Seán Kennedy]]>
The volume is a tour de force.
"The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable is a stunning, powerful, and moving display of a number of registers at once: a sharp and breathtaking literary criticism, a theoretically astute and rigorous psychoanalytical analysis, and a searing portrayal of the biopolitical terrains of the abusive structures of the Irish psycho-sexual imaginary. In this consequential book, the scandal(s) of widespread child abuse in Ireland, made so patently visible in the revelatory discourses of journalism of the post-90s period onward, are deftly refigured as having a long 20th century literary history of in-depth and complex representation. Engaging Laplanche's psychoanalytic theory of the enigmatic signifier, which simultaneously attests to trauma, jouissance, displacement and the inaccessibility of the unspeakable, the study accounts for how fiction viscerally and structurally attends to the scandals, devastations, and silences of child abuse, folding author and reader into the enigmatic psycho-dynamics of narratives of sexual initiation. The concluding chapters on contemporary Irish literature provide vital paradigms for the representational and political economies of the scandals of child abuse post-revelation. The magnificent final chapter and epilogue on Anne Enright's The Gathering bring this exceptional study to its most powerful and accomplished conclusion, pointing to the systemic and saturated structuring of child abuse in the Irish cultural imaginary, as well as to how scandal culture maintains occlusions and dialectic inequities in the practices of scandal revelation itself, where certain abuses get remembered while others remain buried and forgotten. For all of these reasons, not least of which is the brilliant analytic precision and wide ranging vision of its literary scholarship, the importance of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable cannot be overstated, establishing for the field of Irish Studies a vital theoretical and representational framework for thinking of and through the ethical functions and potentialities of Irish literature to address the social and cultural exploitations of both past, present and—as the epilogue so importantly points—future. "
Claire Bracken]]>
The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable is a stunning, powerful, and moving display of a number of registers at once: a sharp and breathtaking literary criticism, a theoretically astute and rigorous psychoanalytical analysis, and a searing portrayal of the biopolitical terrains of the abusive structures of the Irish psycho-sexual imaginary. In this consequential book, the scandal(s) of widespread child abuse in Ireland, made so patently visible in the revelatory discourses of journalism of the post-90s period onward, are deftly refigured as having a long 20th century literary history of in-depth and complex representation. Engaging Laplanche's psychoanalytic theory of the enigmatic signifier, which simultaneously attests to trauma, jouissance, displacement and the inaccessibility of the unspeakable, the study accounts for how fiction viscerally and structurally attends to the scandals, devastations, and silences of child abuse, folding author and reader into the enigmatic psycho-dynamics of narratives of sexual initiation. The concluding chapters on contemporary Irish literature provide vital paradigms for the representational and political economies of the scandals of child abuse post-revelation. The magnificent final chapter and epilogue on Anne Enright's The Gathering bring this exceptional study to its most powerful and accomplished conclusion, pointing to the systemic and saturated structuring of child abuse in the Irish cultural imaginary, as well as to how scandal culture maintains occlusions and dialectic inequities in the practices of scandal revelation itself, where certain abuses get remembered while others remain buried and forgotten. For all of these reasons, not least of which is the brilliant analytic precision and wide ranging vision of its literary scholarship, the importance of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable cannot be overstated, establishing for the field of Irish Studies a vital theoretical and representational framework for thinking of and through the ethical functions and potentialities of Irish literature to address the social and cultural exploitations of both past, present and—as the epilogue so importantly points—future.
author of Unlike Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction - Gerardine Meaney]]>
This is a provocative, cogent, and compelling appraisal of the ways in which the history of institutional cruelty and child abuse shaped Irish literature. Through a series of subtle, detailed, sometimes dazzling re-readings of a century of fiction, it also illuminates how literature reshaped national identity in turn to insist on a reckoning with that history. A powerful work of scholarship, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature is relevant not just to Irish Studies, but to Memory Studies, psychoanalytic criticism and to anyone interested in the relationship between cultural and social change.
Claire Bracken
The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable is a stunning, powerful, and moving display of a number of registers at once: a sharp and breathtaking literary criticism, a theoretically astute and rigorous psychoanalytical analysis, and a searing portrayal of the biopolitical terrains of the abusive structures of the Irish psycho-sexual imaginary. In this consequential book, the scandal(s) of widespread child abuse in Ireland, made so patently visible in the revelatory discourses of journalism of the post-90s period onward, are deftly refigured as having a long 20th century literary history of in-depth and complex representation. Engaging Laplanche's psychoanalytic theory of the enigmatic signifier, which simultaneously attests to trauma, jouissance, displacement and the inaccessibility of the unspeakable, the study accounts for how fiction viscerally and structurally attends to the scandals, devastations, and silences of child abuse, folding author and reader into the enigmatic psycho-dynamics of narratives of sexual initiation. The concluding chapters on contemporary Irish literature provide vital paradigms for the representational and political economies of the scandals of child abuse post-revelation. The magnificent final chapter and epilogue on Anne Enright's The Gathering bring this exceptional study to its most powerful and accomplished conclusion, pointing to the systemic and saturated structuring of child abuse in the Irish cultural imaginary, as well as to how scandal culture maintains occlusions and dialectic inequities in the practices of scandal revelation itself, where certain abuses get remembered while others remain buried and forgotten. For all of these reasons, not least of which is the brilliant analytic precision and wide ranging vision of its literary scholarship, the importance of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable cannot be overstated, establishing for the field of Irish Studies a vital theoretical and representational framework for thinking of and through the ethical functions and potentialities of Irish literature to address the social and cultural exploitations of both past, present and—as the epilogue so importantly points—future.
author of Unlike Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction - Gerardine Meaney
This is a provocative, cogent, and compelling appraisal of the ways in which the history of institutional cruelty and child abuse shaped Irish literature. Through a series of subtle, detailed, sometimes dazzling re-readings of a century of fiction, it also illuminates how literature reshaped national identity in turn to insist on a reckoning with that history. A powerful work of scholarship, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature is relevant not just to Irish Studies, but to Memory Studies, psychoanalytic criticism and to anyone interested in the relationship between cultural and social change.
Seán Kennedy
The volume is a tour de force.
Seán Kennedy
The volume is a tour de force.
