With her new book, Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, Professor of English Mary McGlynn takes a fresh look at the textual strategies and syntactical patterns used by contemporary Irish authors to represent Ireland during the Celtic Tiger and the global recession that followed in 2008.
“At the time, there was a huge outcry that the artworld, and the literary world in particular, was not responding to or engaging with this economic reality. But it always seemed to me that there were Irish novels doing that work. Maybe they weren’t engaging with issues like inequality and overconsumption directly, but they were definitely thinking about them,” McGlynn said.
As she read the novels that appear in the book by authors like Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn noticed that there were ways in which they seemed to be rejecting realist representations by using phrases that were quite literally ungrammatical.
“I noticed some stylistic features that were reminiscent of internet memes. You know, phrases like “all the feels,” “I can’t even” or ‘I can haz Cheezburger,’ were emerging online. Likewise, the culture of Irish novel writing during this time seemed to be embracing fragments as well. In the book, I call them “ungrammatical techniques.”
McGlynn goes on to argue that such unconventional verb tenses, run on sentences, and syntactical fragments reflect a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility. “The fact that there is no stable sense of agency in the language itself seems to me obviously linked to the same sense of economic instability. I know when you have a hammer, everything can seem like a nail, but it all aligned in an amazing way. The book is about a way of reading that allows Irish fiction to reveal its true political and cultural range.”
Buy Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction here.
