Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 90 Es wäre schön, wenn Bodes Band mit seinen mitunter provokanten Formulierungen trotz manch voreiliger Abschlüsse und trotz des ungewöhnlich harschen Tonfalls den narratologischen Diskurs weiterhin befeuern könnte, denn immerhin bietet er in weiten Teilen eine durchaus schöne und auch anregende Lektüre für Leser/ -innen von Erzähltexten, die sich auch für deren erzähltechnische Substanz und Genese interessieren, und bereitet zeitweise durchaus Vergnügen. Als Einführungslektüre für Studierende, die die Textsorte der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit auch weiterhin nicht nur als intersubjektiv nachvollziehbare Methodenanwendung kennen lernen sollen, sondern auch und vor allem den sorgsamen Umgang mit Sprache und mit Texten anderer erfahren sollen, kann der Band indes - unter Berücksichtigung der so betonten Vorgängigkeit von discours vor histoire - nach dem hier Gesagten nur mit Kautel empfohlen werden. Doris Mader Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena (eds.), Redefinitions of Irish Identity. A Postnationalist Approach. (Cultural Identity Studies 12). Berlin: Peter Lang, 2010. Katharina Rennhak In the opening sentence of her article in the collection under review Catherine Rees remarks that “[r]ecent cultural criticism in modern Irish studies frequently describes the nation as experiencing moments […] of crises of identity within a global context” (221). Redefinitions of Irish Identity is by no means the first collection to discuss questions of national identity in (post)- Celtic Tiger Ireland - it can build, e.g., on the insights in Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin’s influential Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (2002) - nor will or should it be the last. Contemporary ‘globalized’ Ireland with its well-known 20 th -century trajectory of cultural and political nationalism - which is simultaneously exemplary and unique in comparison to that of other European nations, since it is temporally as well as conceptually situated halfway between earlier Western and later Eastern European national movements - is relevant in so many contexts today that it certainly deserves our sustained attention and critical commitment. Nordin and Zamorano Llena have subtitled their collection A Postnationalist Approach. Of the thirteen contributions, the first one by historian Michael Böss, “Irish neutrality: From nationalism to postnationalism” provides a his- Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 91 torical overview from pre-Second World War Ireland to the Seville Declaration of 2002, which reminds the reader of contexts relevant to almost all the other articles in the volume. Simultaneously, its claim that the concept of neutrality, “a key symbol of Irish identity” (17), gains various different meanings that depend both on the political agenda of those who use it and on the different national(ist) discourses which keep re-employing it throughout the 20 th century opens up a refreshingly original perspective. Billy Gray’s contribution on the essayist Hubert Butler’s reflections on “community, nationalism and a globalised Ireland” serves as a smooth transition from the historical article by Böss to the analyses of literature and film in the eleven articles that follow. Gray establishes “Butler’s views” as predating Jean Baudrillard’s, Homi Bhabha’s or Zygmunt Bauman’s “critique” of various effects of “increasing globalization,” e.g. the “pivotal role the global media play in propagating what [Butler] terms ‘the ravages of second-hand experience’” (47). Providing the most sceptical perspective on the postnational, Gray moves on to suggest that Butler’s emphasis on the importance of “personal relationships [and] neighbourly concern” (58) may offer answers to some unsolved problems of the globalized world. In briefly (and somewhat fleetingly) touching on the significance of Butler’s “beautifully honed prose style” (60), Gray’s article also reflects on the relationship between the message of a text and its discursive form. A more pronounced interest in the interaction of medium and message, formal structure and ideological effect characterizes the following articles in the collection. In their introduction, which recapitulates the main issues addressed in two of the most influential recent contributions to the “cultural, politicophilosophical […] discourse of postnationalism” (1) - Jürgen Habermas’s The Postnational Constellation (2001) and Richard Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland (1997) - Nordin and Zamorano Llena contend: “Very rarely does postnationalism leave critics indifferent and positions tend to be radicalised.” (1) Even though some contributors embrace the concept of postnationalism more wholeheartedly than others, such radicalization is certainly not a characteristic of the calmly argued articles collected in the book. Almost all contributors refer to Kearney and argue along the lines of his “optimistic perception of the European Union.” Another common feature is the discussion of the central issue of “the regional and the local” in a globalized world (3). On that ground, one can roughly distinguish three different approaches to literary representations of ‘the postnational’. The first group of critics focuses on films (Seán Crosson on The Rocky Road to Dublin and Clash of the Ash), plays (David Cregan on Friel’s The Enemy Within and Living Quarters), or novels (Grace Tighe Ledwidge on Tóibín’s The South, The Heather Blazing, and The Blackwater Lightship) which “provide a searing indictment of romantic nationalist ideology” (Ledwidge 202). They regard this critique as enabled by the authors’ postnational vantage point. It is interesting to observe how, despite their different approaches - Crosson works with Kearney’s concept of the postnational, Jameson’s idea of the postmodern and insights from Irish film studies; Cregan practices masculinity studies informed by Freud; and Ledwidge builds on trauma theories and De- Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 92 clan Kiberd’s idea of the “quest for ‘an enabling narrative’” (201) - they all demonstrate that their ‘postnational authors’ make visible a hitherto often unperceived link between Irish national(ist) discourses and institutions like the GAA, the church, or the law on the one hand, and, to use R.W. Connell’s term introduced by Cregan, the construction of a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (171) on the other. All three articles thus demonstrate that 20 th -century Irish nationalism has “limited ideas and practices” not just of femininity, but also “of masculinity,” because “men themselves [have] creat[ed] restrictive and narrow versions of their own gender” (Cregan 161). Questions of masculinity (as of gender in general) are also discussed in Paula Murphy’s article (on Dermot Bolger’s In High Germany and The Holy Ground; also analysed by Damien Shortt), as well as by Miriam O’Kane Mara and in Catherine Rees’s analysis of plays by Marian Jones and Martin McDonagh, whose contributions can be said to form a second group of articles that also includes Matt McGuire’s “The postmodern promise of Robert McLiam Wilson’s fiction.” These contributors approach the postnational by disentangling (post-)Celtic Tiger processes of identity construction and by asking “how nationalism is constructed […] in a postnationalist Ireland” (Rees 238). While a number of contributors simply equate (Jameson’s or Lyotard’s or Žižek’s) postmodernist theories with postnationalism (cf. 125 or 184f.), Carmen Zamorano Llena’s analysis of contemporary Irish poetry and Miriam O’Kane Mara’s reading of the work of Nuala O’Faolain more rigorously draw on more differentiated concepts of the ‘postnational’ or ‘globalization’. Zamorano Llena charts a number of issues and “overriding concerns” (146) which have been theorized by, e.g., Arjun Appadurai or Zygmunt Bauman and reappear in the poetry of David Wheatley, Justin Quinn and Sinéad Morrissey, most importantly typical ways of interrogating “traditional understandings of time and space” (146). O’Kane Mara establishes a particularly convincing argument about the “search for global Irishness in Nuala O’Faolain” by applying and, at times challenging, Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes and mediascapes, as developed in his influential study Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), and by demonstrating how Faolain skillfully plays with the genre conventions of the memoir (Are You Somebody; Almost There), the novel (My Dream of You), and the literary biography (The Story of Chicago May). In the process, the author’s characters are shown to “create Irish identity by building narratives about other people and places, not by comparison with an Other, but rather by integrating global perspectives into an Irish framework” (76). Like the other critics who can be said to belong to this second group, O’Kane Mara stresses the importance of the “global community of Irish emigrants” (qtd. Shortt 114) for the construction of postnational Irish identities. The question raised at the end of Rees’s article of how contemporary Irish dramatists refashion dramatic conventions in order to accommodate postnational concerns to the genre which, in Ireland, “has become overly preoccupied with questions of national authenticity” (239) is also addressed in the two articles (by Paula Murphy and Damian Shortt) on Bolger’s monologue play High Germany, the literary Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 93 text discussed in the volume which most decidedly tries to actually establish and stage the often rather elusive concept of ‘postnational Irishness’. The contributions by Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Ulf Dantanus, which conclude the volume, can be said to shift the critical interest from processes of identity construction to different aspects of reconstructed Irish identities. Ulf Dantanus’s article traces continuities and convincingly demonstrates that “the supernatural and the spiritual, in their folkloric and religious manifestations,” which have been central elements of “the Irish dramatic imagination” ever since the Literary Renaissance, “still exercise considerable influence” (275), formally and structurally, on recent Irish plays by Brian Friel, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson and Frank McGuiness. In contrast, Irene Gilsenan Nordin’s Heideggerian ecocritical reading of Moya Cannon’s poetical work demonstrates that the traditional preoccupation with (especially rural) Irish landscapes, which Neil Corcoran and many others have shown to be “inseparable from matters of Irish [national] history” (244), gives way to a much “wider, earth-centred approach” in Cannon’s poetry and, thus, clearly marks the concern of Irish literature with questions of national identity as dated, and of minor significance. As such her article is probably the one with the most radically postnational argument in the whole volume. As is typical of such collections, some articles are more convincing and innovative than others. In some cases, the interaction between postnational or postmodern theory on the one hand, and the literary analyses and interpretations on the other, is rather more implicit than rigorously and coherently argued. Some readers will certainly miss a more systematic exploration of the main concept of the ‘postnational’, and a more courageous attempt at structuring the overall results by the editors. Still, the open form of assembling individual contributions to debate an important and topical issue will surely stimulate further explorations into a field of research which is highly relevant to different areas of European cultural and literary studies. Most importantly, this collection itself, by bringing together academics from various different European countries and the United States, is a remarkable testimony to the extraordinary and unique postnationalist drive of contemporary Irish cultural and literary criticism. Redefinitions of Irish Identity does not just provide a ‘postnationalist approach’ but is the result of a truly postnational research project. As such, it is indicative of one of the most typical features of the Irish Studies academic community today. Katharina Rennhak Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Bergische Universität Wuppertal