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For the Irish emigrant, the home place is elsewhere; it is ‘imagined’ in terms of both the past and the future – the past as a form of cultural memory and the future as a desire to return to the homeland. – from The Irish Dancing by
This chapter strikes out on a pathway of charting how Freud considered memory, as one of the processes working through the subject, and I will do so through a specific ‘case-history’. Although Freud thought psychoanalysis was in the pursuit of truth, the speculative nature of his writing, and the different, irreconcilable models of thought, set side by side alongside each
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature explores intertextual memories of William Shakespeare in modern Irish writing. It proposes a new way of reading these memories through ‘dismemory’. Dismemory describes disruptive memories that are future oriented, demonstrating how Irish writers make use of Shakespeare to underwrite the Irish nation-state. The ghosts section foregrounds the father–son relation in Irish literature that is modelled on the ‘hauntological’ (Derrida, 1993) relation between Hamlet’s Ghost and his son. This relation is paradigmatic for Irish writers, evident through J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907), ‘Hades’ from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and John Banville’s Ghosts (1993). These examinations demonstrate how each adapts the father–son structure from Hamlet. The section on bodies thinks through Beckett’s Three Novels (1951–53) and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1960–86) and how they foreground the material body. These bodies are tied either to the antitheatrical discourse (Beckett) or to maternity discourses (O’Brien), and in both cases, the Irish writers manage to throw off the bodies’ burdens much as their early modern literary forebears did. Finally, the land section examines W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney – first Yeats’s concern with the surface of the land results in an ideal image of the dancer, as in As You Like It and Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again; then, Heaney’s interest in the land’s depths. Heaney restores these unearthed Irish memories in his poetry, thereby creating a new Irish archive.
The texts of Henry V Is Henry V better understood as a ‘memory play’ than as a ‘history play’? The former category has helped to define the concerns of modern (and post-modern) drama; it may prove equally fertile for Renaissance theatre. 1 Perceiving Shakespeare’s play as ‘memorial’ would supplant
This book is about the importance of literary memory, both on general and particular planes of examination. On the former, I am interested in the ways in which Shakespeare – ‘our contemporary’, in Jan Kott’s ( 1964 ) idiom – is remembered and put to work by modern writers. What appears to become available through remembering Shakespeare – the
Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship. – from The Instant of My Death by Maurice Blanchot Introduction In the previous chapters, I explored the power of memory to alter
subterranean aspect of the land. That underground nature also functions in the territorial text of the poems: what becomes embedded in the poems is as important as the land’s figuration in language. This interest in depths and the underground is also connected to memory, archaeology, and the archive in Heaney’s writing. I call this practice ‘counter-history’, with Heaney becoming a
part rejects standard postcolonial resistance. One key strand of van der Ziel’s argument, though not foregrounded, is the theatrical nature of Beckett’s intertextual memories in Godot . I will take this theatricality seriously, exploring how it works in Beckett’s prose writing of the 1950s, before his turn to drama. Referring to ‘Lucky’s great feat of
this is achieved, though not in the ways that contemporary theatre critics thought. The ways in which Hamlet confirms the veracity of the Ghost establishes an inverted temporality of memory – it is only considered a truthful spirit because Hamlet decides to pursue vengeance, and therefore historical action gives life to (and precedes) the memory – which is deployed in Playboy
from the dominant critical mode to focus instead on the spectrally rich ‘Hades’. The sixth episode ‘Hades’ charts Bloom’s journey from the centre of Dublin to Prospect Cemetery in the city’s northwest quadrant. He attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam, and the journey, the service, and the burial all prompt memories, both voluntary and involuntary, of people and events to flood