Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory

by Nicholas Andrew Miller

• ISBN13: 9780521815833
• ISBN10: 0521815835
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 new 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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction. All history is local: modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland	1	(20)
PART I THE EROTICS OF MEMORY
Lethal histories: memory-work and the text of the past	21	(18)
A Pisgah sight of history: critical authority and the promise of memory	39	(27)
A reservation under the name of Joyce: Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia and the symptom	66	(31)
PART II THE SPECTACLES OF HISTORY
The birth of a nation: Irish nationalism and the technology of memory, 1891--1921	97	(30)
Fighting the waves: Yeats, Cuchulain and the lethal histories of ``romantic Ireland''	127	(26)
Joyce's erotics of memory: temporal anamorphosis in Finnegans Wake	153	(33)
Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland	186	(3)
Notes	189	(20)
Bibliography	209	(9)
Index	218