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L’inscription du dialecte alsacien dans le paysage linguistique strasbourgeois
François-Xavier Bogatto, Université de Strasbourg
Si l’espace alsacien a donné lieu à de nombreux travaux qui relèvent de la géolinguistique dialectale ou, plus récemment, de la sociolinguistique des contacts, il n’en demeure pas moins que l’espace urbain n’a guère été exploité en tant qu’objet et encore moins en tant que terrain de recherche. En prenant appui sur deux cadres théoriques et méthodologiques complémentaires, à savoir la Sociolinguistique Urbaine et les Linguistic Landscape Studies, notre intervention a pour objectif de rendre compte de la place et des fonctions du dialecte alsacien dans les écrits, institutionnels et non institutionnels, du paysage linguistique strasbourgeois, de cerner les enjeux de diverses natures (politique, sociale, économique, identitaire), ainsi que les rapports de force entre les dialectes et les autres variétés affichées.
‘The real capital’: historical musings on Cork and second city syndrome
Donal Ó Drisceoil, School of History, University College Cork
This paper takes a ramble through the historical record and cultural landscape, seeking the tangled roots of Cork’s sense of identity. It will explore the provenance and import of the ‘Rebel Cork’ moniker and ask how and why Cork city displays the classic signs of ‘second city syndrome’, with its apparently contradictory inferiority and superiority complexes. Merchant princes, striking workers, market traders, British royals, enlightenment philosophers, hot-air balloonists, short-story writers, revolutionaries and porter drinkers are amongst the motley cast of characters invoked in the search for answers.
The form, function and character of small towns in Ireland:
case studies drawn from the Irish Historic Towns Atlas
Jacinta Prunty, NUI Maynooth
Small towns in Ireland have received little scholarly attention at least when compared with the many fine studies published on the two major cities of Dublin and Belfast, and to a lesser but still significant degree, on the next rank of towns which includes Cork and Limerick. The ‘poor relation’ in urban studies has always been the smaller place while it barely features, if at all, in the national story. Part of this may be ascribed to a lack of appreciation of what makes a town truly a town and not a village or hamlet: its form and fabric, the functions it performs, the locus genii that gives each town, no matter how modest, a distinctive character. This paper looks at the topographical evidence we have for a selection of smaller Irish towns in an effort to understand something of what lies behind their neglect in history. The Irish Historic Towns Atlas project (Royal Irish Academy) under the auspices of the International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT), has published fascicles of twenty-three towns to date, with several more, including Galway city, in active preparation. A selection of historic maps is reprinted for each town, while the 1:2,500 nineteenth-century reconstruction map, which is created for each of the national atlases produced under the ICHT, is based on contemporary manuscript and printed surveys. An ambitious gazetteer of topographical information is created for each town, based upon cartographic evidence but supplemented by a wide variety of complementary evidence including commercial directories, visitors’ accounts, state inquiries and other primary sources as listed in each fascicle. Plates, views and aerial photos are included and each town is also the subject of a scholarly essay charting its topographical development. This paper will demonstrate how the Irish Historic Towns Atlas can be used as a window onto some at least of the smaller Irish towns and in a way that is comparative and original. The case studies will include Tuam, Sligo, Ennis, Carlingford and Carrickfergus.
Villes et campagnes : reconfiguration démographique
dans l’après Tigre Celtique
Catherine Piola, Université Paris Dauphine
Si l’Irlande est encore perçue aujourd’hui comme un pays essentiellement rural, il est légitime de se demander sur quoi repose cette perception en ce début de 21ème siècle. La campagne irlandaise est-elle restée à l’écart des bouleversements économiques engendrés par la période du Tigre Celtique, contrairement aux villes dont l’essor et la transformation semblent irréversibles ? La ruralité irlandaise d’aujourd’hui ressemble-t-elle à celle des périodes antérieures ? Les centres urbains ont-ils contenu leur expansion sans débordement sur l’espace rural ? En quoi les contraintes géophysiques ont-elles pu intervenir sur la configuration démographique de l’Irlande actuelle ?
Le questionnement relatif à la nature et à l’évolution de la ville et de la campagne irlandaises sera traité du point de vue de la présence humaine dans cet espace contrasté et antinomique. Il requiert dans un premier temps de se pencher sur la définition des zones dites urbaines et rurales, à l’échelle de l’île et dans le contexte européen. Les recensements de la population offrant des mesures précises de l’occupation du territoire, la réflexion se tournera ensuite vers une analyse démographique des milieux urbains et ruraux. Elle montrera comment les flux internes, de dépeuplement, de repeuplement, de surpeuplement, se sont accélérés au cours des quinze dernières années selon des schémas à la fois propres à l’Irlande et, à certains égards, peu différents des mutations avérées dans d’autres pays européens. L’étude proposée se penchera sur les questions récentes de développement des espaces intermédiaires péri-urbains, de phénomène de néo-ruralité et sur les conséquences de la croissance démographique des villages et petites villes. Les phénomènes relevés depuis plusieurs décennies et caractéristiques de l’Irlande, comme le dépeuplement des campagnes, l’occupation asymétrique du territoire ou encore l’absence de grands centres urbains dans les terres du centre seront réévalués à la lumière des plus récentes évolutions.
L’objectif de l’intervention est de montrer si l’occupation du territoire conserve les caractéristiques liées à l’histoire, à l’économie ou au patrimoine du pays ou si, au contraire, une reconfiguration démographique est en cours.
La planification régionale en république d’Irlande
Philippe Brillet, Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail
La planification, qui n’appartient guère à la culture britannique, ne fut introduite au Royaume-Uni qu’au lendemain de l’adhésion à la Communauté Économique Européenne. Il en alla tout autrement en Irlande, où le concept de développement territorial fut introduit presque d’emblée. Les causes en sont multiples : retard agricole de la moitié nord-ouest, retard global du tiers occidental et volonté d’y « compenser » les exactions britanniques, désir d’affirmation du nouvel État et, assez rapidement, clientélisme marqué. À partir de 1973 on ajoutera la nécessité d’avoir un cadre juridique et territorial pour obtenir puis gérer les aides communautaires. Certains résultats furent d’ailleurs remarquables, voire presque uniques en Europe : ainsi de la planification hospitalière, comparable à celle de la seule Suède.
Toutefois, il n’est pas de planification sans développement régional, et pas de région sans une ville principale qui la commande. Or la faiblesse de l’armature urbaine de l’Irlande (et ce des deux côtés de la frontière), car la plupart des entités qui y sont qualifiées de « villes » ne seraient ailleurs que des bourgs, a longtemps représenté un double obstacle, conceptuel et pragmatique. L’agence nationale de planification (NIRSA) a donc promu d’autorité certains de ces bourgs au rang de capitale régionale et, lorsqu’ils étaient vraiment trop petits, leur association. Mais, si la quinzaine d’années du Tigre Celtique ont été témoins de nombreux projets et schémas de développement, parfois grandioses, on observe que l’essentiel de l’effort fut concentré, à contrecourant de la rhétorique officielle, sur le Grand Dublin. De plus, le reste de la manne se concentra sur la région de Limerick, seul le Donegal et le corridor Dublin-Belfast n’étant pas oubliés.
Cette communication se propose d’examiner si et comment les villes d’Irlande ont pu se développer depuis fin 2008, dans un nouveau contexte de ressources rares mais de planification devenant plus contraignante.
Miltown Malbay: Irish World Music Capital.
Packaging an Irish Town as a Place of Musical Pilgrimage
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, Concordia University, Montreal
Relative to its physical size, Ireland occupies a disproportionate amount of space on the vast cartography of World Music. Driven by artistic talent, nationalist pride, and astute niche marketing, media moguls, entrepreneurs and culture brokers have all been complicit in the globalization of Irish traditional music in recent years. Ireland’s western county of Clare is often cited as the epicenter of this soundscape. Bordered by water on three sides, Clare sits with its back to the river Shannon and the Old World, its front facing west towards the Atlantic and the New World beyond. While the region is home to celebrated novelist Edna O’Brien and avant-guard composer Gerald Barry, its master musicians, like Martin Hayes and Sharon Shannon, are the global faces of Clare today. Similarly, the Kilfenora Céilí Band, the oldest ethnic ensemble in Ireland, has performed Clare’s traditional repertoire in symphony halls and folk festivals across the globe. In the market speak of Irish cultural tourism, ‘Clare for the Music’ has became a time-worn calling card that beckons overseas visitors west from Dublin to the music festivals and singing pubs of the county. Every summer, its towns and villages become make-shift academies of tradition, none more so than Miltown Malbay, Ireland’s mecca of traditional music, known, loved and frequented by music pilgrims and aficionados from Jura to Japan, from the Austrian Alps to the pampas of Argentina.
Unveiling the cultural history of Miltown Malbay from its genesis as a landlord town and stopping point on the lampooned West Clare railway, to its rise to globalism as a capital of Irish traditional music, this paper will investigate the manner in which this small town mobilized its West Clare hinterland in the 1960s and 1970s to create a vibrant global academy of Irish music and folklife. Drawing on a cross-disciplinary palimpsest of cultural geography, music history and social anthropology, the paper eschews the false dichotomy of ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ that continues to characterize traditional histories of Irish town life. In so doing, it will refocus the outsider lens of macro historical analysis to an insider perspective on a rural town radically departing from its isolation, strategically marketing its indigenous soundscape, and re-centering itself away from an externally-imposed periphery.
‘Mind the Gap’: The Big House in Cinematic Representations
of the Anglo-Irish War
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Université de Bretagne Sud
It goes without saying that the Big House was intended to be a symbol: as more than one critic has remarked, these houses really were only ‘big’ in comparison to the poverty of the lesser structures that surrounded them. They were to be a bastion for British and Anglo-Irish culture and a center for social and administrative interactions. In this sense, they straddled the gap between the towns of Dublin and London, whence their power came, and the villages to whom they administered: it is no coincidence that these garrisons of British power bore the brunt of Republican anger during the Troubles of 1919-1921. Examining two of the rare films to focus on the War of Independence from the perspective of rural Ireland (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) allows us to examine the representation of the Big House and its place between the Irish village and the British-ruled town. Loach’s film, which emphasizes the Socialist associations of the Anglo-Irish War and is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of British rule, highlights Republicans blending in to the landscape, walking from the activity of the village to the windswept hills of the countryside; the Big House, however, is reached only by (Black-and-Tan) jeep, and though landowner Sir John Hamilton may know his own servants, he fails to recognize the Republican members of the community. Deborah Warner’s The Last September takes a more clearly revisionist stance, and can be seen adding both the Irish and the British to its adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel about an Anglo-Irish family residing in the Big House of Danielstown during the war. In so doing, the Naylors become the middlemen in the struggle between the Black-and-Tans and the Republicans, once again associated respectively with town and country. In so doing, the films ‘mind the gap’, focusing on the Big House, so obviously present in the landscape, but which ultimately symbolizes the absence of middle ground between the two factions.
You are Now Entering Free (Market) Derry? Towards a Critical Framework for Understanding the UK City of Culture 2013
Peter Doak, Queen’s University, Belfast
Derry, or to be more specific Derry-Londonderry, is currently beginning its year as inaugural UK City of Culture. The award has been integrated into a wider urban regeneration framework, and serves as both a showcase of, and catalyst for, the city’s transition from conflict to post-conflict status. In media, political and much public discourse, the award galvanises the city’s trajectory from archetypal contested city to city of peace and prosperity. While no-one could argue against the need for change, what is passing for a ‘better’ future in this case is arguably a de-politicised, passive acceptance of neo-liberal capitalist urbanism as the only alternative to Derry’s history of conflict and division.
My research seeks to cast much needed critical light upon Derry’s ‘rebranding’ as UK City of Culture. To facilitate this, in the absence of an extensive Irish literature on the matter, I draw upon the inferences of David Harvey (1989, 2012) and Henri Lefebvre (1991) to situate the research within global models of entrepreneurial, neo-liberal strategies of urban governance. I contend that entrepreneurial governance, of the type exemplified in this case, not only entrenches existing patterns of marginality, but actively produces new forms of exclusion and inequality (Evans 2003, Greenberg 2003, 2008). Exclusions arising through the urban branding process are not consigned to a politics of representation per se, but rather directly ask questions about the right to the city. Derry’s year as UK City of Culture has just begun, and given the grave state of affairs evident in other cities that have been subject to urban branding (for example Mooney 2004, Zimmerman 2008), it is imperative to ask of those driving the entrepreneurialist agenda that they do not undermine the right to the city that all citizens – having collectively produced the terroir of the urban commons – should be entitled to.
Poverty-trapped: French Traveller Accounts of Poverty in Irish Towns over the Centuries
Grace Neville, University College Cork
French eye-witness accounts of Ireland from the early modern period onwards focus on rural rather than on urban Ireland. When they do pay attention to urban Ireland, representations of Dublin and, latterly, Belfast, tend to dominate. In its analysis of French portrayals of the towns and smaller cities of Ireland, this paper will focus on a theme that links these depictions from the early modern period down to our own time: the theme of poverty. Across the centuries, French travellers describe the reality of the life of the urban poor, young and old, in these neglected Irish towns and cityscapes. This paper will analyse the manifestations and consequences of this poverty, as recorded and interpreted by these French travellers. Their varying reactions, ranging from pity to amazement and anger, will be examined, as will their hypotheses regarding the causes and possible solutions to this perennial problem.
La présence française en Irlande à l’époque moderne : l’établissement de la communauté protestante, entre mythe et réalité
Emmanuelle Chaze, Bayreuth Universität
En 1869, l’historien victorien Samuel Smiles s’exprimait en ces termes en évoquant la présence en Irlande des Huguenots à la période moderne: « It was long the favourite policy of the English monarchs to induce foreign artizans to settle in Ireland and establish new branches of trade. It was hoped that the Irish people, inhabiting a rich land, and only needing peace and industry to make it prosper, might be induced to follow their example; and that thus the abundant population of the country, instead of being a source of dissenssion and poverty, might be rendered a source of national wealth and strength. » Dans cette introduction, Smiles présente les artisans étrangers comme rédempteurs de l’Irlande, pays grevé par des habitants qui – selon l’auteur – ne sont que source de dissension et de pauvreté.
Au-delà du parallèle avec le mythe du bon sauvage – remplacé dans l’historiographie victorienne par la figure de l’Irlandais passif, souvent incapable – le texte de Smiles apporte des indications précieuses, quoique souvent teintées de paternalisme anglais, sur la présence française en Irlande. Entre la fin du XVIème siècle et le milieu du XVIIIème siècle, plusieurs vagues d’immigration entraînent des protestants français à fuir les persécutions dont ils sont victimes en France, et à s’installer en terre irlandaise.
La colonisation huguenote en Irlande relève de deux démarches. La première est un déplacement individuel et spontané, notamment dans les villes portuaires, faciles d’accès depuis l’Angleterre, la seconde le résultat d’une politique encadrant un mouvement de personnes plus important : en témoignent les familles transportées d’Angleterre en Irlande par Ruvigny ou par le Duc d’Ormond afin d’établir des bastions protestants dans l’intérieur du pays (Kilkenny, Carlow, Portarlington) et/ou de développer des manufactures, comme celle du tissu (Lisburn, Waterford, Lurgan, Dundalk). L’étude du développement économique, social et culturel dans ces colonies pour la plupart éphémères permet de définir le rôle et la place de ces villes de petite et moyenne taille en Irlande, par rapport aux centres urbains de taille plus importante comme Cork et Dublin.
J’examinerai dans un premier temps quelles stratégies de colonisation huguenote ont été mises en place en Irlande, en en rappelant les bornes temporelles, démographiques et spatiales (I), et avec quels résultats, en observant dans quelle mesure les colons huguenots ont contribué au développement économique des villes dans lesquelles ils se sont établis, et quelles ont été les conséquences culturelles de leur installation dans celles-ci (II). De même, la présence française a suscité l’intérêt – et dans certains cas l’imaginaire – des historiens, qu’ils soient contemporains des faits ou qu’ils en rendent compte postérieurement, c’est pourquoi j’étudierai dans une troisième partie comment – et à quelles fins – la réception de cette communauté française a été rapportée par les historiens depuis la contemporanéité des faits jusqu’aux recherches actuelles (III).
Les ‘Bastilles’ irlandaises de Dublin et de Cork (1789- 1924)
Emilie Berthillot, Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail
Selon Michel Foucault, le Moyen-Age a inventé l’investigation criminelle, une révolution très lente dans l’application des sanctions ; le XIXème siècle, lui, voit le système pénal irlandais se doter de nouveaux pénitenciers (voir Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir – Naissance de la prison). Dans la société victorienne, les prisons représentent des châtiments légers comparés aux exécutions, elles permettent aux criminels de payer leurs dettes à la société, mais doivent aussi les transformer et les remettre sur le droit chemin. Les penseurs comme Elisabeth Fry et John Howard suggèrent que les moralités chrétiennes ainsi que le goût du travail et l’éducation soient inculqués aux prisonniers afin de garder les pauvres éloignés du péché (Pat Cooke, A History of Kilmainham Gaol1796- 1924). En Irlande, deux grands centres carcéraux se distinguent, Dublin, qui construit un grand nombre de nouveaux pénitenciers pour répondre à l’explosion de sa démographie et de sa criminalité, et Cork, la ville dépôt d’où partent les «hulks», des bateaux prisons chargés de criminels condamnés à la déportation vers l’Amérique, l’Australie ou la Tasmanie.
Cette communication se propose de mener une étude comparative entre Cork City Gaol, la nouvelle prison de Cork en 1823 et Kilmainham Gaol construite à Dublin en 1789 afin de montrer que Cork s’inscrit pleinement dans le système carcéral irlandais et suit l’exemple de Dublin. Cette étude approfondira tout d’abord l’évolution de l’architecture des bâtiments pénitenciers, puis la vie quotidienne des prisonniers ainsi que leur régime alimentaire tout au long du XIXème siècle (Patrick Carroll-Burke, Colonial Discipline, The Making of the Irish Convict System). Finalement, le vécu des prisonniers politiques à l’intérieur de la prison de Cork comme celle du Fenian J.S. Casey, enfermé dans la prison de Cork en 1865, sera examiné (voir John Sarsfield Casey, The Gatlee Boy) Cette analyse a pour but de montrer l’unicité de l’Irish Convict System fondé en 1857 par Walter Crofton et la volonté de la société irlandaise de donner une seconde chance à ses prisonniers à travers ces deux exemples que sont Cork et Dublin.
A sense of Place in the poetry of Vona Groarke
Hedwig Schwall, KU Leuven /HUBrussel
In her poetry, Vona Groarke focuses on the domestic microcosm embedded in rural, suburban and urban spaces, and most important therein is the poet’s focus on silence and gaps in life, the seams where the literal and the metaphorical touch, where physical and metaphysical (emotional) aspects of objects seem to meld into each other. In this paper I want to look at how Winnicott’s statement that “feeling real means … to relate to objects as oneself” is experienced by Groarke in her poetry.
Objects are signposts to deeper, darker worlds, and in her exploration of these darker aspects we see that Groarke is led by painters, but also by philosophers like Bachelard and psychoanalysts like Christopher Bollas. The latter’s book on « The Evocative Object World » is a fine starting point to help us see how Groarke evokes different dimensions of objects which are “ghostly” in the different degrees in which they “are”, or “appeal” to the observer, while the observer is active too, engaging in what which one might call, with A.L. Kennedy, a kind of “object bothering”.
We will look at poems from several volumes but mainly at poems from « Spindrift » (2009), all of which focus on the act of writing.
Ballybeg, la ville irlandaise selon Brian Friel
Martine Pelletier, Université F. Rabelais, Tours
Brian Friel a choisi pour cadre de la majorité de ses pièces la petite ville fictive de Ballybeg. Cette communication analysera la construction progressive de cet espace dont Friel s’attache a brosser un portrait à mi-chemin entre réalisme référentiel et archétype, ainsi que la façon dont cette petite ville entre en dialogue avec d’autres espaces de la fiction dramatique – en Irlande et ailleurs – créant un réseau et suggérant une géographie de la société irlandaise de la seconde moitié du XXème siècle. Enfin, au travers de deux pièces, Translations (1980) et Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), nous verrons comment grâce à Ballybeg, Friel retrace une histoire à la fois intensément personnelle et profondément collective. Personnelle car avec Dancing at Lughnasa c’est l’inscription de Glenties, la ville de sa famille maternelle et de son enfance, comme modèle premier de Ballybeg qui est actée ; collective car Baile Beag dans Translations nous renvoie aux ruptures profondes de la société irlandaise, politiques et linguistiques.
Urban and Rural Ireland: Social Change and Language
Raymond Hickey, University of Duisburg and Essen
The topic for this talk is language in Ireland and the urban – rural split with particular emphasis on the urban developments of the past few decades. This urban – rural split in Ireland is in a way a mirror of the England – Ireland split on a higher level. In both cases one is dealing with a difference in language competence, in the latter case between a colonial power and a colonised country which has shifted to the language of the colonisers. What makes the urban – rural split interesting in the Irish context is that the relationship is entirely within the colonised country. But it still has one essential element of the coloniser-colonised relation-ship: it is about relative power in society. To begin with a closer look at just what is meant by the urban – rural split is be taken. This can be done by asking a number of relevant questions. How does the urban-rural split relate to the following issues:
1) Class
2) Education
3) Gender
4) The differences between the regions
5) The north – south difference
6) Local identity
7) The Irish language
Should one talk about an urbal-rural or a rural-urban split? This is a matter of perspective. It depends where one’s centre is and which side of the division is external to one‘s own position. How does this split manifest itself for the different groups? Is there an equality on both sides of the division or is there a cline away from or towards one‘s own centre? How do these considerations relate to language?
These and similar questions will form the core of this presentation and the connection between language and identity in post-modern, post-boom Ireland will be centre stage.
References
Hickey, Raymond 2005. Dublin English. Evolution and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hickey, Raymond 2007. Irish English. Its History and Present-day Forms. Cambridge: University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2011. Irish English in Today’s World. Special issue of English Today, Vol. 106, June 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, Raymond (ed.) 2012. Standards of English. Codified Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strolling Player and Irish Revolutionary: From Drogheda to Derry
Gay Smith, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
Touring Ireland strolling player Charlotte Melmoth crossed paths with Irish reformer-turned-revolutionary Wolfe Tone; she a Catholic, he a Protestant. Between 1773 when Charlotte Melmoth first took to the stage in Drogheda, and 1792 when she was featured as leading lady performing in Derry, revolutions in America and France inspired Irish Catholics and dissenting Protestants alike to seek reform and emancipation from English domination
The Society of United Irishmen, initially an open and public organization seeking reform, was forced underground as the English-led government accused its members of treason, eventually imposing capital punishment. Melmoth a sympathizer, and Wolfe Tone a founder of the United Irishmen and Chairman of the Catholic Committee, in search of safer haven to continue working, left Ireland for America, the one to continue her career on the stage for another twenty years, the other to return to Ireland with the assistance of France as a revolutionary and to die a martyr to the cause.
This essay will focus on the convergence of theatre and rebellion in the town of Derry, on Melmoth’s satiric performance as ‘Mrs. John Bull’ and on Wolfe Tone’s rebuttal to the English-led civic leaders of their Londonderry summer assizes, 1792.
Ballymena in ’98
Wesley Hutchinson, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
This paper would look at a series of articles that appeared in the Ballymena Observer in 1857 dealing with the events that had taken place in Ballymena during the 1798 rebellion. Although the town was not the site of a significant engagement as was the case for the neighbouring town of Antrim, Ballymena was seized by the rebels and a number of loyalists were killed, actions which were to be the prelude to a brutal repression by the forces of the Crown.
The paper would be interested in issues surrounding the control of space in these accounts: the space of the town and that of the (loyalist and rebel) body during and after the rebellion. It would look at the way in which the takeover of the town by the revolutionary, largely anonymous crowds is seen as creating scenes of ‘bedlam’ and ‘pandemonium’ which form the backdrop to the murder of the handful of loyalist supporters who actively resisted the rebels. It would examine how the collapse of this short-lived ‘anarchy’ is immediately followed by the imposition of a rigorous (military) order on what had been for a brief period a fluid insurrectionary space. It would explore the difficulties the authorities encountered in identifying and tracking down the rebel leaders and would look at the specific options chosen when punishing the townsfolk and the rebels (decapitation, disembowelling, exhibition of the decomposing body). The paper would suggest that these choices which insist on the capacity of the State to dismantle the rebel body and expose its inner workings to view can be seen as forming the basis of a macabre visual narrative of the disintegration of the revolutionary movement in the area, one confirmed by the reading of the events contained in the newspaper accounts.
Benedict Kiely and the ‘ineluctable town’ in Drink to the Bird
Jean-Philippe Hentz, Université de Strasbourg
Benedict Kiely (1919-2007) spent most of his childhood and adolescence in the small town of Omagh in Northern Ireland, about a hundred kilometres West of Belfast. This town and this period of his life were a source of inspiration for the writing of many of his novels and short stories and they are also dealt with in the first volume of his autobiography, Drink to the Bird, published in 1991.
Drink to the Bird is a kind of perambulation, almost a stroll, both through the twists and turns of Kiely’s memory and the streets of Omagh and its surrounding countryside. Indeed, the structure of Drink to the Bird is akin to a geographic route which, from the Western entry to the city towards its Eastern border and the countryside, ends at a crossroads where the Dublin road begins, Dublin being the place where Kiely lived afterwards and the background of the second volume of his autobiography.
A profusion of digressions, anecdotes, bits of local history or poem extracts are added to this perambulation through the native town and individual memory, which contributes to the portraying of what Kiely calls ‘that ineluctable town’, i.e. always present in his mind and never really, totally left behind. Besides, the adjective ‘ineluctable’ is an explicit reference to Joyce’s Ulysses, and the fact is that Kiely’s perambulation almost takes on a ‘Bloomian’ quality.
Omagh then becomes in turn a signal town, which designates the author’s individual identity, a paradoxical town, where nature is never completely obliterated by the urban, a metaphysical town, where both the city of Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem coexist, but also a political town, with its spires and barracks symbolizing the powers that ruled it for a long time, or a Phoenix town, twice destroyed by fire and twice rebuilt, and rebuilt again through writing. And if, in the author’s own words, we may have the feeling that the Northern Irish conflict seems far away, outside the invisible walls of the town, Omagh still remains a town in the world, where the echoes of violence can also be heard.
The village of Rathmoye in William Trevor’s novel
Love and Summer (2009)
Marie Mianowski, Université de Nantes
This paper focuses on William Trevor’s latest novel, Love and Summer in which the fictional village of Rathmoye in the mid-1950s is so central that it almost becomes a character in itself. Just as all roads end or pass through Rathmoye and below Ms Connulty’s windows in 4, the Square, all stories meet and merge in Rathmoye. The narrative begins as a young photographer, about to exile himself from Ireland for good, cycles into the village with his camera during a funeral, taking innocent photographs of what he sees. A maelstrom of rumour then begins to swell as he is seen talking to Ellie Dillahan. As tides of gossip gradually close in upon Florian Kilderry, and he in turn captures sights and glimpses of the quiet village with his camera, William Trevor’s narrative progresses and unveils secrets. Whereas Rathmoye is presented as a morbid town at the centre of many unspoken-of deaths, it gradually comes alive with the buzzing of guilty gossip in the background. William Trevor’s narrative relies on the same linguistic mechanisms as village rumour. I will try to show how in this novel Rathmoye might also be read as a metaphor of Ireland at the time when William Trevor was preparing to leave for his life-long exile in the late 1950s. In Love and Summer, Trevor plunges back into the provincial and parochial Ireland of his youth and adds to the three-dimensional vision of the sculptor he was back then, the energy and movement of a camera, while in the meantime painting a very personal landscape of exile.
‘Of town and river’ : images de Derry dans The Emigrant’s Farewell (2006) de Liam Browne
Michel Brunet, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis
A bien des égards, le premier roman de Liam Browne, écrivain originaire de Derry, exploite la veine des ouvrages de fiction néo-Victorienne et en décline les caractéristiques et les stratégies. Il conjugue en effet trois récits qui s’enchevêtrent et tissent des liens thématiques et métaphoriques au fil des pages : un récit de fiction contemporain qui dépeint le désarroi d’un jeune couple qui doit faire face à la disparition accidentelle de son enfant, l’histoire authentique de la vie et de la carrière de l’ingénieur naval William Coppin (1805-1895), que le jeune père, Joe O’Kane, entreprend d’écrire pour tromper sa tristesse et enfin celle de Sir John Franklin et de son équipage, partis reconnaître le passage du Nord-Ouest en 1846.
L’étude s’attachera à démontrer que l’esthétique du récit de facture néo-Victorienne contribue à brosser un tableau de la ville de Derry dans une perspective chronotopique, susceptible de définir un esprit ou une essence des lieux. Métropole régionale, haut-lieu de l’histoire de l’Irlande, Derry est indissociable, dans ce roman, de la présence obsédante de la Foyle, du souvenir de ses chantiers navals, de l’essor technologique et des cohortes d’émigrants irlandais, candidats à l’exil outre-Atlantique, qui ont transité par son port (voir le titre métaphorique de l’ouvrage qui est aussi celui d’une ballade). La ville, restituée dans sa quotidienneté prosaïque, apparaît comme une communauté circonscrite, garante de l’authenticité de sa configuration, mais aussi comme un microcosme décentré vers un ailleurs spatial et temporel. Le narrateur – et l’auteur, pénétrés de l’histoire de la ville, transcendent, en quelque sorte, la division politique et sectaire et les événements du siècle dernier pour donner à lire un roman ‘post-terroriste’ offrant une image nouvelle de la ville de Derry sans pour autant ignorer la violence de son passé.
The Novice in the City: Sydney Owenson and the Bildungs of Metropolitan Economics
Matthew Reznicek, Queen’s University, Belfast
In the atlas of Irish women’s writing and indeed of Irish literature more broadly, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) (c. 1783-1859) remains exceptional for the geographic expansiveness of her oeuvre. A brief mapping of Owenson’s literary career highlights what critics are beginning to recognize as an historically global trend in Irish writing. Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), The Missionary (1811), O’Donnel: A National Tale (1814), Florence Macarthy (1818), The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties (1824), and The Princess; or, The Beguine (1835) range from settings across Europe and around the world: from Greece in Woman, to Portugal and Goa in The Missionary, to Vienna in O’Donnel, to Columbia in Florence Macarthy, to Rome in The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties. This geographical sketching clearly demonstrates the necessity of including Owenson in the broad project of mapping prose fiction. A critical mapping of Owenson’s novels challenges the paradigmatic concept that one of the definitive characteristics of Irish literature is the privileged narrative locus of Ireland. What is surprising, though, is that there is a geographic site to which she returns in O’Donnel, The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties, as well as The Princess, not to mention in her two separate volumes of travelogues: Paris. The French capital, as this study will demonstrate, acts as an omphalos in the geography of Irish women’s writing. The Novice of Saint Dominick provides a clear and early iteration of a long-running tradition in Irish women’s writing: the economic Bildungsroman. This relatively unknown novel proves an important point of contact between the metropolitan and financial fictions of Goethe and Balzac, a tradition that includes Dickens, Zola, as well as Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, and Kate O’Brien. Building upon Moretti’s awareness of the critical interplay between the Bildungsroman tradition and modern capitalism as experienced in the metropolis, this paper will argue that, through its representation of the young female protagonist’s individual development, The Novice demonstrates the ambivalent relationship that exists between women and the emerging metropolitan commodity economy by presenting capitalism as a conservative socializing system.
Between Here And There: Self, Place And Gender In The Fiction Of William Trevor, Sebastian Barry And Colm Toibin
Michael Parker, University of Central Lancashire
Contemporary Irish Literature continues to be shaped by and to reflect the major reconfigurations that have taken place in Irish culture and society over the last thirty years. Amongst the many early examples of the way history, identity, gender and sexuality were being re-read and re-written are Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and John McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990), both of which are set in small towns in remote areas of rural Ireland and engage deeply with issues of politics, gender and gender politics. At the start of the ‘live’ action in Lughnasa Friel employs an image which instantly reminds one of Joyce’s ‘cracked looking-glass’ at the beginning of Ulysses. It is voiced not by a sardonic, aspiring male artist, but by a frustrated twenty-six year-old unmarried mother, the youngest Mundy sister, Chrissie: ‘When are we going to get a decent mirror to see ourselves in?’
This lecture will examine four texts which, with comparable skill and insight, register the distance between Irelands past and present: William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev (1991) and Felicia’s Journey (1994), Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009). It is significant that female characters occupy a central position in each of these male-authored narratives, which testify to the varying degree of social, economic, spiritual and psychological constraints under which Irish women and, to a lesser extent, men, laboured at different junctures of the twentieth century. Whereas Roseanne McNulty (The Secret Scripture) and Mary Louise Dallon (Reading Turgenev) attempt to cope with confinement and to seek verification through acts of writing and reading, Eilis Lacey (Brooklyn) and Felicia (Felicia’s Journey) are compelled by circumstances to relocate themselves in large urban centres abroad. Discussion will not be confined, however, to thematic concerns, characterisation and setting, but extend to differences in narrative technique.
Individually and collectively, these works function as highly polished mirrors through which to view Irish experience, and to achieve fresh perceptual angles.