Search results
Ireland in the early 1980s who backed the Catholic Church’s 9780719075636_4_001.qxd 6 16/2/09 9:23 AM Page 6 Contexts opposition to abortion sought to prevent the Irish Constitution ever legalising the procedure. They proposed an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the foetus ‘the right to life’. Their proposals were put to a referendum in September 1983, and won the day; of the 50 per cent of the electorate who voted, just over 42,500 more people supported the amendment than opposed it. The same year witnessed Senator David Norris’s attempt to
open, access to corrective reading. Furthermore, 11/23 of these texts can be classified as religious in focus, suggesting concerns that perhaps respond to the restrictions of Arundel’s Constitutions. Published in 1409, the Constitutions are often credited with creating a perilous climate for writers, translators, and readers of devotional material, because of concerns about being affiliated with Wycliffitism.42 While critical discussion in recent years has nuanced long-standing perceptions about the repressive influence of the Constitutions, certainly the discourse
concerning the social, political, and economic formations of the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century. 5 Examining newspaper representations of settler colonial life in Australia, it reveals the surprising and imaginative ways that settlers both identified with and rejected the antipodean mythologies of the southern hemisphere. With a focus on the three decades following the discovery of gold in Australia (1851), the passing of the Australian Constitutions Act (1850), and the achievement of responsible government (1855–56), the chapter’s analysis of newspaper
had been brokered, soon followed by a similar cessation of violence on the part of the loyalists. In spite of numerous difficulties a fragile peace has been established thanks to the constitutional arrangements contained in the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement, opening in Seamus Heaney’s words ‘a space – and not just in the political arena but in the first level of each person’s consciousness – a space where hope can grow’.5 In the wake of the Agreement, Irish people were asked to vote in a referendum to modify the two articles of the Constitution which laid claim
(March 1987), p. 197. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 5. Divorce legislation in Ireland was prohibited by the Constitution of 1937. A referendum seeking to amend this position was decisively defeated in 1986, but in 1995 a narrow majority voted to permit divorce for couples that had lived apart for four years. The Constitution’s prohibition on abortion was challenged by referendum in 1983 but, while the amendment was enacted, the absence of appropriate regulations has made the practical effects limited. The
challenge of his investigation depends heavily therefore on his portrayal of the new leaders, their style of politics and, in particular, on the viability of the class and gender constitution of the reformed ruling group. In The Trouble with Nigeria, the pamphlet which Achebe wrote as an injunction to Nigeria just before the 1983 election scandal that ended in military takeover, light is shed on the political conception behind Anthills of the Savannah. ‘The trouble with Nigeria’, as Achebe cites the popular expression in that text, is, quite bluntly, the ‘indiscipline’ of
sense of that which appears; one never grasps the world itself, even if it must be presupposed as the receding and withdrawing condition of experience. The real would be such that it always exceeded any inscribing mark or determination. One might say that the very constitution of the world as sustainable, or as remaining the same through time, generates a presupposed ‘we’ and a future that could not be constrained or determined by the very humanity that it implies: this is why Derrida, discussing Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’, follows Husserl in arguing that
occlude lines of connection which do not move from centre to margin, or from margin to centre. It ignores the fact that in some contexts the margins may occupy central positions: as W. N. Herbert notes in his ‘Mappamundi’ – a poetic map of the world: ‘Ireland’s/bin shuftit tae London, whaur/oafficis o thi Poetry Sock occupeh fehv/squerr mile’ (O’Rourke 1994: 146). Challenges to an unhelpful margins/centre binarism and to the centripetal forces of metropolitan culture have also emerged in new questions about the constitution of Englishness itself – as demonstrated most
can consequently be seen as another indication of a postnationalist perspective. The 1937 Irish constitution emphasises the role of the family in the state-building project, producing an idealised picture of family life that 9780719075636_4_012.qxd 16/2/09 9:28 AM Page 223 Postnationalism in the Irish novel 223 Irish writers have struggled to shatter ever since. In the first chapter of What Are You Like? Enright describes family as very much a matter of coincidence and a solution to practical problems. Maria and her twin sister are taken out of their dead
, that of Misra, because it signifies familiarity and a local, specific loyalty, becomes the more dear and desirable (and also, as Askar grows older, the more repressed). The mother, even if adoptive, the nation, even if divided, signify a joyous plenitude of physical feeling and deferred desire (therefore, literalisation). However, in the space of lack opened up by Askar’s process of maturing, as he grows further away from Misra, alternative symbolic rallying points are located: here the alternative strategy of figuration comes into its own. His life reads a tale of self-constitution