Contributor:

Professor Glenn Patterson

Talk Title:

Writing and the Border

Talk Synopsis:

This talk looks at how ideas of borders and boundaries have been reflected in Irish literature. It ranges widely across time and genres and includes reflections on works by Spike Milligan, Anna Burns, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. It suggests that ‘fractal-like, the border recurs and recurs’ in much of the writing from/about Northern Ireland down the decades and that this divide is ‘repeated and magnified in the divisions between neighbourhoods, or .. internalised as a set of no-goes and sometimes no thinks’. It picks up on Seamus Heaney’s observation (from a 1998 documentary for the BBC) that ‘with so much division around, people are forever encountering boundaries that bring them up short’ but also the ways in which borders are sometimes bridged, or transgressed. None of this, Glenn Patterson says, is intended as ‘a survey’, rather it ‘is a thought taken for a walk… as wayward and eccentric as its subject.’

Short Biography:

Glenn Patterson is an author and the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Further Reading:

Ulster Cycle