Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth

Autores/as

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v9i0.3689

Palabras clave:

Memory, Childhood, Youth, James Joyce, Seamus Deane, Patrick McCabe

Resumen

In this paper we aim to analyze three different works – The Dead,
The Butcher Boy and The Speckled People – and to show the capacity of
music to activate memory and to act as a catalyst for nostalgia. Ballads and songs create in these works a landscape of its own, functioning both as a barrier and as a link between different characters and different worlds. An instrument or a song can become an objective correlative to the characters‘broken dreams or truncated hopes, synchronizing with their life’s rhythm, their emotional shades and accurately echoing their passions and frustrations, since the music that interweaves in the text is by no means accidental. Quite the opposite, it emanates from a carefully selected repertoire that sounds at the crucial moments and that operates as a sort of musical variation on a threefold theme: a failed love experience, a truncated sentimental journey and an intense feeling of otherness.

Biografía del autor/a

  • Inés Praga Terente, Universidad de Burgos

     ERENTE, INÉS PRAGA is Professor of English at the University of Burgos ( Spain). She is the author of Una belleza terrible: la poesía irlandesa contemporánea 1945-95,
    (1996), co author of Diccionario Cultural e Histórico de Irlanda ( 1996) and Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics (1998) and editor of Irlanda ante un
    Nuevo Milenio ( 2002) and La novela Irlandesa del siglo XX ( 2005) . In 1998 she received an honorary degree in Literature from The National University of Ireland (Cork).
    She is presently the Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies( AEDEI) and a member of the steering board of EFACIS ( European Federation of Irish Associations
    and Centres of Irish Studies ).

Referencias

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Gibbons, Luke. “Back Projections: John Hinde and the New Nostalgia” in Transformations in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 37-43, 1996.

Hamilton, Hugo. The Speckled People. London & New York: Fourth Estate, 2003.

Heaney, Seamus. “The Sense of Place”. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber,pp.131-149, 1980.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995; rpt.) London: Vintage, 1996.

Lyotard, J.F. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

McCabe, Patrick. The Butcher Boy. London: Picador, 1992.

Shepherd, John. Music as Social Text. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

Stokes, Martin (Ed.). Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg, 1994.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience. Edward Arnold., 1977.

White, Harry. The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland 1770-1970. Cork: Cork University Press, 1998.

Descargas

Publicado

2007-06-17

Número

Vol. 9 (2007): ABEI Journal 9

Sección

Fiction

Cómo citar

Praga Terente, I. (2007). Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth. ABEI Journal, 9, 27-42. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v9i0.3689