Skipping and Gasping, Sighing and Hoping in Colum McCann’s “Aisling”: The Making of a Poet

“Aisling” est la dernière nouvelle en date publiée par Colum McCann dans la revue Paris Review en 2010, puis dans l’anthologie New Irish Short Stories de Joseph O’Connor en 2011. Elle mérite toute notre attention car dans cette nouvelle l’écriture de McCann semble atteindre un point d’accomplissement particulier. “Aisling” est une nouvelle très brève qui donne la parole à une allégorie de l’Irlande contemporaine et s’inspire de “l’aisling” une forme poétique ancienne, florissante au XVIIIème siècle. Cette nouvelle met au jour une double métamorphose. La première est la métamorphose de ce texte de fiction en un poème, alors que le romancier incarne la voix d’une Irlande éternelle tout en faisant des emprunts à une forme poétique traditionnelle. Le récit recule peu à peu derrière la puissance des images et le rythme, laissant le lecteur captivé par les suggestions visuelles et sonores, la respiration du texte, ses soupirs et halètements. Dans cette nouvelle, Colum McCann se métamorphose lui aussi en poète, dessinant une véritable poétique de l’espérance, poussant la dynamique et le souffle de la danse jusqu’à sa plus pure expression poétique

Ireland Through the Looking-Glass

Voici un excellent ouvrage écrit par Carol Taaffe qui porte sur l’oeuvre tentaculaire de Brian O’Nolan que les lecteurs connaissent plus souvent sous le nom de Flann O’Brien ou Myles na gCopaleen. Cet ouvrage propose un état des lieux précis de la recherche nationale et internationale sur les écrits de Brian O’Nolan. Avec beaucoup de recul et une grande maîtrise du sujet, Carol Taaffe étudie les textes d’O’Nolan à la lumière du contexte historique dublinois et irlandais des années 30, mais au..

Immaterial matters in Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

Often compared to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones published in 2016 is built on tensions and paradoxes. The narrator of Solar Bones is a dead man coming back to his home and his village on All Souls Day 2008 to reflect on his life on earth. The one-sentence narrative sounds like a gasp between life and death, the past and the present, real facts and virtual facts. Just as this in-between status of the narrator is a key-feature of the novel, the narrative questions the meaning of place, embodiment, and life in Ireland at the end of the 20th century and the turn of the twenty-first century. The narrator’s death and his return coincide with the formidable end of the Celtic Tiger, so that the novel can be read as a dirge for Ireland, while the voice of the narrator, an ex-building engineer on a tightrope between the world of the dead and that of the living, implicitly questions what kind of future Ireland wants to construct. In Solar Bones reading becomes an exercise in balance between past and the future, materiality and abstraction, nature and constructs, life and death. And yet, for all its dramatic and morbid tone, this novel opens out moral, social, political and environmental perspectives and points at the need to draw lessons from the past in order to build a sounder future for the generations to come in Ireland.Souvent comparé au roman posthume de Flann O’Brien Le Troisième policier, le roman Solar Bones de Mike McCormack, publié en 2016, est construit sur des contradictions fondamentales. Le narrateur de Solar Bones est bel et bien mort en ce jour de la Toussaint 2008 quand il revient dans sa cuisine pour réfléchir à sa vie sur terre. Constitué d’une longue portion de phrase, ce récit résonne comme un ultime râle entre vie et trépas, passé et présent, réel et virtuel. Tout comme cet entre-deux du narrateur est un trait essentiel du roman, le récit pose la question du lieu, du corps et de la vie en Irlande à la fin du XXe siècle et au début du XXIe siècle. La mort du narrateur et son retour coïncident avec la fin spectaculaire du Tigre celtique, si bien que ce roman pourrait être lu comme une élégie pour l’Irlande. Le narrateur, ancien ingénieur du bâtiment et des travaux publics, en équilibre tel un funambule entre le monde des morts et celui des vivants, pose de manière implicite la question de l’avenir de l’Irlande. Dans Solar Bones la lecture se fait exercice d’équilibre entre passé et futur, matérialité et abstraction, nature et construction, vie et mort. Et pourtant, malgré cette tonalité mortifère, le roman ouvre des pistes de réflexion morale, sociale, politique et environnementale et renvoie à la question essentielle des leçons à tirer du passé pour construire l’avenir des générations futures en Irlande

Drafts From Sociology of Design. Introduction to Discussion

Praca recenzowana / Peer-reviewed paperThe following publication is a collection of texts on the contemporary meaning of design, the changing in roles of designers and cultural and social expectations described in the broad cognitive perspective. Although this topic raised in the field of sociology quite recently, the complexity of the phenomenon, its manifestations, forms and ways of preventing provoked the debate on the field. Hence, presented volume is prepared by the researchers, whose interests have been provoked by needs of sociological inclusion in the debate in the area dominated so far by theorists and practitioners from the field of art and related disciplines. Through the publication of this book we would like to explore the area associated with the use and perception of design in a broader social context and try to find the answers for few questions: • What is the role or roles for design in modern society? • How design can be use in solving problems connected with social and cultural changes? • What are the examples of the application of design in processes of social and cultural change? • What are the boundaries of socially responsible design? • How to involve society in the process of socially responsible design

« Being Jewish and Irish in Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan »

International audienceIrish Jewish questions have long stood in the margins of scholarly work, and in fact Irish Jewish literature as a whole has been marginal within Irish literature. While the first Jewish people setting foot in Ireland were depicted in the Annals of Inisfallen, a medieval chronicle, as arriving in 1079, the most famous, however complex, representation of a Jewish character in fiction is James Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Paradoxically enough, interest in Irish Jewish history has increased since the 1990s, at the same time as the community itself declined. Irish Jewish studies are therefore only beginning. 1 In 2016, the same year as the Cork synagogue closed its doors, after more than a hundred years, a collection of poems by Simon Lewis, Jewtown, 2 and a novel by Ruth Gilligan Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, 3 were published, both 'artistically resurrect[ing] the now disappeared Cork Jewish community'. 4 Also in 2016, an exhibition entitled Representations of Jews in Irish Literature 5 was launched in Belfast, part of a wider, long-term project set up by researchers from the Arts Department of the University of Ulster, whose aim is to 'analyze the representations of Jews from the earliest times to the present', as well as 'investigate references to Jews in Irish literature, whether in Irish or English, and collect more substantial references into an anthology of such writing'.

“The Art of the ‘Good Step’ in Colm Tóibín’s Bad Blood : A Walk Along the Irish Border(1987)”.

International audience"The art of the 'good step' in Colm Tóibín's Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987)." In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit emphasized how the action of walking generated a unity of the body, the soul and the landscape: Walking […] is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart […] Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes making a chord. (Solnit 5) In her words, the apparent paradox between intention and unwilled actions made walking a unique way to apprehend a territory, favouring active and mobile interactions capable of adapting to the various terrains or situations. The territory examined in this paper is the contested space of the Irish border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and more specifically the account given by author and journalist Colm Tóibín of a three-month journey along the border in 1986. The nature of this borderland corresponds to Homi Babbha's definition of 'thirdspace' as a place of invention and transformational encounters, a dynamic in-between space that is imbued with the traces, relays, ambivalence, ambiguities and contradictions with the feelings and practices of both sites, to fashion something different, unexpected. (Bhabha 1994) We will therefore focus on the ambiguities and paradoxes Tóibín invariably stumbles upon in his book and question the transformational nature of his journey, especially its capacity to welcome the unexpected. To what extent does the invisibility of the border in some places and the palpable tension in parts of the territory open out creative possibilities, as artists choose to inhabit the blurred spaces and create horizons of reconciliation and re-connection? In the light of anthropologist Tim Ingold's work on lines and walking, we will discuss how in walking along the border Tóibín uncovered new meanings that might have been concealed or simply not been expressed in dominant discourses. Tóibín followed a specific method to walk along a violently contested space. In turn, we will follow the sometimes invisible line of the border he uncovers in his text. Just as 'thirdspace argues for the breakdown of binaries, and the emergence of anOther , a third space of enunciation and political and cultural resistance

Time and Sense in Anne Enright’s The Gathering

À la lumière des textes d’Henri Lefebvre (La production de l’espace) et d’Edward Soja (Postmodern Geographies), cet article s’intéresse moins à la temporalité dans The Gathering qu’à la manière dont l’espace construit le temps du récit ainsi qu’une histoire nationale et individuelle. Le but de cet article est de souligner les liens entre l’histoire familiale et nationale et la construction d’une identité personnelle et nationale. La gémellité, la pédophilie, la transgression, les secrets de famille, la fonction et le poids de l’héritage historique sont des thématiques communes à d’autres romans post-coloniaux, comme par exemple The God of Small Things écrit par Arundhati Roy, auteure indo-anglaise, en 1997, dix ans avant The Gathering. La comparaison entre ces deux romans met en valeur les points communs entre deux regards féminins contemporains mais aussi la spécificité de la voix contemporaine irlandaise d’Enright pour aborder les contradictions du passé.In the light of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies, the aim of this paper is to focus not so much on time and the experience of time in The Gathering, but on the ways in which spatiality enables the narrator to shape narrative time, as well as national and personal history. It will strive to show how the study of space in The Gathering enables us to gain a better insight into the way family and national history can mould personal and national identities. The themes of twins, paedophilia, transgression, family secrets, the function and heritage of history or the probing of national identity in post-independence years echo other post-colonial novels, such as for instance The God of Small Things, another Booker Prize winner, written by the Indo-English woman writer Arundhati Roy in 1997, ten years before The Gathering. The comparison with The God of Small Things highlights how a contemporary Irish woman author responds to the contradictions of the past

« Tales of the Irish Traveller world in Why the Moon Travels (2020) by Oein DeBhairduin »

International audienceThe present paper focuses on Oein DeBhairduin’s collection of stories Why the Moon Travels published by Skein Press in 2020. Skein Press is a young publishing house devoted to publishing texts by authors who are traditionally underrepresented in Irish literature. The 20 stories in the collection come from the Irish Traveller community recognized as Ireland’s indigenous nomadic people and ethnic minority. All the stories in the collection reflect the strong ties between human beings and non-human beings or elements. Irish Traveller’s culture being mostly oral, the publication of those 20 stories in 2020 deserves our attention. Among the Traveller community, spiritual activities, connections to nature and forms of animism have been maintained for longer than in the rest of Irish society. In this paper I wish to study the ways in which the stories collected and narrated by Oein DeBhairduin represent and value the agency between the human and the non-human worlds in ways which could (re)awaken both an awareness of old lore and a form of presence to the natural world in readers outside the Traveller community. The publication of this collection of stories also raises the wider and deeper question of the place left to the ‘other’ in Irish society: the other as non-human, which in a context of climate-change ought to be urgently reassessed and addressed. But also the human ‘other’, living in the margins of Irish society, coming from across the globe, from regions at war and/or already dramatically affected by climate change - or longstanding communities who have been marginalized. I wish to argue that the ‘greening’ agenda, if it is to trigger a virtuous ecological circle and new forms of agencies with non-human ‘others’, must also include the human others back from the margins to the centre of the political agenda, concomitantly with environmental issues