McCann, Fiona
A Poetics of Dissensus
Confronting Violence in Contemporary Prose Writing from the North of Ireland
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2014. 228 pp.
Reimagining Ireland. Vol. 59
Edited by Eamon Maher
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ISBN 978-3-0343-0979-0 pb. (Softcover)
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Book synopsis
Twenty years after the peace process began in the North of Ireland, many thorny political issues remain unresolved. One of the most significant
questions involves the means by which acts of violence and the ideologies that subtended them can be dealt with, interrogated and questioned
without rekindling conflict. This book focuses on a number of fictional and non-fictional texts published during the last two decades and
analyses, through the prism of French cultural philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work, the emergence of an aesthetics of dissensus within these
novels, short stories, graphic novels and memoirs. Associating close textual analyses with wider contextual readings, the book investigates the
overlap of politics, aesthetics and the redistribution of the sensible in recent prose works, revealing how the authors avoid the pitfalls of a facile
discourse of peace and reconciliation that whitewashes the past and behind which unaddressed tensions may continue to simmer.
Contents
Contents: Between Understatement and Overkill: Anna Burns’ No Bones And Little Constructions – ‘The Post-past City’: Apocalyptic Cityscapes
and Cultural Stagnation in the Fiction of Sean O’Reilly – Postcolonial Gothic and Body Politics in Recent Novels by Patrick McCabe – The
Politics of Identity and the Language of Dissensus in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place – Whodunnit or Who Didn’t Do it? Authority and Poetic
(In)Justice in Eoin McNamee’s The Ultras, The Blue Tango and Orchid Blue – Consensus and Dissensus in Fictional Representations of
Working Class Protestantism and Loyalism – Aesthetics of Violence in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction – Subverting Authority or Reinforcing
Convention? Garth Ennis’s Graphic Novels – Troubling Narratives of the Troubles: Commemoration, Sensationalism and Authority.
About the author(s)/editor(s)
Fiona McCann is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the Université de Lille 3, where she teaches courses on contemporary Irish
and South African literature and feminism. Her research focuses on the representation of violence in the literatures of these countries and the
overlap of politics and aesthetics. She has published several articles and book chapters on contemporary postcolonial writers and has guestedited special issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies and Études irlandaises.
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