UCDscholarcast

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposition to the national.

In his episode Aude Doody reads from the Introduction to Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press. The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness of what such a characterisation implies. In this book, Dr Doody examines this concept and its applicability to the work, paying far more attention than ever before to the varying ways in which it has been read during the last two thousand years, especially by Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot.

In this episode Nicholas Daly reads from the Introduction to his book Sensation and Modernity in the 1860's published by Cambridge University Press. This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this 'Leap in the Dark', authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urban and more anonymous.

The relationship between the poetic and the national is crucial to how war poetry is perceived and interpreted. This essay looks at Second World War (and wartime) poetry from Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and in particular at images of absence, cancellation, annulment and denial, to explore differences in each poetry between how the war and the role of the poet in the war are constructed.

Nick Groom's study of the union, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag, was published in 2006. In this paper, he brings that story up to the present day by surveying the past five years of Union Jackery, from Gordon Brown's initial enthusiasm for new definitions of Britishness through ongoing redefinitions of the iconic image of the flag to the almost complete absence of issues of national identity in the debates preceding the 2010 UK General Election.

The emergence of four nations framework in literary and historical scholarship has helped us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the complex and overlapping histories of the islands of Britain and Ireland, while recent research into Wales and Ireland in particular has helped to make the map of our relations more fully comprehensible. But what is the relevance and meaning of the four nations context for womens writing in Ireland and Wales? What part does gender play in the interconnected histories of Wales and Ireland, and how are questions of sexual and artistic identity addressed within texts that imagine British-Irish history in gendered terms?

This lecture identifies finds evidence of a feminist reimagining of archipelagic relationships by two writers: Munster novelist and playwright Una Troy, and Welsh writer Menna Gallie, born into a mining community on the western edge of the South Wales coalfields. Both Troy and Gallie wrote novels that deploy plots of female friendship to interrogate the relationship between gender and national affiliation in a four nations context.

Among the many divergent strands of Irish and Welsh cultural history, one commonality stands out: the profoundly self-conscious preoccupation with nationality and nationhood. For decades, political and cultural thinkers have troped this concern in the spatialized relation between centre and periphery. This paper finds poets working on both sides of the Irish Sea strategically critiquing the exhausted-seeming dialectic of the centre-periphery paradigm, in their anti-deterministic deployment of deixis, the term assigned by cognitive linguists to words which point or position. The few existing studies of deixis in poetry typically presume on its unvarying functional effect: to situate and anchor the voice(s) and environment(s) of the poetic text. Interestingly, poets like Catherine Walsh and Zoe Skoulding, writing out of Ireland and North Wales respectively, call that assumption into question. Both these poets use deictic signifiers in ways which deliberately, arguably self-protectively, fail to fix their texts in a range of potential cultural contexts.

In '"I have only one culture and it is not mine": Professions of English diaspora', Julian Wolfreys engages in acts of memory-work, to recover, through a focus on the voice as mnemotechnic and anamnesiac trace, the occluded and marginalized cultural differences of the regional English. Through a reflection on the work of the literary as archive and and the role folk song and folk culture play in the spectral maintenance of different Englishnesses over a thousand year period, Wolfreys argues that at a time when a national agenda for national identity is more urgently damaging than ever, turning to the embedded traces of different, pre-industrial pasts, offers modes of perception and representation that are based on equalities, rather than hierarchies of difference.

In Poems and Paradigms Edna Longley argues that the archipelagic paradigm is crucial to the criticism of modern poetry in English. Quoting John Kerrigan on the expansive, multi-levelled, polycentric aspects of the literary and cultural field, she discussed five poems which display their archipelagic co-ordinates on the surface: W.B. Yeats’s Under Saturn (1919), Philip Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), W.S. Graham’s Loch Thom (1977), Edward Thomas’s The Ash Grove (1916) and Louis MacNeice’s Carrick Revisited (1945).

For Longley, the poems’ deeper aesthetic dynamics epitomise how influences move around within the archipelago, and she particularly emphasises serial transformations of Wordsworth and Yeats. She sees archipelagic and national paradigms as complementary, but criticises the way in which national poetic canons marginalise border cases’, saying: If a poem doesn’t fit the paradigm, change the paradigm.

She goes on to suggest that, in the mid twentieth century, the aesthetic significance of Yeats’s mature poetry was most significantly absorbed by MacNeice and by English poets such as Auden, Larkin, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. She ends by proposing that all this throws light on the archipelagic sources of Northern Irish poetry.

In this episode Diane Negra reads from the Introduction of Old and New Media after Katrina published by Palgrave Macmillan. This pioneering collection explores the relationship between Hurricane Katrina and a range of media forms, assessing how mainstream and independent media have responded sometimes innovatively, sometimes conservatively to the political and social ruptures Katrina has come to represent.

Looking closely at the organization of public memory of Katrina, this collection provides a timely and intellectually fruitful assessment of the complex ways in which media forms and national events are currently entangled.The contributors explore how Hurricane Katrina is positioned at the intersection of numerous early twenty-first century crisis narratives centralizing uncertainties about race, class, region, government and public safety.