POSTNATIONALISM, HYBRIDITY, AND UTOPIA IN PAUL DURCAN’S POETRY: TOWARD AN IRISH MINORITARIAN LITERATURE
Yeonmin KimDissertation AbstractPOSTNATIONALISM, HYBRIDITY, AND UTOPIA IN PAUL DURCAN’S POETRY: TOWARD AN IRISH MINORITARIAN LITERATUREThe main question for contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan (1944-) is how to find a way out of a rigid concept of national identity established by the Roman Catholic, middle-class, nationalist majority group in Ireland. Wrestling with this question has led him to search for other homes abroad, for versions of postnationalist utopia; and it has served to classify him as a minoritarian artist because of his own staunch refusal to romanticize the Irish, their chauvinism, their provincialism, and most importantly, their violence. In an attempt to find a more flexible concept of nation, he reconstructs Irish identity in transcending religious, ethnic, and geographic boundaries of nation. Durcan’s postnationalist project includes his quest for alternative identities in exotic places replete with utopian aura. In addition, by intermingling two different genres of poetry and painting, in his collections of ekphrasis, he produces a creative hybridity of the temporal and the spatial, the public and the private, through which he suggests a new sense of historicity, atemporality, which can withstand a nationalist logic of progressive history fit for the nation-state ideology. His postnationalist project culminates in Durcanesque metamorphosis, in which his poetic speakers freely transform themselves into a woman, an animal and something imperceptible. Those radical experiments serve to call into question the notion of a monolithic identity. Durcan not only recreates and amplifies what James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus vowed to create in the smithy of his soul – the uncreated conscience of his race – but also offers a twenty-first century “uncreated conscience” for Ireland and other nations struggling to move past nationalism. In that sense, he creates new assemblages of people to come.
Literature, Paul Durcan, Ireland, Postnationalism, Hybridity, Utopia, Deleuze, minor literature
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