Cultural CriticismIf you want to know how younger scholars of Irish studies think, Margaret Kelleher has assembled many of the best in this volume of the Irish University Review.
A short answer is that they think surprisingly alike. They think, for one thing, that something important has been neglected. That is the driving force of scholarship in every generation, but the notion of what's been neglected changes, and must change, with each new publication. In this case, the poetry of Blanaid Salkeld, Irish scientists (two essays), the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, the parallel origins of Sinn Féin and the Literary Revival, tenement dramas before O'Casey, the "Northern Revival" led by Alice Milligan (two essays), and other matters still come up for fresh attention.
The way neglect is normally addressed in this volume is by means of a little bit of theory and a lot of careful archival work with letters and old newspapers. Remarkably, the contributors do not often turn their analytical powers - which are topnotch - upon the text of a poem, play, or story.
Academic wars raging a few years back, such as Theory versus New Historicism, or Nationalism versus Revisionism, have vanished. Only scraps of jargon remain (the prose is highly readable), and the occasional gesture of political alignment with the left (feminist, proletarian, anti-imperialist). Pragmatic methods of revisionist history prevail.
Largely absent is aesthetic criticism. Save for the selection of topics, signs that the authors work in departments of English rather than History are rare. The intricacies of a great work of literature are just once extensively investigated in the volume (Clare Hutton's examination of the library scene in Ulysses), unless one includes Shaun Richards's comparison of the subject-matter of Synge with that of Martin McDonagh, or Moynagh Sullivan's feminist recovery of Salkeld. While many works are knowledgeably situated in their period, one might ask if there are any grounds for the value of a specific work of literature other than those to be located within the situation in which that work first appeared.
Most people are interested in Irish literature not because it is Irish but because some of it is literature of the highest order. People are curious about how something fine came to pass. Did it have to do with the author's gender, companions, education, culture, or political moment? The mystery of art's origins will support many hypotheses. But the question of how it came to pass is not more important than questions of what exactly it is or how it may be best described.
But one needn't worry overmuch. The goal of current criticism, as Richard Kirkland puts it, is to rewrite "the Revival project" by "reconstituting" its "collective effects" and "interconnecting forces". The aspiration is to comprehend the totality in its complexity. This ambitious enterprise to illuminate everything also sheds light on works familiarly called great.
Sometimes the beam is especially bright. For instance, Ben Levitas traces one "wiry thread of theatre practice running through the fabric of the Revival", working-class realism on the Abbey stage from 1899 to 1919 (that is, before O'Casey), and while the essay never examines a single O'Casey play, it improves our understanding of them all.
Clare Hutton's stimulating, delightfully literate account of 'Joyce and the Institutions of Revivalism' brings alive the staff and users of the National Library in June 1904, and then shows how Joyce's library chapter in Ulysses fictionalises a complex social situation by means of its "denominational politics". Several friendly, helpful Protestants become erudite phonies who exclude the young genius, Stephen Dedalus. Meanwhile, Joyce airbrushes away other smart young Catholics in the library: Tom Kettle, Arthur Clery, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, etcetera.
Elsewhere, too, in this collection the standard of interesting scholarship is consistently high. If a biographer may say so, however, it seems that something important is somewhat neglected: literature itself.
Adrian Frazier is director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies and the MA in Writing at NUI Galway
Irish University Review: special issue on New Perspectives on the
Irish Literary Revival, volume 33, no 1 (Spring/Summer 2003)
Guest editor: Margaret Kelleher 243pp, €12