Showing papers in "Journal of Irish Studies in 1989"

Selected literary criticism of Louis MacNeice

Abstract: Louis MacNeice has often been read in the shadow of his Anglo-American friend Wystan Auden, because few of his own writings are in print. Alan Heuser has edited the present volume - the first of two annotated selections of the hitherto-uncollected prose - so that MacNeice can be seen in his true light. He emerges as a major Anglo-Irish writer: prolific, intelligent, and accessible. The book includes 56 articles of previously neglected prose criticism from 1930 to 1963 to set beside MacNeice's three full-length critical works: "Modern Poetry" (1938), "The Poetry of W.B. Yeats" (1941), and "Varieties of Parable" (1965). The selection - drawn from reviews, articles, drama criticism, and contributions to books not his own - excludes juvenilia but aims to keep a balance between earlier and later work. The subject-matter ranged widely, from the Classical writers to MacNeice's contemporaries.

Sectarianism: an optimistic prognosis

Abstract: I am very conscious of being an optimist about the future of Northern Ireland in the midst of many pessimists. Much of what I have written has been tinged by a basic respect for the decency of my fellow northerners, a respect grounded in my upbringing and personal experience. That in itself is not sufficient to generate optimism, given the record of the past twenty years. My old friend, Ed Cairns, concluded his book, Caught in Crossfire: Children and the Northern Ireland Conflict (1987), by looking at future prospects for peace in Northern Ireland and predicted, essentially, little or no change in the foreseeable future, arguing from the perspective of potential societal change via changes in the outlook of new generations of young people in the province, of which he found little evidence. My thesis is that significant change may be more dramatic and quicker than that if there is movement in critical aspects of the situation in Northern Ireland which are inextricably intertwined with the entire matrix of sectarianism and political and social stagnation. Essentially, I am arguing that, because of the interdependence of so many factors, a significant change could take place relatively quickly in some respects which would have profound consequences throughout the network of interlocking factors, like clearing a log-jam. When I began to write about Northern Ireland in the warm and distant balm of California in 1977, I was conscious that the book that I was writing, Northern Ireland: A Psychological Analysis (1980), was inevitably going to be a bit of an oddity both within and without psychology. Within psychology, it was not then as common as it is now to query the value of psychological experimentation as an infallible guide to understanding complex human situations, nor was it common to align oneself with sundry other disciplines and professions who had, by their lights and practices, something to offer to an understanding of such problems, albeit from very different perspectives. Without psychology, one was equally conscious of the suspicion which more established and conventional disciplines in such areas might view the intrusion of a jargon-wielding newcomer. In retrospect, neither fear was totally justified and my aim here is to pick up the threads of my previous look at sectarianism in Ulster after an interval of approximately a decade and try to project ahead. Thankfully, psychologists, and particularly social psychologists, have become much more conscious of the specific perils of decontextualised experimentation in recent years, and, to paraphrase the late Henri Tajfel, whose influential book Human Groups and Social Categories was published in 1981, theories in social psychology do not make any sense unless we relate