Irish Pages LTD

Back MatterSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006)Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057462 .

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THE THIRD ANNUAL

IRISH PAGES LECTURE in association with Critical Voices 3 and the Royal Irish Academy

"THE DROWNING SIGNAL: SELF IN THE INFORMATION AGE"

will be delivered by

Sven Birkerts

with an introduction by

Seamus Heaney

on Thursday, 14 December at 7.30 pm The Royal Irish Academy

19 Dawson Street, Dublin

One ofAmerica's leading prose writers, Sven Birkerts is the author of six books, including The

Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber, 1994), Readings

(Graywolf, 1999) and My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time

(Viking, 2002). He is Editor of Agni and teaches writing at Harvard University.

Places are limited and prior booking is recommended. Further information may be found on the

Critical Voices website (www.criticalvoices.ie). Free bookings may be made online through the

Royal Irish Academy website (www.ria.ie/events calendar).

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AMONG OUR CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Agee / Gary Allen ' Neal Ascherson Eileen Battersby ' Sven Birkerts

Wendell Berry / John Burnside / Rachel Giese Brown / Angus Calder /Moya Cannon / Ciaran Carson / Harry Clifton / Patricia Craig / Andrew Crumey / Gerald Dawe / Michael Davitt / John F. Deane / Greg Delanty / Michael Donhauser

Hans Magnus Enzensberger / Brian Friel / John Gray / Eamon Grennan / Michael

Hamburger Francis Harvey / Seamus Heaney i Kathleen Jamie / Julia Kristeva / Helen Lewis , Michael Longley / Sean Lysaght / Deirdre Madden / Sarah Maguire

Fred Marchant / Enda McDonagh ' Medbh McGuckian / Askold Melnyczuk / Samuel Menashe 'John Minmhan / Zakaria Mohammed ' Alfonso Monreal / John Montague / Paul Muldoon / Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill / Micheil 6 Conghaile / Bernard O' Donoghue Liam 6 Muirthile / Cathal 6 Searcaigh / Tom Paulin / Sir Martin Rees ' Tim Robinson Gabriel Rosenstock / Raoul Schrott / Paul Seawright / W.G. Sebald ' Gerard Smyth

' Gary Snyder ' Susan Sontag / William Trevor /

Damel Tobin Michael Viney Casey Walker / Hans van de Waarsenburg / Bruce

Weigl / Charles Wright and many others

BACK ISSUES

Inaugural Issue- Belfast in Europe (Vol 1, No 1) The Justice Issue (Vol 1, No 2) Empire (Vol 2, No 1)

The Earth Issue (Vol 2, No 2), The Literary World (Vol 2, No 3)

IRISH PAGES is printed on Challenger offset paper, thread-sewn, and set in

Monotype Perpetua to a design by Keith Connolly of Tonic Design

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IRISH PAGES is a Belfast journal combining Irish, European and international

perspectives. It seeks to create a novel literary space in the North adequate to the

unfolding cultural potential of the new political dispensation. The magazine is

cognisant of the need to reflect in its pages the various meshed levels of human relations: the regional (Ulster), the national (Britain and Ireland), the continental

(Europe), and the global.

Traditionally the hot element in art, the powerful unresolved experience that was

early and local, could only be dealt with, expressed and therefore exorcised, by

going away from Ireland. Hence the association of cities like London and Paris with

detachment, the forming of an object, the cold element in art. Until lately, Ireland was also associated with innocence, elsewhere with experience. One travelled, not

just to gain detachment, but to grow up. Now there are no borders, no seas to cross between innocence and experience - or indeed between the hot and cold elements in art. The social world of Ireland, at least in its southern part, is as wide as elsewhere. Whether that resolves the deeper conflicts, the need to leave, only the

coming decades will reveal.

Coming back, over the years, from Africa, Asia and various European countries, I have grown used to being labelled exotic - in this case meaning cosmopolitan. Fortunately for me, Irish society is evolving in the direction of the cosmopolitan, which may mark an end to the shouting match between those who go away and are sneered at as writers of travelogue, and those who stay home and are sneered at as

purveyors of authentic Gaelic misery, whether of the Northern or Southern

varieties, for consumption in the Irish Studies departments and archival collections

of wealthy American universities. As Eliot says, here and there cease to matter as one

grows older. Only the common human fate remains. And the city named in a poem - be it Bangkok or Paris, Dublin or Belfast - is incidental, no more than a prism through which a universal experience refracts itself.

Harry Clifton

ISBN 0-9544257-6-6 b10.00 /E14.00 /$14.00 9 "780954"425760

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