Exhibitionary Forms in Ireland: James Joyce’s Exhibits of Irish Modernity

The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the beginning of a bond between capitalism, consumer culture, the emergent advertising and the imperial ideology of England that would consolidate its hold not only economically but semiotically well into the early twentieth century. Within the new ‘scopic’ sense of the Empire promoted by the International Exhibitions in the British context, the specificity of Ireland as internal colony and emancipating nation is worth considering. The 1907 Dublin International Exhibition, in spite of its success, failed to elicit a strong interest on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals, at a peak time in the history of cultural nationalism championed by the Celtic Revival movement, with the two notable exceptions of novelist Bram Stoker and, to a lesser degree, of playwright John Millington Synge. The first part of the essay considers the cultural implications of the expositions in Ireland and the 1907 Dublin Exhibition in the light of the defining trope of the core-periphery relationship. The second and main part of this study focuses on what appears to be one of the most interesting and articulate textualizations of the “exhibitionary complex” in Irish – and English – literary culture, which should rather be ascribed, it is my contention, to the work of James Joyce, notably in Dubliners and Ulysses. This applies to the distinctively Irish minor expository form of the (Orientalist) bazaar (the Araby and Mirus bazaars, respectively in Dubliners and Ulysses), the phantasmagoria of commodity culture, the ubiquity and the spectacle of the imported colonial commodities as an instance of cultural imperialism, the consumption of Orientalist images as an escapist rather than imperialist fantasy, the nexus between the ephemeral expository space and erotic degradation, the museum (“Lestrygonians”), the press and advertising (“Aeolus”), the monumentary apparatus of the city (“Wandering Rocks”), the Victorian seaside resort indirectly evoked as a sexualized space of leisure (“Nausicaa”), the pageant of colonial Ireland’s efforts of technical and scientific progress satirised in “Ithaca”, and, finally, the very idea of the modern city as exhibition

The fictive and the funerary: macabre and black humour in the contemporary Irish novel

Death and the macabre have always been deeply entrenched in Irish culture: one of its most celebrated sons, Bram Stoker, has granted Ireland a central place in the Gothic literary tradition. The wake and the funeral have a prominent place into the Irish obsession with death and all its paraphernalia. In their book about Irish funerary tradition, Nina Witoszek and Patrick Sheeran state how those traditions are a mark of identity and might be seen as politically charged since the history of Ireland is one of a country divided by opposing loyalties and religious affiliations. Poetry has been regarded as one of the most effective vehicles for the transmission of death traditions in the rich Irish culture, and the modern and contemporary Irish poetry is a remarkable depository of death imagery. By recalling the distinction by Vivian Mercier, who identifies 'macabre' and 'grotesque' as two types of humour typical of the Irish comic tradition (along with the fantastic), the essay discusses the cultural and anthropological matrix of the Irish macabre through examples from contemporary Irish literature, focusing in particular on novels by Patrick McCabe and John Banville

«Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements

The article considers two main aspects of literary estrangement in neo-Victorian fiction, starting from a very brief introduction to Shklovsky’s concept in the context of English literature. The first part refers to the structural use of defamiliarization and foregrounding of narrative strategies innovated by John Fowles’ seminal 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles ‘made strange’ the Victorian novel reinventing its form, promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of the great themes of Victorian fiction through an inventive use of narrative distance and of the narratorial voice. The second part of the article focusses on the ‘restoration’ of the object mentioned by Shklovsky in considering a specific material and cultural object - the fossil- connoted by an epistemic tension which was investigated by Foucault and Mitchell. The fossil is thus analysed as a catalyst of estrangement in some neo-Victorian novels of the last fifty years, among which Fowles’ masterpiece, Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009)

«these heavy sands are language»: the beach as a cultural signifier from Dover Beach to On Chesil Beach

Il saggio si concentra su alcune caratteristiche del topos della spiaggia come spazio geografico liminare, problematico e instabile, nel suo connotarsi come costrutto culturale nella riflessione estetica della letteratura inglese. Partendo da “Dover Beach” di Matthew Arnold, uno dei più celebri testi poetici Vittoriani, in cui la spiaggia e la costa sono lo scenario di una fantasia di conflitto, espressione di un’inquietudine sociale e di un’angoscia morale suscitate dalla paventata deriva di una civiltà, si analizza la complessità semantica della spiaggia come spazio ove si inscena una rottura del precario equilibrio tra individuo e il mondo cui appartiene, o la presa d’atto di un impossibile controllo sul reale in alcuni testi narrativi del tardo Ottocento – il racconto “The Beach of Falesá” di R. L Stevenson – e Modernisti – “Solid Objects” di Virginia Woolf, il terzo capitolo di Ulysses di Joyce, “Proteus”. Nella parte finale si considera la ripresa intertestuale del testo arnoldiano nel romanzo On Chesil Beach di Ian McEwan, che ripropone l’immagine della spiaggia come luogo simbolico della rivelazione della fragilità dell’identità e dello smarrimento dell’io

Introduzione

The ship and the sea have always held an important place in literature, with their powerful imagery. Ships are constantly central and have become the symbol of the proximity of “here and elsewhere”, the proximity of real, ruled places, and the boundless space which contains imagined places. The title of the interdisciplinary conference “Transatlantici ed altri bastimenti: Transiti, desideri, memorie” (“Ocean Liners and Other Ships: Passages, Desires, Memories”), evokes the sea as supreme boundary and as object of desire and fear, but also as the crossing of oceanic distances, thus foregrounding the crucial theme of wandering, a motif which underlays the various contributions and is declined in a multitude of significations, historical and social concretions. Beside that of the journey, many are the issues, the figures, and the topoi connected with the ship within the antique and the modern imagery. The articles are grouped in three sections: “From Legends to Scenes”, “Europe and Beyond”, “From the Empire to the Global World”

Premessa

This issue of “Prospero” has a monographic character and presents the contributions given to the conference held in Trieste in January 2005, “L’appetito vien leggendo: il cibo nell’immaginario letterario dal Medioevo alla contemporaneità”. The articles investigate, in a multidisciplinary and comparative way, the ancient and various ties between food and the written word, and the ways in which the imagery of food has represented and still does represent fundamental rituals of human experience, as well as extraordinary evocative moments