Abstract
This chapter begins with a discussion of Ernest Renan’s influential 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its argument for the importance of national forgetting to the peace and unity of a nation-state, and then focuses on one particular literary case study, Joyce’s treatments of these issues in Ulysses. The second half of this chapter continues pursuing the complex realities of national “memory” and the nation-state—by considering the role of “place” and “space” in Irish memory and the Irish national imaginary through a series of controversies about the nature of “Irishness” and the Irish nation, from the eighteenth century to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.
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- 1.
Renan is, however, a controversial figure in postcolonial studies—for, like many of his contemporaries, he defended colonialism as a laudable institution bringing civilization to the darker races, arguing that “The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races, by the superior races, is part of the providential order of things for humanity”: see, for example, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (Granta 2001), pp. 418–19; and Robert Young , Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 69.
- 2.
Vincent J. Cheng, Inauthentic : The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), especially pp. 46–61. The following two pages are adapted from this material.
- 3.
The previous paragraph was partly adapted from various passages in Joyce, Race, and Empire , pp. 198–200.
- 4.
The full text can be found easily—for example, at www.peaceaccords.nd.edu/provision/citizenship-reform-northern-ireland-good-friday-agreement
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Cheng, V.J. (2018). The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses. In: Amnesia and the Nation. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71818-7_3
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