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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
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Public Works - Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Hardcover)
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Public Works - Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Hardcover)
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In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the
Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship between
Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material culture of
the modern state known colloquially as "public utilities" or
"water, gas, and electricity." The water tap, the toilet, the gas
jet, and the electrical light switch: these are all sites, in Irish
modernism, of unexpected literary and linguistic intensities that
burst through the routines of everyday life, defamiliarizing and
reconceptualizing that which we might not normally consider worthy
of literary attention. Such public utilities-material networks of
power and provision, submission and entitlement-are taken up in
Irish modernism not only as a nexus of anxieties about modern life,
but also as a focal point for the hopes held out for the
postcolonial Irish Free State. Public utilities figure a normative
and utopian standard of modernity and modernization; they embody in
Irish modernism and in other postcolonial literatures an ideal for
the postcolonial state; and they figure a continuity between the
material networks of the modern state and the abstract ideals of
revolutionary republicanism (liberty, equality, and brotherhood).
They define a new territory of contestation within the discourses
of civil and human rights. Moreover, public utilities influence the
formal qualities of both Irish modernist and postcolonial
literature. In analyses of literary works by James Joyce, Flann
O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, and
Patrick Chamoiseau, Rubenstein asks us to think about the
industrial networks of the twentieth century alongside
self-consciously "national" literary works and to understand them
as different but inherently related forms of public works. In doing
so his book maps thematic and formal relationships between national
infrastructure and national literature, revealing an intimate
dialogue between the nation's literary arts and the state's
engineering cultures.
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