The Tiger-event: The literature of a global Ireland
Abstract
My dissertation argues that the Celtic Tiger is vital for both discourses on the past, present, and future of Irish identity. I argue the movements and effects of global capital are present in two dominant cultural motifs: possibility and newness. The popular symbolic terms "possibility" and "newness" are symptomatic of a temporal colonization: anything that can be thought of as possible is already actualized in the neoliberal present, and the new is caught on a border between the old and the really new, a space in which even innovation is considered a pre-ordained and pre-figured result. Thus newness becomes nowness, and our ideas of both past and future are irrevocably distorted as they are manufactured to fit within an ever-expansive neoliberal present. These symptoms of "free market futurism" become visible in Irish literature through extended examinations of authenticity, consumerism, newness, the possibility, speculation, futurism, risk, and a constant threat of collapse that harrows the post-boom landscape of Ireland.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Marzec, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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