![]() ![]() This book traces the aesthetic epistemology of Seamus Heaney, by placing it within the context of the writings of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. It offers a reading of his most famous book, North, which takes issue with David Lloyd’s now canonical reading of Heaney, by seeing the book as opening a dialogue with other traditions. It is the first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, suggesting parallels between the writing of Heaney and Derrida. The book examines Heaney as a cultural thinker, whose work combines the aesthetic and the political, using one mode to critique the other. It also examines Heaney’s engagement with the issue of Ireland as a postcolonial society. It is the most contemporary study to date, dealing with all aspects of his writing – poetry, prose and translations – up to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict. ![]() This is the first thematic study of Heaney’s work in terms of its creation of a politics of identity, as well as being the first to discuss his critique of notions of home and place, both terms that are important in Irish literature and politics. His work as viewed as driven by the desire to create a space where notions of Irishness are pluralized and opened to different influences, and which is predicated on the ‘an erotics of the future’) where ‘whatever is given / can always be reimagined’. He is constantly probing the nature of selfhood and of self-identity as well as the relationship between that selfhood and different forms of otherness, and his work sets up a dialectical interaction between these positions that is ultimately transformative. I will argue that, far from accepting the cultural and religious ‘givens’ of his heritage, Heaney’s writing sets out a more inclusive notion of identity, which is ethical, in the sense used by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Given the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the contextual background of much of Heaney’s writing, this book examines the relationships between Heaney’s texts and this context. While such a procedure is necessarily arbitrary, nevertheless I feel that there is an internal coherence in the groups of texts which I have chosen.Īs the title indicates, this book examines the attitude to place and home that is enunciated in the work of Seamus Heaney, as well as looking at the place or role of his writing within notions of the political. Because the thrust of my argument suggests a parallel between the development of Heaney’s own thought and the developing sense of self-consciousness and sophistication of contemporary Ireland, my approach will be broadly chronological, grouping different works into different stages of development. ![]() I also mean in cultural, social and intellectual terms, as we become more confident of our place in Europe, and of our position as a bridge between Europe and America. By this, I do not just mean in economic terms, as evidenced by the much lauded Celtic Tiger phenomenon. From being a backward, inward-looking country, obsessed with the past and with a sense of inferiority, Ireland has begun, in the words of Robert Emmet, to take her place among the nations of the earth. I will argue that these books adopt a far more complex attitude to issues of nationalism, Catholicism and Irishness. However, I will also be suggesting that to see North in particular, and Heaney’s writing in general, as in any way a simplistic account of a nationalistic outlook is to misread them completely. I will be examining how Heaney progressed from a personal vision of digging into his familial past to a more Jungian view of digging into the historical consciousness of his psyche. His developing writing, encompassing, as it does, influences from different cultures, languages and texts, enacts a movement from “prying into roots” and “fingering slime” to an embrace of different aspects of European and world culture which has strong parallels with the development of Ireland itself. Heaney has progressed in terms of his thinking from a relatively simplistic and conventional perspective into a far more cosmopolitan and complex view of his own identity. Seamus Heaney’s development, as I will argue in this study, parallels that of the Irish psyche over the past fifty years. ![]()
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