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FRIHUM-Fri prosjektstøtte humanistiske fag

"'From the Frontiers of Writing': Ekphrasis and transgressionality in contemporary Northern Irish poetics"

Awarded: NOK 2.8 mill.

Recently, Northern Ireland has appeared as a tormented arena of historical atavism, community conflicts and individual perturbation. The poets of the place, e.g. the 1995 Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, interact imaginatively with the many predicaments of t heir urgent situation. In their plurality of concerns and forms the poetries of Northern Ireland exist upon the limits of life and death. Their transgressive aesthetics constitute a crucial field of humanist research. This project examines how their aesth etics contribute not only to represent the conflict and the many divisions and demarcations in and of Northern Ireland, but, more importantly, to refer, refract and reposition them in order to imagine unpresented figurations for possible futures. Such bor der poetics strengthen the focus on transgressive artefacts, divert attention from conflict-centred studies, and complement Marxist critique with intellectual radicality. Similarly, they pose a new alternative to the hermeticism of new criticism, the soci o-cultural grounding of Bakthinian theories, and the politics of nation and identity in postcolonialism, and they point to hermeneutic possibilities beyond the strictures of structuralist cognition. A genealogy of borders - non-existing within Northern Ir ish poetics at present - needs to be developed beyond the concept of border as two different logics of a limited space that engender the dynamics of limitation and transgression, unification and dissociation. Problems of confining contested areas - whethe r in an abstract or concrete sense - cannot always be reduced to such a minimal number of positions. Furthermore, such binary dynamics operate to exclude differentiation and liminalities, and they restrict the amplifications of alternatives.

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FRIHUM-Fri prosjektstøtte humanistiske fag

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