Seamus Heaney and the poetic(s) of violence (Northern Ireland)

"Seamus Heaney and the Poetic(s) of Violence" reconsiders the key importance of violence as an aesthetic, political, and cultural category in Heaney's poetry and translations. This dissertation begins by asking how the relation between violence, literature, and nationalism might be understood in the Irish postcolonial context. Taking Heaney's work as the primary focus of my research, I detail how specific explosions of postcolonial violence as well as broader cultural manifestations and perceptions of violence have motivated and informed some of the key aesthetic developments and major projects in this poet's career. By examining a wide range of representations from his oeuvre, I detail Heaney's deft negotiation of the related problems of violence and decolonization through a complex and compelling poetic of violence.; Specifically, I examine Heaney's conception and development of the lyric as a field of force, his employment of the pastoral as an anticolonial mode of resistance, and his translations of canonical texts as acts of counter violence carried out at the level of the vernacular and form. Through close readings of Heaney's verse, translations, prose, journalism, I demonstrate how many of his writings can be profitably read as part of an ongoing attempt to intervene textually in a Northern Irish culture of violence. I also argue that Heaney's often conflicted, occasionally uneven, and frequently brilliant attempts to outface violence through writing have necessitated a remarkable degree of experimentation and adaptation at the level of form, language, and genre. By bringing into interactive and critical focus a study of poetics and postcolonial criticism, I attempt to demonstrate that a particular set of violent conditions and perceptions (which are endemic to postcolonial situations) have, to a remarkable degree, informed Heaney's highly innovative transformations of inherited cultural materials. In short, I argue for Heaney's poetic of violence as a poetically significant and socio-politically efficacious means of countering, containing, and redressing various forms of violence within the Irish (post)colonial context.