Preface

The image in Ireland has fretted in the shadow of language. At the beginning of a new century, however, it may be that the picture has caught up with the power of the word and the stage, as is evident in the emergence of an Irish national cinema. These were the considerations that lay behind the convening of "The Theater of Irish Cinema," a conference at Yale University, February 2001, co-sponsored by the Keough Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and Yale's Whitney Humanities Center. As the dates coincided with the birthday of James Joyce (February 2), it was appropriate that so much of this conference addressed that most cinematic of writers' relationship to film, focusing particularly on John Huston's remarkable adaptation of "The Dead" (1987).

Overhearing the many papers, panels and discussions, the editors of The Yale Journal of Criticism invited us to work up this issue by focusing on "The Dead" and the historical, cultural, and aesthetic concerns embedded in it. Each of the articles recruited here was greatly expanded and re-adjusted by its author. Bonnie Roos, who knew nothing of the conference, fortuitously offered YJC her reading of Joyce's story, while Paul Muldoon, who was very much with us, graciously supplied the poem that serves as our invocation. We want to thank the YJC editors for the generosity and intensity of their readings of the articles, and Pearl James for her advice as well as impeccable diligence in bringing this issue to term. While YJC could accommodate only a cross-section of the conference, chosen for the contrasting treatment of certain key interrelated themes, we want to recognize other members of our cohort who contributed to our remarkable interchange: Murray Biggs, Jeffrey Chown, Mary McGlynn, Diane Negra, and Margaret Spillane. Their individual presentations addressed recent theater, documentary, advertising and cinema, sometimes with an eye on America as well as Ireland. These topics and the perspectives they brought to our wide-ranging discussions are palpable throughout this issue.

All of the articles here were developed with an eye on the methodologies and approaches of new departures in Irish Studies. Not only has the image caught up with the word: criticism and theory have also been inflected with distinctive Irish voices. Gone are the days of "the Celtic note" when the Irish could be admired for their imaginative and creative energy while the more sober business of criticism was left to discerning intellects in the metropolitan center. By the same token, the illusion of direct, unmediated access to some timeless Irish archive, avoiding the messy engagement with contemporary Irish cultural debates, has also been dispelled. The critical eyes that now scan a far more varied Ireland belong not just to intellectuals and writers, but to activists and cultural workers of all stripes who know the consequences of ideas—as the Oscar-nominated actor Stephen Rea cogently points out in the interview which leads off this special issue. In Lady Morgan's pioneering romantic novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the urbane visitor to the west of Ireland in search of the noble savage finds out to his surprise that the natives are reading Rousseau, not to mention writing critical dissertations on Ossian.

The work of demystification continues in these pages, although now aimed at critical clichés that for years have relied on the all-too-convenient binaries of space versus time, modernity versus tradition, city versus country, cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, exile versus home, mobility versus memory—in a nutshell, Joyce versus Yeats. If the post-colonial turn has made any lasting contribution to Irish criticism, it is that all such categories look decidedly different from a peripheral or (post-) colonial perspective. It is not that familiar and universal ideas are set against a novel or unfamiliar Irish background; rather, figure and ground themselves merge in a contestation of critical space, as in a Jack Yeats painting or in the landscapes that infiltrate the action in some of the...