New Critical Perspectives on Franco-Irish Relations

In Entre l'écriture French writer Hélène Cixous urges others to be 'of a body with the river all the way to the rapids rather than with the boat' ('Faire corps avec le fleuve jusqu'aux rapides plutôt qu'avec la barque'). This involves danger, a particular pleasure, and provides the writer with rich potential. Arguably, Dublin poet and recently appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry, Paula Meehan, is a writer who engages with Cixous's examination of language and meaning as 'soundsense, singsound, bloodsong'. This paper proposes that Meehan's poetry, like Cixous' writing, is 'a flux immediately text'. The immediacy of Meehan's writing allows, nevertheless, for a subtle music of breath and tears, 'tears, beyond comfort of song or poem', but full of music and poetry despite themselves.

Irish Studies Review, 2010

Cultural Studies, 2001

Wasafiri, 2010

2019

Assessing something as all-pervasive as cultural heritage can run the risk of resorting to cliches and stereotypes, even though these very things are also an integral part ofwhat constitutes the patrimoine of any given society. The French are rightly acclaimed for their fashion, wines, gastronomy, literature, philosophy, regional specificities, architecture, and cafe culture, to name but a few ofthe Hexagone' s most distinctive traits. Ireland, on the other hand, has its pubs, its writers, many ofwhom traditionally spent far too much time in the aforementioned pubs, its fighting spirit, its greenness, its historic struggle with its nearest neighbour, perfidious Albion, its beef and its Guinness. Patrimoine is what marks one country out from any other country; it is what makes it distinctive, different, sometimes appealing, at other times, unappealing. Therefore, when the organizers were considering the theme for the AFIS 2017 conference in Limerick, the former Conseiller Culturel at the French Embassy, Frederic Rauser, suggested it could be both interesting and worthwhile to examine how cultural heritage plays out in both countries. The view beforehand was that the French are more adept at underlining their heritage, even at commodifying it, than the Irish are, but some of the essays you will read in this collection illustrate the fact that the Irish are starting to catch up in this regard, as the country begins to attract more and more tourists to its shores and to see the potential that has for economic prosperity. There are several reasons why Irish writers and artists were attracted to France, but patrimoine was certainly a Significant factor in their migration. After the Revolution, France overthrew the monarchy to become a Republic, which distinguished it in Irish eyes from England. Then there was the indisputable Catholic heritage that was shared by the two countries, l Moore's enthusiasm for France was predicated on the fact that he knew it to be a country which cherished artists and valued learning. His experience of Ireland was very different: he found the insular attitudes and superstitious religiosity ofhis home country inamicable at best to his artistic sensibility. He believed that he could be happy and comfortable in the type of setting that Paris would provide, a beliefthat p!oved well founded, as Moore

ELOPE, 2024

The introduction presents the special issue of ELOPE (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2024; guest eds. Aidan O'Malley and Anamarija Šporčič), which focuses on Irish literature and non-anglophone Europe.

Wasafiri, 2010

Icons of Irishness from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, 2012