Alterity, literary form and the transnational Irish imagination in the work of Colum McCann
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Date
02/07/2015Author
Garden, Alison Claire
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Abstract
This thesis explores selected texts by the contemporary author Colum McCann
(b.1965), situating his work within a larger transnational Irish canon. The project
traces how notions of Irish identity interact with experiences of diaspora, migration
and race; throughout the thesis, close attention is paid to the role and function of
literary form. After an introduction which maps out the material covered in the thesis,
the project opens with a contextual chapter entitled ‘Deoraí: Exile, Wanderer,
Stranger: (Post)colonial Ireland and making sense of place’. This chapter sets up the
methodological frameworks that guide the thesis through a meditation on exile in an
Irish and postcolonial context. My second chapter, ‘Deterritorialised novels:
McCann’s short stories as Minor Literature in an (Northern) Irish Mode’, focuses on
McCann’s short stories, paying particular attention to those set in the North of Ireland.
Invoking Thomas MacDonagh’s notion of an Irish Mode and Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of Minor Literature, I argue that the rejection of the novel in favour of the
short story is a form of literary politics inflected with anti-colonial sentiment.
Continuing my examination of literary form, my third chapter, ‘Nomadism and
Storytelling in Zoli: oral culture, embodiment and travelling tales’, highlights the
ambivalence of orality within McCann’s novel Zoli and works towards establishing
what a textual practice of storytelling might be, in addition to probing at the
representation of nomadic peoples across McCann’s work. The next chapter is
entitled ‘Topography of Violence’: race, belonging and the underbelly of the
cosmopolitan city in This Side of Brightness’. This discusses the cosmopolitan ethics
that underpin McCann’s novel and how these are grounded by the close attention
McCann pays to the experiential realities of America’s (often racialised) underclass
through McCann’s depiction of interracial love. My final chapter ‘TransAtlantic:
Frederick Douglass, the Irish Famine and the Troubles with the black and green
Atlantics’, maps out the overlapping histories of the black and green Atlantics, tests
the validity of the ostensible affinity between the two groups and asks how useful
conventional chronological narratives are in the representation of their histories.
Finally, I finish with ‘Minor Voices, race and rooted cosmopolitanism’, which
concludes that McCann’s fiction articulates a need for rooted cosmopolitan and
critically engaged nomadic thought which embraces Minor Voices and rejects
exclusionary politics.