A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me

Horton, Emily

doi:10.1057/9781137035189_9

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Alternatively, Lynch's use of Gothicism could also illustrate the genre of what Emily Horton calls "postmillennial Gothic", in which "the centrality of ghosts and haunting reflects a topical preoccupation with discourses of trauma, violence and socio-economic abjection specific to twenty-first-century life" 30 , another way Grace could be read as much as a reflection on the present times as on the past. There are indeed multiple ways of identifying with what Grace endures: first and foremost, she may be viewed as a victim of a defining event in Irish history; but also as a victim of an ecocatastrophe which may involve any human being in the future; and also as the embodiment of what some unfortunate children in some parts of the world, born in the wrong place at the wrong time, still have to suffer nowadays, engulfed in a disaster that they cannot comprehend.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Paul Lynch’s Grace and the “Postmemory” of the Famine

Mikowski¹

2020

etudesirlandaises

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper starts as a discussion of Paul Lynch's novel Grace as a Famine novel and on the ways in which the Famine is represented historically, but also emotionally. It questions the limits of language and fiction in representing history, trauma and affects and discusses the specificity of Grace, comparing it with Liam O'Flaherty's Famine and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea. Grace, it is argued, manages to evade the nationalist versus revisionist debate and constitutes, at an aesthetic level, the same type of middle-ground as the one achieved by the "post-revisionist" historians, situated halfway between the mythologising of the first interpreters of the Famine and the revisionists' controversial attempts at writing "value-free" narratives of the tragedy. Drawing on Eric L. Berlatksy's model of an anti-realist narrative mode and its application in Art Spiegelman's Maus, and on Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory applied to the Shoah, the essay posits that Lynch's novel offers the reader a renewed mode of understanding the reality of the past, and in particular, of horrifying historical events that resist representation-in this case, the Great Famine.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%