Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory
Cambridge University Press, 9/19/2002
EAN 9780521815833, ISBN10: 0521815835
Hardcover, 240 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
In Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory Nicholas Miller re-examines memory and its role in modern Irish culture. Arguing that a continuous renegotiation of memory is characteristic of Irish modernist writing, Miller investigates a series of case-studies in modern Irish historical imagination. He reassesses Ireland's self-construction through external or 'foreign' discourses such as the cinema, and proposes readings of Yeats and Joyce as 'counter-memorialists'. Combining theoretical and historical approaches, Miller shows how the modernist handling of history transforms both memory and the story of the past by highlighting readers' investments in histories that are produced, specifically and concretely, through local acts of reading. This original study will attract scholars of Modernism, Irish studies, film and literary theory.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. All history is local
Modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland
Part I. The Erotics of Memory
1. Lethal histories
memory-work and the text of the past
2. A Pisgah sight of history
critical authority and the promise of memory
3. A reservation under the name of Joyce
Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia and the symptom
Part II. The Spectacles of History
4. The birth of a nation
Irish nationalism and the technology of memory, 1891–1921
5. Fighting the waves
Yeats, Cuchulain and the lethal histories of 'Romantic Ireland'
6. Joyce's erotics of memory
temporal anamorphosis in Finnegans Wake
Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland.
'… an impressively wide-ranging book.' Irish Review