'[I]t wasn’t in the picture and is not': Blind Spots and Vanishing Points in Irish Poetical Self-Portraits

2016

International audience; Pictoriality and a propensity for self-examination and self-representation are characteristic of the poetry of Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. In many a poem, these four contemporary Irish poets try to capture their own portraits in words and images, through highly visual poems often inspired by paintings. This paper first examines how these poets use images and invest paintings, how verbal and iconic texts interact in their creations and to what extent self-exegesis is made possible and more successful through ekphrasis. With reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay on self-portraiture—Memoirs of the Blind: Self-Portraits and Other Ruins—thi…

'In Mucker I was born': humour et pittoresque dans "The Green Fool" de Patrick Kavanagh

2004

International audience; Kavanagh’s The Green Fool (1938) consists of a double portrait of himself and his birthplace, the main motifs of which are humour and wit. In his self-portrait, humour dominates, enabling him to positively, if not, proudly, single himself out : his imputed status as « village fool » or « family idiot » actually reveals his essential singularity as a poet. Contrastingly, his portrait of Inniskeen is marked by farcical theatricality and witticisms galore. Farce and wit prove compelling instruments of ridicule and apt ways to circumvent the constraints of his milieu. Yet their dominance in the communal portrait hints at Kavanagh’s failure to overcome his suffering from …

'I Show Off, Therefore I Am': The Politics of the Selfie

2016

International audience; Named word of the year by the OED in 2013, the “selfie” is a worldwide phenomenon. Many see these digital self-portraits as markers for the spread of narcissism or signs of the blurring of limits between the public and private spheres. Initially popular with young people, selfies were soon adopted by politicians who, in a mediatized society, are eager to adhere to new vogues and use digital trends to self-promote. Like “digital natives”, they attempt to go viral by turning their cellphones on themselves and tweeting. Contrary to more formal images (official portraits, campaign posters) where politicians are clearly packaged and marketed, self-snapped photos taken on …

Irish Man, No Man, Everyman : Subversive Redemption. Sebastian Barry's The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

2010

Undercurrents and crosscurrents revealed: Sinéad Morrissey’s parallactic poetry

2015

International audience; In Parallax (2013), her most recent collection of poems, Sinéad Morrissey is attracted to affections “embedded in our cells”, to realities “on the periphery”, to “what happens outside”, to “the accidental”, to “world[s] that can’t be entered”, to “conversation[s] no one else can hear”. She also explores oblique, alternative perspectives that she describes in “The Mutoscope” as “what-the-butler-saw perspective[s]”. Parallax – the optical phenomenon used in astronomy to measure the distance of nearby stars and celestial bodies - serves as the prime metaphor for Morrissey’s poetical and metaphysical quest: the implications of the angle of vision and distance on percepti…

Texte et image : la théorie au 21ème siècle

2011

International audience; Issue 5 of Interfaces – which is reproduced in this number – contains among other contributions papers by John Dixon Hunt, W.J.T. Mitchell and Jean-Michel Rabaté as well as by Marie-Odile Bernez and Maurice Géracht. Michel Baridon also provided a survey of research centres and periodicals, and an up-to-date bibliography devoted to the question, in which he carefully listed the then most recent major contributions to text/image theory in the fields of arts and literature, psychology, linguistics and sciences. His concluding words were “les perspectives qui s’ouvrent sont neuves et profondes […] Tout cela n’ira pas sans beaucoup de travail […] mais toute démarche novat…

Secrets de famille, famille de secrets dans Reading in the Dark de Seamus Deane

2006

Le langage de l’indicible abjection dans "Salomé" d’Oscar Wilde

2012

International audience

Fenêtres sur couples : trois nouvelles de Sean O'Faolain

2003

In several short stories, Sean O'Faolain ponders over the complexity of love relationships and tries to unveil some of the unconscious motivations underlying them. This essay focuses on three of these short stories, namely "There's a Birdie in the Cage", "Discord" and "An Inside Outside Complex", and shows how, in each of them, the fissures or cracks in love relationships are figuratively represented by an isotopy of windows, the various qualities of which are artfully exploited by O'Faolain (the window as partition between contiguous spaces, as transparent filter, as surface or frame). The position of characters with regard to windows (their framing) and their relations to windows (how the…