The action takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and rendered into English. In examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative.

In Brian Friel's writing, the distinction between public and private is closely linked to the concepts of home, family, identity and truth. This study examines the characters' excessive introspection and their deep-seated need to disclose their most intimate knowledge and private truths to define who they are and, thus, to oppose dominant discourse or avoid heteronomy. This study begins by investigating how a number of Anglo-Irish writers publicised their characters' private versions of truth thereby illustrating what they perceived to be the space of 'Irishness'. The book then focuses on Friel's techniques of sharing his character's private views to demonstrate how he adopted and adapted these practices in his own oeuvre. As the characters' superficial inarticulateness and their vivid inner selves are repeatedly juxtaposed in Friel's texts, his oeuvre, quintessentially, displays a great unease with the concepts of communication and absolute truth.

Essays on Irish playwright, Brian Friel

First published in 1997

Recent years have seen cultural memory become a significant element in area studies and the humanities. Ireland, with its trauma-filled history and huge global diaspora, presents a fascinating subject for work in this vein. This series as a whole seeks to construct a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland, looking to map—through an examination of various historical moments, spaces, and cultural forms—the ways in which cultural memory shifts over time. Volume 3 focuses on the impact of trauma on cultural memory by considering two cruxes, the Famine and the Troubles, as formative to the study of Irish cultural memory. Topics include hunger strikes, monuments to the Famine, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process, and Ulster Loyalist battles in the twenty-first century. Gathering the work of leading scholars such as Graham Dawson, Richard Kearney, Margaret Kelleher, David Lloyd, and Joseph Valente, this collection is an essential contribution to the field of Irish studies.

The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post ‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antimonies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers. In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. The book raises the following questions: Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity? The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.