Reviews for Irish Writers on Writing (Writer's World Series)

The average rating for Irish Writers on Writing (Writer's World Series) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-13 00:00:00 Shaynoah Sharp To my habitually dislike for anthologies, this one achieves something different; although, it is exhausting and overwhelming in how much the reader needs to process. Eavan Bolan does something spectacular in trying to anthologize what comes to define the Irish literary tradition in opposition to an Irish cannon as she states in her introduction. The selection is brief but rich in content. The invite to explore writers that one encounters for the first time. That is, Boland balances the readings from among the usual suspects to lesser known writers that have contributed to define and redefine the Irish literary tradition.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-31 00:00:00 Lawrence Rankin I was assigned this collection of essays in college, didn't understand it then, but recognized that they were important so now so many years later tried again. While they were still high way high academic headie writing (alot of adding parenthesis words like (un)poststructural type thing) from what I was able to understand I found the ideas and ways of writing to have very interesting and important perspectives. The essays takes major political times or moments of great loss (South Africa apartheid, Vietnam war, HIV/AIDS, Jim Crow South, the failure of Communism, and many others) and then uses the psychology, art therapy, and psychoanalytic ideas about grief and mourning to understand them think about loss as constituting social, political, and aesthetic relations. The thereby overcame the conventional understanding that "loss" belongs to a purely psychological or psychoanalytic discourse. Many of the essays I preferred tried find ways in which Loss can create new opportunities and modes of expression rather than remaining a source of unresolved melancholy. What emerges from the ashes and how it is different/marked by them. It is not always positive or what is expected but it becomes a condition, the writers show, through which life after catastrophic events are shaped by. Some of the essays I particularly liked were: -Black Mo'nin by Fred Moten -Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Mark Sanders - Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Villashini Coopan -Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians by Ann Cvetkovich -Resisting Left Melancholia by Wendy Brown