Book contents
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction: A Weak Theory of Transnationalism
- Part I Transnational Genealogies
- Part II Planets
- Chapter 6 Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: Navigating Colonial Entanglements with Asterisms
- Chapter 7 Ireland, Literature, and the Blue Humanities
- Chapter 8 You Have Gas: Reading for Irish Energy
- Chapter 9 “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet
- Part III Missed Translations
- Part IV Transnational Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: Navigating Colonial Entanglements with Asterisms
from Part II - Planets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2024
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction: A Weak Theory of Transnationalism
- Part I Transnational Genealogies
- Part II Planets
- Chapter 6 Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: Navigating Colonial Entanglements with Asterisms
- Chapter 7 Ireland, Literature, and the Blue Humanities
- Chapter 8 You Have Gas: Reading for Irish Energy
- Chapter 9 “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet
- Part III Missed Translations
- Part IV Transnational Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, he thinks, “the land a maze of dark cunning nets … Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersman and master mariners. Human shells” (3.154–57). This thought evokes Ireland’s complicated position as an island nation and its entanglements with fellow colonized peoples. For Ireland’s cultural mariners of the twentieth century, navigating such currents requires a knowledge not only of sea but also of sky. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, a chapter where the city of Dublin is the prominent star, the sections are separated by a series of three asterisks also known as a dinkus. As a writer for the Paris Review explains, a dinkus is “used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.” Asterisms serve as a striking intervention into the textual groundswells of Joyce’s Ulysses that ultimately connect to Derek Walcott’s own navigations in Omeros as a means of paternal inheritance and transatlantic affiliation.
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- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 119 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024