UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea - Scholarcast 33: Archipelagic Cartographies: Brenda Chamberlain's 'Western Isle'

Scholarcast 33: Archipelagic Cartographies: Brenda Chamberlain's 'Western Isle'

10/29/13 • 38 min

UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea

This lecture is an exploration of the archipelagic island imagination of artist, poet and writer Brenda Chamberlain (1912–71) under the rubric of literary cartography. Part of a wider study of the literary text's 'mapmindedness' – the ways in which imaginative writing accomplishes specifically cartographic 'work' – the paper examines Chamberlain's emotional geographies of the Irish Sea, focusing on her fabling autobiographical account of her residence on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), off the Llyn Peninsula, north Wales: Tide-race (1962). Beginning with two suggestive examples of Chamberlain's composite graphic cartography, which plot an imaginative ethnography and gendered 'zoning' of Bardsey, the paper considers the Irish (specifically Syngian) alignments of her representations of the island self. The visual-verbal Tide-race is then brought into focus as a text powerfully invested in the process of mapping island space by means of layered (and knowing) folktale fantasies, troubled by thwarted desire and terror. The Syngian genetics of the work are revealed. At stake is the need Chamberlain felt, mid-century, to carve out her own space as a woman writer on a 'deluding scrap of rock and turf'. More generally, the paper seeks to accomplish a necessary reterritorialisation of Welsh Writing in English.

Previous Episode

Scholarcast 31: Writing around the Irish Sea: Inlets, outlets, Firths and Mouths

The Lecture explores the enduring fascination of the Irish Sea, focusing particularly on the Solway Firth, an area regarded by the nineteenth-century artist, art critic, writer and social reformer, John Ruskin, as second only to the Holy Land in its cultural importance. The ageing Ruskin wrote passionately about the Solway in his autobiography, Praeterita, which pays tribute to the beauty of the coast and its creative legacy, as evident in the work of Walter Scott, J. M. W. Turner and the local Scottish music. The lecture considers the connections between these works and the coast itself, with its changing history, before moving across the Irish Sea to Ciaran Carson's 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti, which includes a poem about Ruskin, Turner and the modern city, 'John Ruskin in Belfast'. Exploration of the dialogue between different writers on either side of the Irish Sea, and on either side of the Solway Firth allows the area to be viewed temporally as well as spatially. It thus offers a new model for reading landscapes and literature, in which geographical and historical aspects are mutually informing. What may appear to be fixed and unchanging is revealed as being subject to successions of developing technology and economic imperatives; but conversely, the longer view encouraged by returning to the same place over the centuries offers a different perspective on the contemporaneous impulse of contextualisation.

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Scholarcast 35: Via Holyhead, Material and metaphorical meaings between Ireland and Wales

This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce. The lecture begins by following Buck Mulligan's invitation in the opening of Ulysses to 'come and look' at the sea, and at the mailboat crossing from Kingstown to Holyhead. Looking at the sea takes us to questions of boundaries and connections, to the local, national, and global scales of identity and belonging, and to the contested and diverse meanings of routine journeys between Ireland and Britain. The representation of different aspects of this route by Katharine Tynan, W.B. Yeats, Sean O'Casey, Thomas Kinsella, Emyr Humphries and R.S. Thomas highlights the affective dimensions of the crossings and journeys made through Ireland, Wales and England, and suggests the lines of influence, connection, and contest that travel along these transport routes.