Category: Textual Analysis

Continued from Part 1

Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours strives for a very different style of pariah in the figure of freida, an Eve on the verge of leaving the school which has groomed her since birth to be either a companion wife, a concubine or a chastity, women who live alone and instil the order of the totalitarian society. The narrative circles around freida in a first person perspective as she navigates her final year, but what consumes most of the text is the interrogations or compatibility seminars with the young males of the Euro-Zone. Continue reading “Christ Rebooted While the Irish Dream of Electric Sleep: Role of Technology in the Formation of the Contemporary Irish Dystopia Hero. Part 2”

It’s “prevent the future”, that’s the way I put it. Not predict it, prevent it. (Bradbury)

While it may seem unorthodox, the raison d’etre for dystopia fiction is to deliver salvation. These worlds of compounded social failure are built to express one primary intention: instigating redemption. Continue reading “Christ Rebooted While the Irish Dream of Electric Sleep: Role of Technology in the Formation of the Contemporary Irish Dystopia Hero. Part 1”

Continued from Part 2

City of Bohane choses to focus on the midpoint of the twenty first century where society, unlike Kelly’s narrative, has become isolated from the rest of the nation and the outer world. Gang culture rules the city and the presence of bureaucracy and government seems minimalistic. Continue reading “Ireland in the Parallax and Paralysis of Time: How John Kelly and Kevin Barry’s future Dystopias conform and break from Flann O’Brien’s Imagined Tomorrow. Part 3”

Continued from Part 1

O’Brien’s future plays into the histrionics of its age, particularly the violence of large scale combat with its massacre, but by the time of John Kelly’s From Out of the City histrionics are of assassinations and terrorism. The texts narrative studies the build-up and fall out from the supposed assassination of the President of the United States on Irish shores. Our narrator, Monk retells the events of one man that have occurred during this time frame, Anton Schroeder. In focusing on this singular individual in the larger narrative events, Kelly is focusing the dystopia away from O’Brien’s individual in a national level dystopia and onto the individual in a globalised dystopia. Continue reading “Ireland in the Parallax and Paralysis of Time: How John Kelly and Kevin Barry’s future Dystopias conform and break from Flann O’Brien’s Imagined Tomorrow. Part 2”

Continued from Part 2

Flann O’Brien’s short story “Revenge on the English in the Year 2032!” written originally in Gaelic in nineteen thirty two, is a classic example of the post apocalypse dystopia. Violence is central to the actions of the text, we hear mention of a great war and the language barrier is used to incite revenge. There are no utopian positives, only Science Fiction dystopian negatives… Continue reading “The Uncertainty of Genre: Problems of Classifying Irish Speculative Dystopias within the National Narrative Part 3”

Continued from Part 1

Sterling’s creation of the Slipstream genre illustrates the slippage categories undergo. The vision of the Slipstream genre as a separate classification to Fantasy Fiction and Science Fiction where the writing “simply makes you feel very strange” was not a primal manifestation Sterling’s. Instead he was relabelling of a selection of titles that already had existed prior to his attempt to categorise them, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He simply wanted to rebrand their genre classification as Slipstream genre titles… Continue reading “The Uncertainty of Genre: Problems of Classifying Irish Speculative Dystopias within the National Narrative Part 2”

Walking into Hodges Figgis, a modern lexicon of the Irish narrative, you are faced with shelves of classification that have grouped identity into categories. These categories are considered genres, they exist to help the capitalist consumer in sifting through writers until they discover a mirrored desire, a world that vibrates to their emotional and intellectual tuning. Continue reading “The Uncertainty of Genre: Problems of Classifying Irish Speculative Dystopias within the National Narrative Part 1”