Contested Pasts and the Politics of Memory: Irish Gothic Fiction Revisited» (UDK 821.152.1.09-03)

CONTESTED PASTS AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY: IRISH GOTHIC FICTION REVISITED (UDK 821.152.1.09-03) At least two major critical approaches to Irish Gothic fiction can be delineated and they, nonetheless, tend to converge. Psychoanalytic readings of the Irish Gothic fiction as «a return of the repressed» often put emphasis on the release of dark, unconscious forces, and point beyond the existing social order by transgressing and subverting it. On the other hand, socio-political and cultural readings (Deane, Gibbons, Eagleton) insist on the essentially historical nature of the genre. An analysis of Irish Gothic fiction raises also the complex issues of Protestant ethic, modernity and capitalism within the context of a wider Victorian crisis of Christian belief (Cf. McCormack). Departing from Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's statement in the introduction to her book The Coherence of Gothic Convention about the necessity to differentiate the critical function of the Gothic form from «the Gothic novel proper» my paper seeks to examine the role of memory in Irish Gothic fiction bearing in mind the fact that this literary genre in Ireland demonstrates its persistent attachment to history and politics, as well as an overt tendency to blur the distinction between past history and present politics. The Gothic mode in Irish literature seems suitable not only for fostering national narratives related to ruin and destruction, but also for registering major cultural, social and historical shifts, which accounts for its endurance within the Irish literary canon. Multiple relations to the past are enacted in various modes of mnemonic transmission. Nostalgia is the most recurrent mnemonic mode in Irish Gothic fiction related to the process of cultural self-analysis and re-enactment of the contested pasts, often through remediation and embodiment. The cultural interaction of nostalgia as, basically, a mode of looking to the past for a stability lacking in the present, pertaining to Irish postcolonial experience, is enacted through the motifs of the soil, dispossession, language and exile. It forges various interactions between personal and collective memory. Fred Botting describes Gothic nostalgia as the yearning for a romanticized past. On the other hand, Linda Hutcheon points out that: «It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia's power.» Once dismissed as merely a glorification of the past, nostalgia has come to be read by a range of scholars in the humanities in a more complex way as a filter through which memories of the past are ordered and shaped by forces of the present (Robert Hemming Modern nostalgia, p. 6). My paper will, therefore, explore various mnemonic modes encoded in Irish Gothic texts, in particular nostalgia, and discuss how they transmit moments of cultural and historical cognition. Grubica, Irena. «INTRODUCTION» u: Irena Grubica (ur.). Literature, Culture and the Fantastic: Challenges of the Fin de Siecle(s). Rijeka: Filozofski fakultet Sevucilista u Rijeci, 2012. str. 7-8. (ISBN: 978-953-6104-86-4 ; UDK 82.0-3 316.7 130.2) SAŽETAK UVODA: The international interdisciplinary conference Literature, Culture and the Fantastic: Challenges of the Fin de Siecle(s) held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka on 17 and 18 February 2012 gathered gathered more than fifty scholars coming from all across Europe (United Kingdom, Scotland UK, Ireland, France, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia). The main discussion revolved around the concept of the fantastic and related issues in literature and culture, as well as various discourses the term itself generates. The topics of the abstracts collected in this book include but are not limited to the following: - The fantastic and various aspects of the fin-de-siecle(s) aesthetics - The fantastic and the challenging of the fin-de-siecle(s) canon ; genres and sub-genres, popular literature, intertextuality - The fantastic and gender, body, corporeality - The fantastic and narrative manipulations, supernatural, temporality, scientific development and progress, cultural anxiety and social crisis, cultural subversion - The fantastic and identity, dualism, doppelganger, grotesque - The philosophy of the fantastic - The fantastic and memory, cultural memory - The fantastic and visual in the fin-de-siecle(s) ; literary in relation to other modes of representation, visual and performance, film - A single author/text: e.g. Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Machen, etc., as well as comparative analysis - The fin-de-siecle fantastic as reflected cross-culturally in Scottish, Canadian, Australian, American, etc. writing, emphasising specific predominant cultural or generic aspect, the genesis of the fin-de-siecle fantastic in these cultures and literatures and their relations to wider historical and cultural framework, possible relation to the issue of postcolonialism - Fantastic, imperialism, (post)colonialism, nationalism - Some papers highlight the interaction of fin-de-siecle fantastic and gothic literature with other literary periods, both canonical and popular literature, in terms of the reception, intertextuality and their dialogic and cultural implications. The conference also discussed the legacy of the term in various fin de siecles, especially its application to literature and culture of the end of the 19th and 20th century, raising or challenging parallels and questioning the very idea of end (fin). It provided a stimulating platform for further rethinking of the concept of the fantastic, its theoretical, philosophical, generic, and other implications within a broader literary and cultural context.

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