Introduction

Chomsky and Halle’s approach to phonological theory, as with other components of generative grammar, represented a sharp break with the main currents of American linguistics that immediately preceded them. The differences were conceptual as well as technical. Accounts of the development of phonology emphasize technical issues, such as arguments over the existence of a “taxonomic phonemic level,” or whether it is permissible to “mix levels” in a phonological analysis. Lying behind discussion of these issues, however, were assumptions about psychology and the practice of science. Indeed, throughout the development of phonology, major changes came about not only through technical breakthroughs, but also by reinterpreting the significance of existing technical devices. This was also the case with Chomsky and Halle’s innovations.

In this chapter I discuss Chomsky and Halle’s contributions to phonological theory by putting their views in the context of the theories that prevailed before them. I will also try to connect the technical issues to the larger conceptual ones concerning the nature of language acquisition and the mind. I will be treating Chomsky and Halle’s contributions together, without attempting to distinguish who contributed precisely which ideas. Their early work in generative phonology, culminating in the major work The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968, henceforth SPE), was done jointly.

From the earliest period, cinema in Ireland has contended with two apparently conflicting forces: the 'esperanto of the eye' promulgated by the globalising drive of Hollywood, and the localising lens adopted by the Irish Literary Revival. Part of the cultural power of Hollywood in its formative decades lay in its appeal, as a cheap form of entertainment, to the working class and immigrant populations rapidly expanding in American cities at the turn of the century. To facilitate cross-cultural markets, story-lines, narrative forms and visual styles were devised that addressed spectators not as 'Irish', 'Italians' or 'Jews' but at the most general, human interest level - shorthand for the individualism and universal aspirations of the American way of life. Notwithstanding its crass commercialism, the movie industry also performed a powerful civic function: by divesting viewers of their ethnicity or inherited loyalties, or at least making them redundant on entering a film theatre, it promoted the assimilation of widely divergent cultural minorities into the white American mainstream. It was not entirely coincidental that D.W. Griffith called his landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915) - though its white supremacist vision and replaying of the civil war also betrayed some of the underlying narratives of that nation.

But while cinema was establishing a commodified public sphere in the United States – what Robert Sklar refers to as ‘movie-made America’ – theatre and literature were spearheading a national renaissance of a different kind in Ireland. As if emphasising the very cultural ties endangered by Hollywood, the Irish literary movement looked to the past, the vernacular and the local to stage its version of the nation. It would be a mistake, however, to see this solely in terms of the backward look of romanticism.

Introduction

The novel, the dominant narrative form in the English-speaking world for the period treated in this volume, is not an indigenous Irish form. When novels did come to be written in and about Ireland (from the late eighteenth century), English was the language of expression and the influence of Irish-language narratives on these new productions was not obvious. Nonetheless, writers in English from the time of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) have been at least intermittently and selectively responsive to Irish-language materials, particularly the largely oral story-telling tradition. When an important Irish-language tradition of prose fiction did emerge, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it drew energy from both the revival of indigenous forms and English language influences. Thus, it is no longer possible to insist with some of the older cultural nationalists that prose fiction in Irish owes nothing to Irish prose fiction in English. Much scholarly work remains to be done, however, in investigating the two bodies of writing and in establishing points of contact. This chapter treats the two traditions of novel writing in separate sections,but aims to offer readers a rich sense of the Irish novel as it developed across a range of voices, forms and languages.

Prose fiction in Irish

The history of prose literature in Irish since 1800 inevitably reflects the shifting state of the Irish language itself during that period, from its cataclysmic decline in the nineteenth century and its revival at the end of that century and on to its continuing survival today.

Language has operated as a vehicle for debates concerned with cultural identity and political legitimacy in Ireland for much of its modern history. While the incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union of 1800 marks a milestone in the cultural no less than the constitutional history of Ireland, the direction and dynamic of the 'language shift', from Irish to English as the general vernacular, were already well established and, as it seemed, irreversible, by the end of the eighteenth century.

Language and, even more crucially, religion, were the key elements of cultural discrimination in the great convulsion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the outcome of which was the establishment of a Protestant, overwhelmingly planter, new ruling class in Ireland, together with the triumph of the English language, law and politico-administrative institutions throughout Ireland, and the defeat of the whole institutional edifice of the Gaelic political and social order which had sustained and been mediated through the Irish language.

In the centuries that followed, language, together with religion, remained at the centre of the debate on Irish culture, community and identity. But the language shift to English, the language of power and of all the avenues to advancement, soon gathered momentum among those who aspired to improve their condition or to progress and participate fully in the life of the country under the new order. By the late eighteenth century, Irish was already considered the language of the past and of the poor; not only by the planter society, but by the emerging Catholic middle class in town and countryside, who, while continuing to use Irish in transactions or social intercourse with the lower orders, had themselves made the transition to English as the language of their domestic as well as their public lives. For the literate, Irish was still largely a scribal language of manuscripts, with only a limited presence in the world of print.

Nationalism and modernism: the twin imperatives

In 1939, the Irish architect Michael Scott brought his design for an Irish Pavilion to the New York World's Fair: 'A board of ten or twelve architects vetted every building for the World's Fair. I appeared before them with the model and explained the whole idea behind it. They thought it was marvellous, a wonderful building. They liked how I solved the problem of nationalism and made it modern at the same time.' To the visitor the pavilion initially appeared as a sleek and sinuous form clad in concrete and glass, with a bright, airy interior (Fig. 16.1). Only from the air would it become clear that the building had a shamrock-shaped plan. If this device now seems somewhat corny or superficial, the challenge facing Scott - that of reconciling the imperatives of nationalism and of modernism within a single representative form - was evidently a substantial and enduring one. Indeed it seems possible to discuss the architecture of Ireland's modern era precisely in terms of this tension between the desire to be modern and the requirement to be representative of some idea of the 'national spirit'.

While this tension sometimes became the subject of deliberate theories and projects (as with Scott’s pavilion), more often it simply formed the cultural climate within which Irish architecture was produced. Sometimes the two forces effectively cancelled each other out, resulting in architecture which was neither particularly modern nor particularly Irish. But at other times an architecture emerged which seemed, almost effortlessly, to be as much of its place as of its time.

Introduction

This chapter shows how the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 was the single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. In European terms, famine had become an increasingly remote event, and that Ireland should suffer a devastating episode was made all the more unusual in that it then formed part of the richest, most powerful and centralised state in the world - the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union in 1800. The Famine disproportionately impacted on the 3 million potato dependent people who comprised the notoriously poverty-stricken base of Irish society. These effects were compounded by doctrinaire government policies, designed as much to appease British opinion and to promote social engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. Over 1 million people died and 2 million more emigrated within a decade: the population of the island halved by 1900, the result of endemic emigration by young people, delayed marriages and abnormally high rates of celibacy.

The Famine therefore marked a water shed in many areas of Irish life – demographics, economics, society, culture. Yet the immediate response appears sluggish. Indubitably, Ireland remained culturally comatose in the immediate post-Famine period. The period from the 1880s, when the post-Famine generation took over, witnessed the creation of a series of radical responses to the Famine legacy, of which the Irish literary revival is one. Many other initiatives were also undertaken, inspired by people themselves born during the Famine. The best-known examples include Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League in 1879, and Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884.

Introduction: change and continuity

For over two centuries, republicanism and unionism/loyalism have marked polarities in Irish politics - the former committed to a 'sovereign' all-Ireland republic, the latter to the maintenance and consolidation of Ireland (and Northern Ireland since 1920) as part of the United Kingdom. Much has changed, however, in the period between the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. In the first instance, the social composition of the constituencies supporting both ideologies have altered substantially over time, influenced by Ireland's complex integration into the global capitalist economy, by famine and war, and the outcome of political struggle. In the interim, too, the substantive issues at the heart of unionist-republican conflict such as the 'Union', the 'Republic', self-determination, government, democracy, the state, Irishness, Britishness and 'Ulster' have changed their scope and meaning. Irish unionism and republicanism also register the successive imprints of their changing international contexts - the republican revolutions in the US and France; the subsequent 'age of imperialism'; and imperial fragmentation and the growing significance of the national state in its aftermath.

Against this vast panorama of change, the first part of this chapter examines some of the reasons for the endurance of unionism and republicanism. It suggests that the roots of their survival are to be found in a resilient, if highly asymmetric power structure, the legacy of colonial and imperial Ireland and the working out of the Partition settlement. Within this power structure, nationalists and republicans have developed characteristic, if asymmetric, views of the relationship between state and nation, modes of remembrance and styles of political mobilisation. The second part of the chapter sketches how Partition reconstituted unionism and republicanism and discusses how the ‘politics of culture’ has come to be central in the Northern Ireland conflict and in the search for a solution.

Religion and everyday life

Being Catholic or Protestant has been fundamental to what Irish people have done and said over the past two hundred years. It has been central to family life, education, health care and social welfare and has influenced the schools people attended, the friends they had and who they married. Religion has reached into areas such as the businesses, shops and pubs used by people; as well as the sports played and the newspapers and magazines read. In many ways, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland occupied two different, divided, social worlds. These worlds necessarily overlapped in business and everyday life, of course,but the doctrinal division between Catholicism and Protestantism remained central to commonly held conceptions of national and individual identity.

Religious identity in modern Ireland has been as socially significant as gender, class, ethnicity or sexual orientation. There is nothing uncommon about this. Throughout history and in the contemporary world, religious affiliation has been a major social divider. What made Ireland exceptional throughout the twentieth century was that while the rest of Western Europe became increasing secularised, religious affiliation remained a strong social marker for the Irish. In the terms adopted in this chapter,what mattered was not so much that Irish people were labelled as Catholic or Protestant, but that they were good Catholics and Protestants and could be identified within their communities as having accumulated spiritual capital.

Considered from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when plays by Irish writers can be seen on stages from Los Angeles to Warsaw, it is difficult to imagine Irish culture without the theatre. However, if we turn back to the first major histories of the Irish theatre, published in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, we find them troubled by an awareness that the theatre does not fit easily into the prevailing definitions of Irish culture.

This problem is best defined by one of the foundational works of Irish theatre history, Joseph CooperWalker’s ‘An Historical Essay on the Irish Stage’, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1788.Walker was a respected antiquarian who had published his ‘Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards’ two years earlier. He was one of a number of antiquarians and historians of the period who sought to recover indigenous forms of Irish architecture, music, poetry, graphic design, sports, clothing and civil law. In all of these areas, the ancient Irish past seemed to be an almost inexhaustible source, connecting the emerging modern nation with an authenticating history. ‘Can that nation be deemed barbarous in which learning shared the honours next to royalty?’ asks Walker in one of the more passionate moments in his ‘Memoirs of the Irish Bards’. ‘Read this, ye polished nations of the earth, and blush!’1 However, when Walker and his contemporaries looked for traces of theatre in Irish antiquity, they found nothing. ‘It is very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bards’, comments Walker. ‘If the Stage ever existed in Ireland previous to the middle ages, like the “baseless fabric of a vision” it has melted into air, leaving not a trace behind.’

The constitutional union of 1800 was an extreme political formula. It was pursued with ruthless energy; it ultimately disappointed its architects. Yet the Union provided a constitutional framework for Ireland for 120 years, and has survived in a truncated form within Northern Ireland since 1920. The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which is sometimes viewed as a 'renegotiation' of the Union, has brought into focus the issue of its survival. More than ever, there is a need to understand not only why the original Union failed in 1920-21, but also how and why it lasted for over a century. More than ever there is a need to illuminate some of the explanations for the survival of the British state in nineteenth-century Ireland and beyond.

Yet even though the Union was a central feature of political life in the nineteenth century modern Irish historians have some how evaded the question of its survival. At one level the reason for this is not hard to locate: modern Irish political historiography remains dominated by the Home Rule and revolutionary era; and it is hard to escape the impression that a good deal of Irish history writing has, as its ultimate destination, the political settlements of the early 1920s, when the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were each established. Of course this is an entirely unexceptional emphasis, given the enormous and lasting significance which the revolutionary and Ulster Unionist movements possessed. It is also entirely reasonable that Irish historians should emphasise the ultimate failure of the Union in the twenty-six counties. But it is possible that this reasonableness has created a paradox – that many Irish historians have effectively dedicated themselves to explaining the death of a settlement which (whatever the quality of its life) clung on for a remarkable length of time.

Introduction

The history of the visual arts in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the ongoing story of the relationship between a metropolitan culture (London) and a smaller, less economically sustainable environment (Dublin). The production of art is an expensive activity. Although all cultural media need patronage and financial assistance, the visual arts have the added burden of needing materials, be it oils and canvases or marble blocks or the latest innovations in information technology, so as to begin the process of visual communication. Finally, it needs forms of display to make it all accessible to an audience, be it private or public. For much of the period under discussion, 1800-2000, Ireland was very often not in a position to greatly assist its visual artists. In many ways an account of the visual arts in relation to Ireland in the modern period is a story of talent exported to London and in more recent times to other European cities and also to New York. In the nineteenth century London was the metropolis of empire while in the twentieth century it and other international locations have become convenient sites for artistic training, exhibition and sales. That economic dependency is vital to an understanding of the progress of the visual arts over the last two hundred years.

The nineteenth century

One of the key facts in discussing pre-twentieth-century Irish art is the dominant position of the British School. No native-born artists have had the cultural effect that John Constable, J. M. W. Turner or David Wilkie had in their native England or Scotland, while at the same time most prominent Irish artists of the period – from James Barry who died in 1806 to Sir John Lavery who died in 1941 – are still staunchly included in most reference books as British artists. The problem lies with the export of talent to London and the economic impossibility of making a living in Dublin or Ireland in general.

The aim of this Companion is to introduce readers to modern Irish culture in all its complexity and variety. Before moving into detailed cultural analysis, however, the opening chapter invites readers to consider the historical and theoretical meanings of our framing concept: modern Ireland. What does modernity mean for Ireland? How can we conceptualise the modern culture of a country and a people with two languages, divided since the early twentieth century into two states? Officially incorporated into the United Kingdom with the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland in the nineteenth century was a constituent element of a sprawling empire of global reach. Union with Britain survives into the twenty-first century in the shape of the political border dividing Northern Ireland from the Republic. And yet the long history of Irish migration and diaspora means that even the divided island - the basic geopolitical unit - cannot be taken for granted as the sole sphere of modern Irish culture.

The nowadays much-debated terms terms ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’ also require consideration. For a long time, these words were associated with the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the Enlightenment and with the transformational dynamism of capitalism. The revolutionary utopianism of feminism, socialism and communism sprang from such quintessentially Enlightenment beliefs as human rights and global justice and equality: all such claims expressed in terms of a cry for the optimal extension of the modern. At the start of the new millennium, however, calls for the extension of modernisation are more likely to hinder than to abet campaigns for social justice or the dream of a better world beyond capitalism.

While the attempt to recover or revive a traditional native culture was a key element of Irish cultural nationalism since the late eighteenth century, the moment of the so-called Celtic Revival, at around the turn of the twentieth century, remains distinctive and significant for a number of reasons.

In no other period has Ireland produced so many writers of such extraordinary quality. Moreover, the reputations and achievements of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge are inextricably bound up with the revivalist features of their Irish subject matter, and those of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are at least in part moulded by their rejection of the aesthetics and politics of the revival. The contemporary ‘branding’ of the Irish cultural heritage continues to exploit the fame of these literary stars. The works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, of course, are all also central to the history of European modernism. Indeed, it could be argued that this unique instance of a modernist movement in a colonial setting presents an important challenge to theorists of modernism; certainly, this literature demands from its critics a nuanced understanding of modernity in relation to Irish history.

Introduction

The historical development of a sporting culture in Ireland reflects the island's political and cultural history as a whole. It is a story of accommodation and resistance, and of an uneasy relationship between these attitudes, dialectically intertwined in Irish history. As Mike Cronin observes, 'until there is only one idea of Irish nationalism, and a singular and commonly shared expression of identity, then sport will continue to reflect the multifaceted and ever changing nature of Irishness'. Not only has sport in Ireland been greatly affected by economic and political change, it has also impacted both directly and indirectly on Irish society. It is worth noting, however, that the story of Irish sport as a cultural practice is to a large extent his/story. As in other areas of public life, women have had a relatively low profile in the sporting world. Much has changed since the 1960s, and yet Irish sport remains a preserve of gender inequality: men run the games, are the best rewarded participants, make up the bulk of sporting audiences and receive most publicity from the sporting media.

Sport matters to the Irish people, and in particular to Irish men. They play it, read about it, watch it and speak about it to a degree that, whilst by no means unique, certainly suggests that it is an aspect of Irish cultural life deserving of notice. The extent to which Irish soccer captain Roy Keane’s departure from the World Cup Finals in 2002 and his criticisms of association football’s ruling body in the Irish Republic, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), held virtually the entire nation in thrall is clear evidence of sport’s ability to supersede almost all other domestic and international matters.

Introduction

Irish migration in the nineteenth century is one of the most significant movements of population in modern European history, in terms of the total number of people involved and the proportion migrating. Between 1801 and 1921 (the period of Union with Britain), approximately 8 million people left Ireland. Ireland's contribution to the outflow of approximately 44 million people from Europe between 1821 and 1914 was the largest of any other country, relative to the size of the island's population. In the twentieth century, outward migration continued; but it was marked by two periods of very heavy out-migration, the 1950s and the second half of the 1980s, and by two periods of net inward migration, the 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. These patterns reached a point in Ireland such that, for all but the eldest son and sometimes daughter, emigration was a life event as 'normal' as leaving school or getting married. Altogether in the period 1949-89 800,000 people left Ireland. There are two consequences following this sustained emigration over the past two centuries. One is that at any one time a significant proportion of people alive who were born in Ireland were living abroad. The second is that there are many millions of people across the globe who are of Irish descent and who can claim an Irish heritage and identity should they so wish.

Introduction

This chapter surveys current and past definitions and theories of Irish folklore. It relates our understanding of folklore and folklife to the ways in which these knowledges have developed and become institutionalised and argues for the special place of folklore studies in our understanding of Irish subaltern culture more generally.

In practice, ‘folk culture’ usually distinguishes those aspects of popular culture which have long been established in agrarian society and are associated with a particular way of life – especially that of peasants – from more recent and non-rural forms. The latter, of course, may be traditional too, but are usually seen as being a product of modern rather than traditional society. Folk culture in another sense refers to an ideal of authenticity, as in the attribution by the Romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau to nature of various social phenomena supposedly uncorrupted by culture: the ‘noble savage’ and then the peasant challenged the decadence of aristocratic society. Johann Gottfried von Herder explicitly contrasted natural writing (Naturpoesie) with the artifice of civilisation (Kunstdichtung). Ireland in the same period sawa heated Irish controversy over James Macpherson’s appropriation of the common Gaelic Ossianic poems. The Ossian poems prefigured European romanticism with their wild native energy. To Herder these poems, along with Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) by Bishop Percy (a friend and mentor to the pioneering editor and translator of Irish poetry, Charlotte Brooke), were the epitome of Naturpoesie.