accurately a figure of lost hope, doomed ambition, and imprisoned ideals. -- The thesis is divided into four chapters; the first two are broadly historical and descriptive, while the second two are close readings of specific writers/filmmakers' work. Chapter one answers the question of how the gunman comes to be represented in fiction and film. The fictional representation of the gunman is part of a series of discursive practices such as mythology, eighteenth-century chapbooks, political stereotypes, theories of identity and nationalism, and the history of Fenianism and Irish Republicanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of these contribution factors in the make-up of the narrative gunman is examined at length. Chapter two examines the different representations of Irish gunmen characters. Beginning with romantic heroes and unromantic villains, the chapter moves on to more ambiguous characterizations, such as lost boys, gunmen on the run, and the seldom acknowledged but theoretically challenging female gunman. Chapter three analyzes the early twentieth-century novels of Liam O'Flaherty - many of which satirize and criticize the heroicization of Irish republican rebels. Chapter four concludes the thesis by looking at the films of Irish director Neil Jordan and the ways in which his psychological probing into the minds of gunmen resist, if not rebel against, the stereotype of the romantic Irish patriot. -- "Rebel Narratives: The Irish Gunman in Fiction and Film" offers a critical consideration of a character that has seldom come under inquiry, but that is nonetheless both politically contentious and frequently represented in narrative texts. More generally, the project contributes to on-going debates about identity, nationalism and cultural stereotypes by emphasizing, on the one hand, the durability of stereotypes and, on the other hand, the resistance to rigid codes of character and identity expressed in literary and cinematic texts