"Living So Far From Words" : Intertextuality, Trauma and the Post-Shoah World of Medbh McGuckian’s Blaris Moor

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Forging Intertextual Encounters with Death : Medbh McGuckian’s The High Caul Cap

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Does Your Heart Ache with the Truth of the Past? : Victims and Trauma in Northern Irish Culture

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Lest We Forget : Memory, Trauma, and Culture in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

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Introduction

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Introduction : Post-Agreement Northern Irish Culture

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Home and Away : The House in Exilic Narratives

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“Nobody Knows What Is in Them until They Are Broke up”: Medbh McGuckian’s Feminist Poetry

This article argues that Medbh McGuckian’s oeuvre is profoundly concerned with matters of female identity in ways that mark it out as feminist. Her historical gaze lays bare the essentialist, gendered rhetoric used within patriarchal culture which renders women as marginal, submissive and disempowered. In poems which borrow from texts as diverse as source books on women’s culture in Renaissance Italy and sociological studies of women’s housework, McGuckian investigates masculinist ideologies that have controlled and defined women’s bodies and behaviour throughout the ages.Cet article soutient que l’œuvre de Medbh McGuckian témoigne d’un profond engagement féministe dans son traitement de l’identité de la femme. Le regard historique qu’elle porte dénonce la rhétorique essentialiste et genrée employée dans la culture patriarcale qui présente la femme comme figure marginale, soumise et impuissante. Dans des poèmes qui empruntent à des textes aussi variés que des livres sur la culture des femmes en Italie pendant la Renaissance et des études sociologiques sur les femmes et le travail qu’elles exercent au foyer, McGuckian explore les idéologies masculinistes qui ont contrôlé et défini le corps de la femme et son comportement depuis des siècles

“Snared by Words”: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian’s writing is characteristically appropriative: each poetic text is woven together using phrases and images plucked from myriad sources. This article examines how she uses unacknowledged quotations to mark and encircle narratives of trauma. Looking specifically at three poems which take the Shoah as their thematic focus, I explore how she avoids exploitative rhetoric and how she is aware of her lack of authority to speak about or on behalf of the victims.L’écriture de Medbh McGuckian s’approprie les choses : chacun des textes poétiques est élaboré en reliant, comme en un tissage, des expressions et des images issues de sources multiples. Cet article se penche sur la manière dont elle utilise des citations (dont les auteurs ne sont pas référencés) pour marquer et cerner un discours sur le traumatisme. On prendra pour exemple trois poèmes qui ont pour thème la Shoah, et l’on montrera comment McGuckian se détourne d’une rhétorique qui exploiterait le sujet pour au contraire souligner la difficulté intrinsèque à laquelle elle est confrontée pour parler des victimes, ou en leur nom

"Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time": the representation of violent events in contemporary culture

This article focuses on how the representation of violent events is tackled by a number of visual artists and contemporary writers. From their response to such events, there emerges the artists’ concern with avoiding the possible trivialization of violence when fixing the significance of the object or event through the act of representation itself. Incorporating a critical approach towards their chosen method of representation, which may highlight its shortcomings as well as the contingency of the final product, constitutes a shared strategy to overcome such a danger. Consequently, their aesthetic stance evolves towards the trope of silence, which they regard as holding the necessary subversive potential to transcended the postmodern model of the “image-event”Este artículo aborda la naturaleza problemática de las representaciones de hechos violentos, a través de las respuestas que ante los mismos dan un grupo de artistas visuales y de escritores contemporáneos. Para los artistas analizados, la preocupación primordial se centra en la propia responsabilidad con respecto al peligro de trivialización del objeto o evento, durante el proceso de interpretación y de fijación de significado que se produce en el acto de la representación. Las técnicas metadiscursivas que incorporan una visión crítica sobre las deficiencias del método de representación, tanto del texto visual como del texto lingüístico, se perfilan como las más eficaces en la consecución de tal objetivo, pues apuntan a la contingencia y provisionalidad de la actividad representacional. De esta manera, la evolución natural de los artistas comprometidos con la realidad de la violencia es hacia el tropo del silencio, al que se recurre por su potencial subversivo para trascender el modelo posmoderno de la «imagen-evento»