1,992 research outputs found
Power in modernity: a discussion among Mark Haugaard, Clarissa Hayward, and Jonathan G. Heaney of Power in Modernity: agency relations and the creative destruction of the King’s two bodies, by Isaac Ariail Reed, with a reply by Isaac Reed
No full textIn this article, Haugaard, Hayward and Heaney discuss Reed’s Power in Modernity, and the author replies. The exchanges centres on the question of whether power relations should be theorized via Reed’s concepts of rector, actor, other, and project, and on the roles of performance agency in power’s exercise. The contributors discuss sseveral examples of political crises in modernity, including the storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021
Northern Irish Elegy
Get PDFThis thesis proposes that Northern Irish elegy is a distinctive genre of contemporary poetry, which has developed during the years of the Troubles, and has continued to be adapted and defined during the current peace process. It argues that the practice of writing elegy for the losses of the Troubles has established a poetic mode in which Northern Irish poets have continued to work through losses of a more universal kind. This thesis explores the contention that elegy has a clear social and political function, providing a way in which to explore some of the losses experienced by a community over the past half-century, and helping to suggest ideas of consolation.
Part one focuses on three first generation Northern Irish elegists: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. Heaney is considered in a chapter which takes in a poetic career, through which might be traced the development of Northern Irish elegy. Following this are two highly focused studies of the elegies of Longley and Mahon. The place of artifice in elegy is considered in relation to Longley's Troubles elegies, while Mahon’s irony is discussed in relation to his elegiac need for community.
Part two looks at a second generation, represented by Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon. Carson's elegies for Belfast are read in a discussion of the destruction and reconstruction that occurs during the process of remembering. This study explores the idea that elegies might also be written for places and temporal spaces. Carson's interest in poetic form is shown to be intricately related to his elegiac practice. The chapter on Muldoon surveys a career which has interrogated the connections between art and suffering. Muldoon raises questions of poetic responsibility, and also challenges poetry itself, on a formal and linguistic level. As his career develops, he includes not only the local threats of Troubles violence within his elegies, but also the global threats of disease, violence and terror.
Part three starts with Medbh McGuckian, whose work is discussed in relation to the third generation poets Sinead Morrissey, Leontia Flynn and Colette Bryce. As McGuckian's poetry is perhaps the least immediately accessible of all the poetry covered here, the thesis considers ways in which her work might be read, before her poems are discussed as Northern Irish elegies. Following this are readings of poems from Morrissey, Flynn and Bryce, noting ways in which this generation works to develop the genre of elegy, working in the same broad themes that have been charted throughout this thesis
Creation from conflict: The Great War in Irish poetry
Get PDFThis thesis explores the impact of the First World War on the imaginations of six poets - W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley - all of whom have written in wartime: Graves in the Great War, Yeats in the Great War, the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War, MacNeice in the Second World War, Mahon, Longley and Heaney in the Northern Ireland Troubles. The thesis locates affinities between these poets in their response to violence, and compares the ways in which they have imaginatively appropriated the images and events of the Great War to facilitate that response. Part I of this study begins by outlining the historical background to Irish participation in the Great War, and considers some of the issues involved in the Irish cultural response to the war which were engendered by the complex domestic politics in Ireland between 1914 and 1918. Chapters two to four constitute a more detailed exploration of these issues as manifested in the work of Yeats, Graves and MacNeice. In the cases of Yeats and MacNeice, their engagement with the subject of the Great War is re-evaluated in order to illuminate repressed or complex areas of Irish history and culture, and to shed new light on their influence on recent Northern Irish poetry. Consideration of Robert Graves's response to the Great War serves to illustrate the ways in which a high-profile association with the War can obscure relations to an Irish or Anglo-Irish tradition. The thesis discusses ways in which these poets have been misrepresented, and considers how far the misrepresentation can be attributed to the contrasting interpretations of the Great War in England and Ireland, and to versions of literary history based upon these interpretations. The second part of the study concentrates on contemporary Northern Irish poetry. Chapter five considers problems pertinent to Northern Ireland in relation to the subject of the Great War by looking at the ways in which remembrance of the war, politicized in order to bolster mythologies of history, reverberates in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles. The final three chapters outline the difficulties encountered by Northern Irish poets Mahon, Heaney and Longley, under pressure to respond to the Troubles, and relate these difficulties to those encountered by the Great War soldier poets. The chapters explore the extent to which the fascination of these three poets with the Great War illuminates their aesthetic strategies, revises aspects of Irish political and cultural history, offers a way of responding to the violence in Northern Ireland, and has determined critical responses to their work. The thesis is concerned with ways in which the Great War has been imagined in Irish writing. It also shows how and why those imaginings have struggled with, and revised aspects of, reductive mythologies of history and competing versions of the literary canon
Incar-Nations: Emotional States and Embodied Nations under Covid-19
No full textRecent work in the political sociology of emotions (Berezin, 2002; Holmes, 2004; Demertzis, 2013, 2020; Heaney, 2019; Heaney & Flam, 2013) has begun to take the relationship between the nation-state and emotion much more seriously. Indeed, this relationship has been thrown into more sharp relief under Covid-19 where, far from the ‘decline’ narratives of just a few years ago, state power, and its intersections with nationalism, and emotion have become perhaps the defining features of the current political conjuncture. The pandemic reasserts and makes visible the extent and reach of state power, and the fundamentals of what the state/citizen relation is founded upon: the sacrifice of liberty for the promise of protection. The crisis simplifies the dominant emotional regimes operating within the nation-state, and shows how both the ‘left hand’ (caring, giving) and the ‘right hand’ (punishing, taking) of the state works on and through the emotions in a time of crisis. In this paper I wish to reflect on this ‘emotional state’ and show how a more embodied conception of nationalism can help us to understand the emotional basis of state power and state legitimacy. This perspective aims to combine key insights from the sociology of emotions, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of embodiment, whilst also accounting for the key role of the (emotional) state in the attempt to (de)legitimize specific versions of nationness within the polity. The case of Ireland and the Irish State’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic will be used to illuminate key points
Embodied Nationalism: Nations, States, Emotions
No full textWhile theoretical talk of globalization and cosmopolitanism was a significant feature of the late 20th century, the beginnings of this century have and continue to be dominated by a resurgence in nationalism and nationalist discourse. This has taken a multitude of forms, and is evident in both popular and political registers. This resurgence has been mirrored in academic work, from across the social sciences, including political sociology (e.g. Bonikowski, 2016; Malešević, 2019), and the emergent political sociology of emotions (Berezin, 2002; Scheff, 2000; Holmes, 2004; Demertzis, 2013; Heaney & Flam, 2013). Here, a new generation of scholars have reopened the question, going beyond the once-dominant top down ‘nationalism as ideology’ approaches to consider more bottom-up perspectives that characterize nationalism as a form of practice (Brubaker, 2004), combining both cognitive and affective orientations to the social world, and involving a more tacit and everyday forms of acculturation and reproduction (Fox & Miller-Idriss, 2008). In this paper I wish to address the endurance and tenacity of nationalism through the development of a concept of ‘embodied nationalism’. This perspective, which draws on previous work (Heaney, 2013), aims to combine key positions on embodiment (a literature that is somewhat silent on the notion of nations), and the sociology of emotions, whilst also accounting for the key role of the (emotional) state in the attempt to (de)legitimize specific versions of nationness within the polity. The case of Ireland will be used to illuminate key point
Affective Transactions: Rethinking Emotion, Power & Habitus from a Processual Perspective
No full textThis paper will address a number of current debates within social theory and the sociology of emotions concerning the concepts of affect, emotion, and habitus from the perspective of processual sociology. My aim is to offer and defend a dispositional theory of social practice, based on a somewhat-reframed conceptualization of the habitus, which draws on and critiques not only the work of Bourdieu and Elias, but also the process ontology of Alfred North Whitehead. This question, at its most general, is concerned especially with the constitution of ‘emotional habitus’, and the relationship between emotions and power (Heaney, 2011). It is approached from a distinct theoretical perspective, here called process-relational realism (Heaney, forthcoming). This suggests that the individual body, engaged in the process of relational becoming, is constituted and re-constituted via ongoing and iterative 'affective transactions' with the (social, cultural, and natural) environment. Such transactions give rise to patterns in emotional practice, which relate to power in a variety of ways, and are historically, structurally, and culturally variable; that the socially-embedded, embodied individual’s affective transactions are mediated via a specific, normative and transformable affective or emotional regimes. Drawing on and contributing to recent work on these issues (Burkitt, 2014, Wetherell, 2012, von Scheve, 2017, Abbott, 2016), I hope to demonstrate and defend the utility of the 'process world view' for rethinking and re-integrating these concepts, not only at the level of theoretical abstraction but also for the design of concrete empirical research
Emotional States and Embodied Nations: Emotions and State Power under Covid-19 in Ireland
No full textRecent work in the political sociology of emotions (Berezin, 2002; Holmes, 2004; Demertzis, 2013, 2020; Heaney, 2019; Heaney & Flam, 2013; Pens & Sauer, 2020; Pykett, Jupp and Smith, 2017) has begun to take the relationship between the nation-state and emotion more seriously. Indeed, this relationship has been thrown into sharp relief under Covid-19 where, far from the ‘decline’ narratives of recent decades, state power, and its intersections with nationalism, and emotion, have become perhaps the defining features of the current political conjuncture. The pandemic reasserts and makes visible the extent and reach of state power, and the fundamentals of what the state/citizen relation is founded upon: the sacrifice of liberty for the promise of protection. The crisis also simplifies the dominant emotional regimes operating within the nation-state, and shows how both the ‘left hand’ (caring, giving) and the ‘right hand’ (punishing, taking) of the state works on and through the emotions in a time of crisis. In this paper I wish to reflect on this ‘emotional state’ in action, and show how a more embodied conception of nationalism can help us to understand the emotional basis of state power and state legitimacy. This perspective aims to combine key insights from the sociology of emotions, cognitive sociology, and the sociology of embodiment, whilst also accounting for the key role of the (emotional) state in the attempt to (de)legitimize specific versions of (embodied) nationalism and (emotional) citizenship within the polity. The case of Ireland and the Irish State’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic will be used to illuminate key points
Emotion as Power: Capital and Strategy in the Field of Power
No full textRecent work across the social sciences have converged on the issue of emotion. In the vanguard of these advances has been the sociology of emotions, broadly defined, which, in various guises – structural, cultural, critical, social psychological, positivist and so on – has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the emotional dimensions of social life, and its centrality to the explanation and understanding of social action. In this paper, and building on previous work (Heaney, 2011), I wish to make a contribution to an increasingly important interdisciplinary sub-field – the political sociology of emotion – and to reconsider and explain the increasingly important role of emotional practice, understood as the strategic deployment of emotional capital, in contemporary party politics
R v G and R [2003] UKHL 50, House of Lords
No full textEssential Cases: Criminal Law provides a bridge between course textbooks and key case judgments. This case document summarizes the facts and decision in R v G and R [2003] UKHL 50, House of Lords. The document also included supporting commentary from author Jonathan Herring.</p
Stonewall Jackson : gudabenådad general
No full textDiscussion of Swedish author Frans G. Bengtsson's classic 1920s essay on Confederate general Thomas Jonathan Jackson
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