Introduction

On a night like this I remember the childwho came with fifteen summers to her name,and she lay down alone at my feetwithout midwife or doctor or friend to hold her handand she pushed her secret out into the night,far from the town tucked up in little scandals,bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,and though she cried out to me in extremisI did not move It is a confusing feeling – somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that is almost genital. This issue of Études irlandais..

Earth Care and Recovery in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places (2021)

Thin Places (2021) is a piece of work which defies categorization. It is partly a memoir filled with traumatic personal events, partly a reflection on loss in all its manifest forms (physical, familial, linguistic, environmental), and partly an uplifting plea for allowing the exploration of our natural surroundings to function as a meaningful form of care. Kerri ní Dochartaigh uses the materiality of the sentient beings that surround us, and deep care for our ecosystem, as a means of recovery. Earth care as self-care. Ní Dochartaigh is concerned with both the materiality and the immateriality of objects of care and manages to incorporate both through her interest in “the liminal space between things”, to borrow the title of an article by Timothy Morton (2014). The narrator foregrounds her mental health difficulties brought on by a violent and traumatic childhood in Northern Ireland yet also places the focus on the ways in which Ireland’s natural habitat, its material reality and its immaterial Celtic portals, “hold us” (2022: 228) in unsuspected care relationships. In the process, “[a]rt happens […] in the liminal space(s) between things, in conversations between metal and sky, humans and metal, era and era, heaven and earth” (Morton 2014: 270-1). A poignant process of recovery is recounted, highlighting firstly the refusal of care before slowly moving towards co-constituted acts of care: as ní Dochartaigh gradually recovers her lost mother tongue, and pays attention to the beauty of her natural surroundings, as she begins to care for both, she also starts to feel cared for. The sensory experience of loss, gain, and care in Thin Places is predicated upon several ecologies and resonates strongly with Joan Tronto’s definition of care as ultimately “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves (sic.), and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993: 103; original emphasis). Kerri ní Dochartaigh celebrates, in the most understated manner, the full complexity of this “life-sustaining web” and this article proposes to unpack all of the above elements to show how her very singular aesthetics places the emphasis on the coloniality of loss and the restorative power of stories

Dan Wylie and Craig MacKenzie, eds. “No Other World”: Essays on the Life-Work of Don Maclennan

This collection brings together intimate reflections and academic articles on a lesser-known and, the contributors argue, to date underrated South African academic, playwright, fiction writer, and poet, Don Maclennan (1929-2009). Born in England, Maclennan moved to South Africa when he was still a boy, and although he subsequently studied for a short while at Edinburgh University, and lived and taught for a couple of years in the United States, his home became South Africa. He held temporary ..

Between the Shadows

The essays contained in John Wilson Foster’s latest publication, most of which are slightly revised versions of papers, talks and previously published articles, cover a period of almost fifteen years. This time span is not unproblematic, especially given the significant political evolution which has taken place in the north over that period. In the preface, however, Foster pre-empts any criticism of his decision to let the articles stand in their original form by claiming that despite their p..

« Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000: The Transformation of Oral Space », David Lloyd

In his latest monograph, David Lloyd offers a stimulating analysis of the ways in which, as the subtitle of his work indicates, the oral space in Ireland has been profoundly and radically altered over the last two hundred years or so. Extremely erudite, Lloyd’s work retraces the transformation of Irish oral spaces from the clachan to the H-Blocks, via the public house, situating this metamorphosis within the context of capitalist expansion and colonial control and exploring the multifarious e..

Síobhra Aiken, Spiritual Wounds. Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War

Spiritual Wounds by Síobhra Aiken is not only a timely reappraisal of fictional, (semi-)autobiographical, and non-fictional narratives of the Irish Civil War and what they reveal about trauma and the power of testimony; it is also a colossal piece of research, as the thirty-page bibliography testifies to, and a generous contribution to contemporary research on the forgotten stories of this period of Irish history. In a coherently presented demonstration, Aiken takes us through the five diffe..

Introduction

On a night like this I remember the childwho came with fifteen summers to her name,and she lay down alone at my feetwithout midwife or doctor or friend to hold her handand she pushed her secret out into the night,far from the town tucked up in little scandals,bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises,and though she cried out to me in extremisI did not move It is a confusing feeling – somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that is almost genital. This issue of Études irlandais..

Introduction

“The Blessed Virgin and Cathleen Ní Houlihan were probably the two most dominant female icons in my thinking – the one being religious and the other poetic and romantic”, Edna O’Brien “a new languageis a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before”, Eavan Boland The decline of second-wave feminism in Western societies, the legacy of neo-liberal capitalism in general and of the Celtic Tiger in particular, and the emergence of a more liberal Irish society ..

Nadine Gordimer: De-Linking, Interrupting, Severing. Introduction

In a reflection about her own positionality, seen against the provisional and uncertain background of the “breaches and interstices that the ravelling-out of apartheid colonialism produced” (Writing 128), Nadine Gordimer recounts how her artistic calling preceded her political activism. In this essay, entitled “That Other World that Was the World,” she explains that before she committed herself to the anti-apartheid struggle per se, she had mingled with black writers, painters, and actors, an..

Revolution(s)

In 2018, the theme for the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), held at Nanterre University, itself a site of student revolution in the past, was “Revolution(s),” a notion which has particular resonance for the New Literatures panel which provided the genesis of many of the articles included in this issue. Previously colonised countries, as diverse and geographically disparate as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Australia (to name but t..