UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea - Scholarcast 38: 'port-lights/Of a ghost-ship': Thomas Carnduff and the Belfast Shipyards

Scholarcast 38: 'port-lights/Of a ghost-ship': Thomas Carnduff and the Belfast Shipyards

02/18/14 • 30 min

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

Belfast, as a city, has come to be represented in recent years by the shadow of its industrial heritage. The Titanic, and the shipyards in which it was built, have become central to the city's attempt to give cultural and economic purchase to its contemporary identity. This lecture uncovers some of the history behind that branding of Belfast. It takes Thomas Carnduff's shipyard poetry, written in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way in which to understand the complexities of labour which underpinned the products of the shipyards and to reconsider the meaning of the shipyards for Belfast today.

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Scholarcast 36: Draining the Irish Channel: Identity, Sustainability, and the Politics of Water

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, as well as a comment on the craze for projects and speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics and circulation, resource management and political arithmetic, and improvement and reclamation. The conceptual leap made in Draining the Irish Channel is that the sea can and should be improved: in other words, done away with. The sea could become not only the medium but the very ground of British colonialism; land could be created from unproductive water; the Irish Sea could literally become a new territory. In practical terms, then, the sea is recast as a geography of natural resources that could potentially be pumped, mined, and diverted using locks and drains, all for the health of the British nation.

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Scholarcast 39: Giving 'A Tongue to the Sea Cliffs': The Landless Inheritance of W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land. New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.