A Deleuzian-Adornian Reading of Postcolonial Literature: Neocolonial Territorialization and Anti-Colonial Identity in the Modern Irish Novel

Document Type : Research Paper

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which Ireland and the Irish as the very last locus of European coloniality underwent and then embraced an internal deconstruction of postcolonial ethos. The modern Irish identity, this paper argues, emerges as an outcry of a generation whose dreams are torn between a neocolonial State with atavistic vision of the island and a culture of compliance and submission. Where the former assigns a territory for the Irish to develop, the latter observes an agrarian, if not retrospective, sense of development. The protagonists will be punished and then banished from the public memory should they seek social and psychological mobility outwith the given framework. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's specificity of postcolonial territorialization, postcolonial reality Vs personal memory, and Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, this paper examines the onset of an internal implosion prevalent in the modern Irish novel, which was materialized in the late 1940s up to the 1960s.

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References

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 22, Issue 1
August 2017
Pages 99-134

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