Oceans Apart: Amitav Ghosh, John Millington Synge, and Weak Comparison
| Autor: | Cóilín Parsons |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Irish University Review. 50:120-130 |
| ISSN: | 2047-2153 0021-1427 |
| DOI: | 10.3366/iur.2020.0439 |
| Popis: | This article compares John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) and Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land (1992), travelogues, histories, and anthropological investigations of maritime societies. Both books tell of a world marked by syncretism and synthesis, and deep and unbroken time, and their narratives are fractured, fragmented, temporally promiscuous, and logically paratactical. In comparing these two books, the article asks what it means, and what it could yield, to read together two accounts of oceanic lives from opposite ends of the twentieth century and from distinct continents and oceans? What emerges is the outline of a ‘speculative practice of weak comparison’ that allows us to extend how we understand the contexts of an object of study called ‘Irish’ literature. By rethinking the scale of Irish literature, the article concludes, we necessarily decentre Ireland, and find opportunities to disaggregate Irish literature and its Irishness, setting a new agenda for comparative studies of Ireland that range widely in space and time. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|