Spenser's Trace

Raising his voice against the din, the postman says the weather is to worsen, that the winds will mount into a category that we in Ireland call “storm force.” Streams flow down the graveled driveway; spied even from the distance of the windows, the road is awash with small rivers floated with the detritus that is autumn, flukes and brown-orange leaves, yew needles blackened by rain.When, for a moment, the wind breathes in, I glimpse smoke against the gorsed and heathered hill that says our neighbors, here in the Wicklow mountains, are in and at the fire. And then the wind resumes. I almost wait for the power to cut out, lines clipped by branches broken or snagged: I have filled kettle, water jug, a pot, knowing that if it cuts out our pump will cut out too, and the well, not dry, will seem so. And so these slight preparations

Global civil war and post-9/11 discourse in The Wasted Vigil

Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil offers the opportunity to consider the ways in which notions of civil war in the twenty-first century are complicated both by legacies of colonialisms and by contemporary discourse on extremism. Though the Afghanistan represented in the text is shown to be in a state of civil war stemming from tribal conflict, it is, simultaneously, an occupied space with an inheritance of multiple occupations. This palimpsestic arena serves as a meeting ground for key characters, each of which hails from and so represents a distinct part of Afghanistan’s legacy. The novel also offers a meditation on the nature of extremism and its representations in the post-9/11 era. If, as Baudrillard suggests, terrorism like that enacted on 11 September 2001 succeeds because of its symbolic value, Aslam’s novel pursues the notion of the symbolic through language as a way of moving beyond the standoff created by current-day (and largely American) rhetoric about extremism. The ‘global civil war’ enacted in the pages of The Wasted Vigil thus offers a critique not only of definitions of civil war, but also, and perhaps more significantly, a far more damning critique of the American-centric perspective on globality and media’s normalization of the unimaginable image

Review: NATION STATES: THE CULTURES OF IRISH NATIONALISM, by Michael Mays. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2007. 225 pp.

Abstract included in text

Review: NATION STATES: THE CULTURES OF IRISH NATIONALISM, by Michael Mays. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2007. 225 pp.

Abstract included in text

Edmund Spenser and Transhistorical Memory in Ireland

Edmund Spenser has been beleaguered by some critics who deem him to be a willing and active representative of the worst of English colonial aspirations, and defended by others who see him as a humanist poet caught in the closing jaws of an imperial mission. This vacillation of opinion is seen in the rewriting of Spenser by Irish writers over time. Spenser has also haunted Irish critical work, moving through the contemporary academy in a swift transmission beginning in the 1980s, when ‘Spenser and Ireland’ became a subject of some significance. Yet now, only thirty years later, that attention has been diverted, leaving Spenser, in an Irish context at least, as a placeholder of memory. This essay considers key moments or changes in the rewriting of Spenser's cultural memory in Ireland, considering the long duration of his figuring in Irish literature and culture as a case study of transhistorical memory

Review: NATION STATES: THE CULTURES OF IRISH NATIONALISM, by Michael Mays. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2007. 225 pp.

Abstract included in text

Spenser's Trace

Raising his voice against the din, the postman says the weather is to worsen, that the winds will mount into a category that we in Ireland call “storm force.” Streams flow down the graveled driveway; spied even from the distance of the windows, the road is awash with small rivers floated with the detritus that is autumn, flukes and brown-orange leaves, yew needles blackened by rain.When, for a moment, the wind breathes in, I glimpse smoke against the gorsed and heathered hill that says our neighbors, here in the Wicklow mountains, are in and at the fire. And then the wind resumes. I almost wait for the power to cut out, lines clipped by branches broken or snagged: I have filled kettle, water jug, a pot, knowing that if it cuts out our pump will cut out too, and the well, not dry, will seem so. And so these slight preparations

Spenser's Trace

Raising his voice against the din, the postman says the weather is to worsen, that the winds will mount into a category that we in Ireland call “storm force.” Streams flow down the graveled driveway; spied even from the distance of the windows, the road is awash with small rivers floated with the detritus that is autumn, flukes and brown-orange leaves, yew needles blackened by rain.When, for a moment, the wind breathes in, I glimpse smoke against the gorsed and heathered hill that says our neighbors, here in the Wicklow mountains, are in and at the fire. And then the wind resumes. I almost wait for the power to cut out, lines clipped by branches broken or snagged: I have filled kettle, water jug, a pot, knowing that if it cuts out our pump will cut out too, and the well, not dry, will seem so. And so these slight preparations