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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