Invoking Irish: A Cultural History of the Irish Language in Anglophone Discourse
Date
2022
Authors
O'Neill, Jonathan
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Abstract
The Irish language is a prominent symbol of Irish cultural difference. Despite its symbolic role and the revival efforts of the state, it remains the first language solely in those areas designated as Gaeltacht, a consequence, in historical terms, of multivalent language shift. Colonial discourse identified Irish as a major obstacle to establishing control of Ireland. By associating the Irish language with barbarity and backwardness, it provoked a counter discourse that celebrated Irish as representing a lost golden age of civilisation and learning. This binary has spun a web of persisting anglophone discourse on the language, exerting a paralysing effect on the re-establishment of Irish as a community language. This phenomenon, previously under-examined within the discipline of Irish studies, is the basis for this study. The negative and positive tropes that cling to any discussion on the language are examined for their continuing cultural symbolism and their resistance to establishing Irish as a community language within an enduring refrain of language demise and revival.
This thesis focuses on the discourse in this historical refrain by maintaining a tension between linguistically mediated cultural history and empirically based social history. It achieves this by focusing on discourse as it is mediated through the lives of individual agents operating within the structural constraints imposed by their historical time. An examination of the 'social and symbolic' origins for texts and the significance that these have for the individual agent, grounds the linguistic analysis of discourse or 'epistemic regimes' that influence it. In this way, the subject does not disappear, and the discursive themes can be studied within several historical time frames. This methodology contains the awareness that discourse determines and limits what can and cannot be said about Irish across time frames, but it maintains the perception of determined efforts on the part of individual actors to challenge and transform that discourse even as they operate within it. This makes clear the relationship between discourse and agency as cause and effect. By extending this focus on transnationally located writers and activists, literary figures writing in and about Irish, the contributors to the postcolonial project of Field Day, utopian ecologists, and new media influences, it is made explicit how these subjects adapt and make strategic use of the cultural constructions that they are embedded in, both "reproducing and transforming them." This method allows the themes surrounding Irish that emerge over time in cultural discourse, to be abstracted and studied for their effects on language use.
The research identifies the main narratives in which Irish becomes constructed as a reified cultural artefact, as well as the incidences where the discursive strictures of the language are identified and overcome. The thesis makes recommendations regarding the dialectic discourse on the language, as well as the incorporation of the language into disciplinary approaches to Irish history and literature.
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