Abstract
The introduction proposes that approaches from memory studies can be used to show how a poet can shape and mediate shared memory and can also provide fresh insights into Heaney’s late poetry. A working definition of cultural memory is outlined and key figures and concepts from the field of memory studies are identified. The premise of this book is that transnational approaches to memory studies are the most productive for understanding how the personal, familial, regional, national and global memories created by Heaney can ‘travel’ across and beyond borders and time periods, oscillating between these different frames of memory. The introduction also establishes why Heaney should be considered in a transnational literary sphere.
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Notes
- 1.
Lower House of Irish parliament.
- 2.
‘Speech by an Taoiseach, Mr. Enda Kenny T.D. Seamus Heaney Tribute in the Dail on the 24th September 2013 5:30 pm,’ Department of the Taoiseach Website, Accessed 11 November, 2016, http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/News/Taoiseach’s_Speeches/Speech_by_An_Taoiseach_Mr_Enda_Kenny_T_D_Seamus_Heaney_Tribute_in_the_Dail_on_the_24th_September_2013_5_30pm.html
- 3.
Seamus Deane, ‘The Famous Seamus,’ The New Yorker, March 20, 2000, 54.
- 4.
The Arts Council reports that ‘if only living poets are included and a more restrictive definition of “contemporary” is applied, Heaney emerges as taking nearly two-thirds of all bookshop sales within the period.’ Ann Bridgwood and John Hampson, ‘Executive Summary – Rhyme and Reason: Developing Contemporary Poetry,’ (London: Arts Council of England, 2000).
- 5.
Edna Longley, Poetry and Posterity (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), 281.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Karl Miller, Seamus Heaney in Conversation with Karl Miller (London: Between the Lines, 2000).
- 8.
Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Media and Cultural Memory (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), EBSCO ebook, 2.
- 9.
Ibid., 4.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 10.
- 12.
Astrid Erll, ‘Travelling Memory,’ Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 7, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570
- 13.
Ibid., 7.
- 14.
Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Introduction: Memory and the Nation – Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations,’ Social Science History 22, no. 4 (1998):379, doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200017880
- 15.
Sara McDowell, ‘Armalite, the Ballot Box and Memorialization: Sinn Féin and the State in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland,’ The Round Table 96, no. 393 (2007): 727, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00358530701635306
- 16.
Erll, ‘Travelling Memory,’ 8.
- 17.
Ibid., 12.
- 18.
Ibid., 4.
- 19.
Ibid., 5.
- 20.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), Kindle edition, 4.
- 21.
Ibid., 16.
- 22.
Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’ The Honest Ulsterman 50 (1975): 183.
- 23.
David-Antoine Williams, Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 153.
- 24.
A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, ‘A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory,’ in The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, ed. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), ProQuest ebook.
- 25.
Ibid., 43.
- 26.
Ann Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,’ Poetics Today 25, no. 2 (2004): 383, doi:https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-2-361
- 27.
Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 89.
- 28.
Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 33.
- 29.
Ibid., 36.
- 30.
Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments,’ 383.
- 31.
Ibid., 383.
- 32.
Astrid Erll, ‘Traumatic Pasts, Literary Afterlives, and Transcultural Memory: New Directions of Literary and Media Memory Studies,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 3 (2011): 3, doi:https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v3i0.7186
- 33.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Writer and Righter: Fourth IHRC Annual Human Rights Lecture,’ ed. Irish Human Rights Commission (Dublin: Irish Human Rights Commission, 2009), 8, https://www.ihrec.ie/app/uploads/download/pdf/wrighter_and_righter.pdf
- 34.
Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xi.
- 35.
Ibid., 39.
- 36.
Ibid., 13.
- 37.
Ibid., 3.
- 38.
Ibid., 10.
- 39.
Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 12.
- 40.
Ibid., 12–3.
- 41.
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 4.
- 42.
Ibid., 1.
- 43.
Ibid., 2–3.
- 44.
Ibid., 3.
- 45.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Something to Write Home About,’ Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 53.
- 46.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York; London: WW Norton, 2006), Kindle edition, Introduction.
- 47.
In the twenty-first century the poem inspired the Amnesty Ambassador of Conscience Award, won by Vaclav Havel (2003), Nelson Mandela (2006), Aung San Suu Kyi (2009), Malala Yousafzai (2013) and Ai Weiwei (2015).
- 48.
Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016). Kindle edition, 230.
- 49.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Impact of Translation,’ The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), Kindle edition.
- 50.
Seamus Heaney, ‘Sounding Lines: The Art of Translating Poetry,’ in Critical Views: Essays on the Humanities and the Arts, ed. Theresa Stojkov (Berkley: The Townsend Centre for the Humanities, 2011), 302.
- 51.
Rachel Falconer, ‘Heaney and Virgil’s Underworld Journey,’ in Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses ed. Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh & Helen Eastman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019),200.
- 52.
Neil Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, 1998, 44.
- 53.
Heaney, ‘Something to Write Home About,’ 62.
- 54.
Richard Rankin Russel, Seamus Heaney’s Regions,
- 55.
Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), Kindle edition, 352.
- 56.
Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments,’ 361.
- 57.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), Introduction, Kindle edition.
- 58.
Ibid.
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Piavanini, J. (2020). Introduction. In: Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46927-6_1
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