Irish literatures in debt (John Mitchel, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Pat Sheeran)

The dissertation examines selected works of Irish literature through the concept of debt. As a conceptual tool, debt is intended as a way to read Irish literary history within the framework of postcolonial literary studies on the one hand and globalization studies on the other—debt articulates the many points of contact between the postcolonial and the global. Focusing on the Irish uses of the concept of debt, from the literature of the Famine years in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence in the 1990s of the “Celtic Tiger,” reveals a conceptual genealogy of debt that follows Ireland's national history, from colony to Republic to European member-state. The authors I examine—John Mitchel, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Pat Sheeran—all share an at times explicit, at others implicit, interest in literary figurations of debt. These debt-images, I argue, conjure different versions of the Irish people, different versions of an ideal national public. Linking theories of nationalism to the public debt, to the national debt and to civic finance, I work toward a revision of current theories of colonial and postcolonial nationalism in the shadow of global economic integration.; Debt-images in these texts manifest themselves in the form of highly elaborated scenes of monetary transactions, and in scenes of municipal or national bureaucratic administration. In a series of close readings of these moments, debt emerges as their common element and as their often obscured animating force. That force is always represented as phantasmal and fantastic; debt acts as a kind of ghostly state magic, conjuring publics, conjuring the nation. The debts invoked by these authors look beyond a narrowly economic epistemology of debt—they consistently question the seeming immutability of economic debt, always reading it back into the multiple social, metaphorical, and ethical registers that debt as a concept cannot help but occupy. The genealogy of debt that emerges from my readings of specifically Irish texts, I argue, can be generalized as a feature of postcolonial literary production. Reading for debt furthers an understanding of contemporary world literatures produced in the financial frenzy of neoliberal globalization.