engleski

Counter-memory in Brian Friel's Plays: Conflicting Identities and History-Making

COUNTER-MEMORY IN BRIAN FRIEL'S PLAYS: CONFLICTING IDENTITIES AND HISTORY-MAKING This paper sets out to explore various relations between the representation of conflicting identities, memory and history-making in Brian Friel's plays and, therefore, seeks to contribute to the recent debates about the role of memory in his works (e.g. Roche 2006 ; Tracy 2007 ; Crowley 2008 ; Lin 2010). It will explore the dialectics between individual and collective memories in the representation of history and its formative role in the construction of identity, bearing in mind that collective memory is a contingent and highly contested practice. A new perspective which this paper proposes is to ground the analysis of Friel’s plays in Foucault's notion of history, in particular, to draw on his distinction between «historical sense/sense historique» and «the sense of history/sense de l'histoire» (M. Roth The Ironist's Cage, 1995). The main argument of this paper is that when applied to some of Friel's plays this distinction provides a useful analytical tool to investigate the complex dichotomy present/past within an essentially (post)colonial semantic space and to highlight the ambivalences in the multi-layered mapping of «the self» in relation to «the otherness», which in Friel's plays sometimes generates conflicting identities. History making in Friel's plays will be analysed in relation to the modalities of counter-memory, as Foucault defines it, «a transformation of history into a totally different form of time». Although it will be mostly focused on Making History and Translations my paper will also refer comparatively to the role of memory and different mnemonic modes in some other Friel's plays. PANEL/SEMINAR PROPOSAL by Irena Grubica Language, Memory, Symbolism: Reconciling Conflicting Identities in Irish Literature Taking into consideration the elusive nature of the term identity this panel aims to highlight different examples of conflicting identities ranging from individual, social/religious to collective and their several formative aspects related to the dynamics of language, memory and symbolism. All papers deal with contested representation and/or self-representation of identity in the works of different Irish writers situated within particular historical/cultural contexts featuring the complexities of modernity.

Brian Friel; memory; history; culture; identity

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