Archive Page 2
Justin Quinn says (drb blog, Jul 16th) that I sound like “an unreconstructed Irish nationalist” – which is not, admittedly, quite the same as saying that I am one.
Whatever I may be or may be called, in the time that I have been commenting on Irish history, cultural debates and music I have called time and again for the British dimension of Irish experience to be acknowledged. Unlike a significant section of the Irish intelligentsia, however, I do not write as if all problems in British/Irish relations would melt away if Irish nationalists would see the light. I see cultural and political life on and between this and the neighbouring island as multipolar, dynamic, interactive – and also as involving multiple blind spots and shared responsibilities.
Justin Quinn is, it seems to me, in the line of Irish intellectuals who see themselves as transcending (petty, narrow, insular…) Irish concerns and speaking from an enlightened post-nationalist or international or European or cosmopolitan perspective. This perspective is attained more in theory than in practice.
Thus, though he may wish to provide a route away from cultural nationalism towards a purely artistic, language-centred appreciation of literature, in practice Justin Quinn offers less a comprehensive introduction to modern Irish poetry than a lengthy reprimand to cultural nationalism that fails to map out any model of British/Irish cultural relations or to consider how unionist ideology worked itself out in the domain of poetry.
In the failure to question his own positions, in his uncritical embrace of empire, in his writing about Ireland in such a way as to position British readers as uninvolved spectators on Irish matters, in his partitioning of his thinking about Ireland from his thinking about countries such as the United States, Quinn is a less a light-bearer than a reflector of the ideology of some of the more complacent sections of the contemporary Irish middle class.
A few of his specific points need to be answered.
1. He reminds me that poems are made with words, not ideas. Neither in the drb nor elsewhere have I judged poets or other artists by their conformity to the “nationalist agenda”. Like Quinn and other readers, I am quite capable of reading a poem, now for pleasure, now for its place in cultural history.
2. There is nothing unusual in the fact that Quinn and I should differ in our reading of the Revival. One of my problems with Quinn’s book lies not in matters of detail but in the fundamental matter of how a critic or literary historian should approach a cultural movement. As I see it, the internal logic of the movement must be described (ie, how the participants saw themselves) at least as fully as the
inconsistencies and contradictions and flaws identified by the critic or historian. Quinn is interested only in the second part of the process where the revival is concerned.
3. In my recent review of essays by Maurice Harmon and Gerald Dawe in Poetry Ireland Review, I argued very much like Quinn that the field of Irish Studies should not stay complacently within its own boundaries. It is a pity that Quinn did not act on his own advice and build a comparative dimension into his study of Irish poetry.
4. I was not at all disappointed at Justin Quinn’s failure to excoriate Allingham’s unionist ideology. I was attempting to point out that while (perhaps in an attempt to offer benighted nationalists a lesson
in broadmindedness) he adopts a monotonously negative tone when mentioning any manifestation of Irish nationalism, he tends to go weak at the knees when invoking either Unionism or empire.
5. Where Louis MacNeice is concerned, I see things less dramatically than Quinn does. MacNeice moved to London and was at the centre of English/British literary life for a period. It is not surprising,
therefore, that this is the context in which he tended to be read – though there were sympathetic readings to counterbalance the Austin Clarkes (see the April-June 1945 issue of the Dublin Review) and he featured in the Inter Cert poetry textbook well before his more recent critical repatriation.
6. I am sorry if my brief comments on Ferguson appeared to deny his Unionism. Any study of his thought or writings that did so would be absurdly misguided (though it would also take account of his brief Repeal phase). I do not believe that my writings on Irish history, culture, music or literature have anywhere involved a denial or erasure of unionist thinking.
7. Quinn says that Gaelic culture “has for some time now been learning modes of existence outside nationalism”. Is there not a note of condescension in this little pat on the back? The sentence itself is
rather vague, but I imagine the reference is to writers of Nuala Ní Dhómhnaill’s generation or younger. But how many of Seán Ó Riordáin’s poems are nationalist in intent? How many of the poems in the de Paor/Ó Tuama or any other recent anthology of twentieth century Irish language poetry are? A glance at the international content and references in the mid-sixties volumes of Eoghan Ó Tuairisc or Máire Mhac an tSaoi, or at the young Tomás Mac Síomóin’s work a few years later, would be enough to expose Quinn’s reductionist reading of Irish language culture. But then, as detailed in my review, Quinn’s monocular obsession with nationalism tends to blind him to the specificity, variety and, on occasion, the internationalism of the works of the writers he deals with and leads
to a reductionist reading of the story of Irish poetry.
BOS
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Amazon buys AbeBooks
Amazon is buying rare and out of print books specialist AbeBooks for an undisclosed sum. The takeover, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to be completed during the fourth quarter of 2008.
AbeBooks’ website has been trading since 1996 and has 13,500 bookseller members, who pay a monthly subscription fee to list their books. The website features more than 110 million used, rare and out of print books for sale from thousands of indies across the world.
Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon.com, said that the acquisition would add “breadth and expanded selection” to the company’s customers. “AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We’re excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth.”
Hannes Blum, AbeBooks’ chief executive, said he was “very excited” about the acquisition. “This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience,” he said.
AbeBooks will continue to be based in Victoria, British Columbia. The takeover is the third major acquisition Amazon has made this year. It took over digital book download site Audible for $300m in March and also bought online fabric store Fabric.com in June.
AbeBooks will continue to maintain all of its websites as part of the takeover.
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Call for Papers:
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies/Eighteenth-Century
Ireland Society Joint Meeting, Richmond, Virginia 26-29 March 2009.
Paper Proposals Due: 15 Sept. 2008
The 2009 joint meeting of ASECS and ECIS will feature four panels
affiliated with ECIS or the Irish Caucus of ASECS and three
non-affiliated panels on Irish themes. In addition, there will be a
lecture by Professor Andrew Carpenter, Vice-President of ISECS, on the
topic of eighteenth-century Irish studies in relation to international
eighteenth-century studies and a roundtable on the state of the study
of eighteenth-century Ireland.
Panels in brief (listed in greater detail below):
“Edgeworth, Owenson, and Ireland” (Irish Studies Caucus) Sean Moore,
U. New Hampshire; E-mail: sean@unh.edu
“The Celtic Periphery in the Eighteenth Century” (Irish Studies
Caucus) Juliet Shields, SUNY Binghamton; E-mail: jshields@binghamton.edu
“Irish Enlightenments/Ireland and Enlightenment” (Eighteenth-Century
Ireland Society) Conrad Brunström, National U. of Ireland Maynooth;
E-mail: conrad.brunstrom@nuim.ie
“Jonathan Swift and Ireland” (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society) Eoin
Magennis, Editor – Eighteenth-Century Ireland; E-mail:
eoin.magennis@intertradeireland.com
“Roundtable on the State of Eighteenth-Century Irish Studies”
(Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society/Irish Studies Caucus) Michael
Brown, Lecturer U. Aberdeen; E-mail: m.brown@abdn.ac.uk
“Eighteenth-Century Ireland” (Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish
Studies, U. Notre Dame) Christopher Fox, Professor and Director;
E-mail: fox.1@nd.edu
“Jonathan Swift and His Circle VI” Donald C. Mell, Dept. of English,
U. of Delaware; Tel: (302) 831-3660; Fax: (302) 831-1586; E-mail:
dmell@english.udel
“Poverty and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland”
Joanne E. Myers, Gettysburg College, Breidenbaugh Hall, 300 N.
Washington St., Gettysburg PA 17325; Tel: (219) 464-5282; E-mail:
joanne.myers@valpo.edu
Detailed Description of Panels:
“Edgeworth, Owenson, and Ireland” (Irish Studies Caucus) Sean Moore,
U. New Hampshire; E-mail: sean@unh.edu
Maria Edgeworth and Sidney Owenson, Lady Morgan were pioneers of the
“national tale” – the narrative of regional and national identity that
Sir Walter Scott would acknowledge as the precursor to the historical
novel. Many of their works explored “Irishness” via the fictional
devices of characters, place names, and themes, constructing a
distinct cultural identity and nationalist literary tradition. The
contexts of these acts of writing – the Act of Union between Ireland
and Great Britain, the movement for Catholic Emancipation, and the
Napoleonic Wars – shape a hybrid conception of Ireland as both
independent society and dependant member of the British empire.
This panel solicits papers that explore Edgeworth and/or Owenson’s
fiction from
interdisciplinary perspectives, focusing on formal questions of genre
and character, contextual questions of events and ideas, and/or
theoretical methods by which new readings of these texts may be
produced. While Ireland is the focus of this panel, papers that
explore continental, transatlantic, and global connections in the work
of either or both author are welcomed.
“The Celtic Periphery in the Eighteenth Century” (Irish Studies
Caucus) Juliet Shields, SUNY Binghamton; E-mail: jshields@binghamton.edu
Was there a coherent Celtic periphery in the eighteenth century? If
so, in what was its unity based–language, race, culture, resistance
to Anglicization, or something else? How do the triangulated relations
between Ireland, Scotland, and England challenge traditional models of
the nation-state? How might the differences between Ireland’s and
Scotland’s eighteenth-century connections to England, and to Great
Britain’s growing empire, illuminate or trouble the distinctions
between internal colonialism, settler colonialism, and other forms of
imperialism?
This panel seeks to explore Scotland and Ireland’s relationship with
Great Britain and the empire. It also seeks to examine how the
alliances and rivalries between Scotland and Ireland informed their
respective relationships with England..Papers are solicited that
discuss literary, historical, and cross-disciplinary treatments of the
Celtic periphery.
“Irish Enlightenments/Ireland and Enlightenment” (Eighteenth-Century
Ireland Society) Conrad Brunström, National U. of Ireland Maynooth;
E-mail: conrad.brunstrom@nuim.ie
This panel welcomes papers concerned with Ireland’s relationship with
the history of ideas in the long eighteenth-century. It invites
consideration of ways in which Ireland was influenced by and
contributed to a collective European shift in cultural and
intellectual paradigms. In particular, the panel will be interested in
papers which challenge prevalent definitions of “Enlightenment” in
light of a specifically Irish experience.
“Jonathan Swift and Ireland” (Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society) Eoin
Magennis, Editor – Eighteenth-Century Ireland; E-mail:
eoin.magennis@intertradeireland.com
Swift’s legacy is both topical and universal, contemporary and
timeless, intensely involved in the minutiae of national, municipal,
and sometimes parochial politics while making grand claims upon the
attention of a long and international posterity. This panel welcomes
papers on all aspects of the work of Jonathan Swift, particularly
those which establish and develop an Irish context for his life and
work.
“Eighteenth-Century Ireland” (Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish
Studies, U. Notre Dame) Christopher Fox, Professor and Director;
E-mail: fox.1@nd.edu
[This is a general panel on Eighteenth-Century Irish Studies]
“Jonathan Swift and His Circle VI” Donald C. Mell, Dept. of English,
U. of Delaware; Tel: (302) 831-3660; Fax: (302) 831-1586; E-mail:
dmell@english.udel.
This special session will explore the range of literary, political,
religious, and cultural relationships between Swift and his English
and Irish friends (and enemies) early on and later in his career.
Those treated may be well- known figures of the period or lesser known
people who were nevertheless influential. The panel will consist of
four people, each of whom will read a 15-minute paper after which
there will be a question period and discussion of the issues raised by
the papers.
“Poverty and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland”
Joanne E. Myers, Gettysburg College, Breidenbaugh Hall, 300 N.
Washington St., Gettysburg PA 17325; Tel: (219) 464-5282; E-mail:
joanne.myers@valpo.edu
While the poor may be always present, their representation fluctuates
over the course of our period. The poor are variously suspect and
sentimentally affecting, economically marginal but often central to
plans for the “improvement” of the nation. This panel invites papers
that address the role poverty and the impoverished play in the
eighteenth-century imagination. How are images of the poor deployed in
different kinds of religious, economic, and literary discourses, and
how are the voices of the poor variously captured, appropriated, and
ventriloquized? What kinds of responses to the problem of poverty are
solicited by different kinds of representation? Papers might examine
literary or other artistic representations of the poor and of poverty,
the evolution of the Poor Laws, changing views of the causes of
poverty, sermon literature, poverty and gender, metaphorical
understandings of “poverty,” or the contest over sentimental
representations of rural poverty. Papers that explore how poverty
situates the poor in an ambiguous relationship with society, both
within and without its bounds, are especially welcome.
Sean D. Moore, Assistant Professor
Department of English
Hamilton Smith Hall
95 Main Street
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3574
U.S.A.
phone: +(603) 862-3827
fax: +(603) 862-3827
email: sean@unh.edu
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The death has occurred, following a car accident on Sunday, of the Polish historian and politician Bronislaw Geremek.
For Daniel Vernet, writing in Le Monde, Geremek was the very figure of the humanist intellectual. Born in 1932 in Warsaw, where his father was a rabbi, the young Geremek was hidden during the war by Polish peasants. His father died at Auschwitz. He joined the Polish Communist Party in the early 1950s and left after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
He studied at the Sorbonne, where he made the acquaintance of the historians of the Annales group. His field was poverty and the marginalised. Two of his historical works, Poverty: A History and The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, are currently available in English.
The former is summarised thus on Amazon:
“Professor Geremek shows how the rich and those in authority have always expressed mixed feelings about the poor, oscillating between pity and fear, compassion and revulsion. He examines why this should have been so and discusses the effects it had on private and public actions. Even in the Middle Ages, the author suggests, there was little sentimentality. Then the poor had functions, as the means of securing divine salvation through the giving of alms, and as contractors who would pray for their benefactors. With the economic crises that afflicted Europe in the sixteenth century, mass poverty came to be seen as harmful and destabilizing, and new principles of modern poor relief were formulated to control it.
But the scale of poverty was increasing: first through rural change and then through industrial change. If absolute poverty became less evident, the gap between rich and poor had become more manifest. It is here, Professor Geremek shows, that the utopian ideals of socialism were born. Unrest could be contained in state welfare schemes, or it could be manipulated into revolution and the poor once more enslaved – this time in the name of their own interests.”
Geremek was drawn back into Polish politics in the 1970s through his association with the “flying university” organised under the auspices of the Workers’ Defence Committee (with Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik and the late Jacek Kuron) and later as an adviser to Lech Walesa and Solidarity. He was jailed on several occasions, spending a total of two and a half years behind bars.
With Tadeusz Mazowiecki he was a member of the “round table” which negotiated the end of Polish communism. He was minister for foreign affairs between 1997 and 2000 and in 2004 became an MEP.
Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian, sees Geremek as “Poland’s most eloquent advocate abroad”, even when he was being pilloried by nationalists at home: “He demonstrated again and again what only narrower minds deny: there is no contradiction between being Polish, Jewish, and European.”
Garton Ash recalls meeting him in the corridors of the Polish parliament, when he turned to him and said “with sudden passion”: “You know, for me Europe is a kind of Platonic essence.” A rare expression perhaps and an unfamiliar one in the present sour conjuncture, but for all that perhaps ultimately more serviceable than the anti-vision of many of our current domestic and European leaders.
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Dear Sirs,
Thank you for devoting so much space to Barra Ó Seaghdha’s review of my Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry (drb Summer 2008). I very much appreciated his detailed and informed response, but some of the points he raised require an answer.
Ó Seaghdha views my approach as unreflective and tired revisionism, and yet his own response sounds like that of an unreconstructed nationalist who has difficulty understanding the basic fact that poetry, as has often been pointed out, is made from words and not ideas. Thus it is that when generations of Anglophone Irish poets have expressed their preoccupation (love, hatred, etc) with the Irish nation, they have done so in the language of the imperial conqueror. Of course it is a critical commonplace to say that this is an enabling rather than a disabling paradox.
My fundamental ambition in writing the book was to show that the English language, and not the Irish nation, was the best framework for understanding the work of writers as various as Yeats, MacNeice, Longley and Sirr. Ó Seaghdha remarks that we’ve always known this, referring to an early critic of Yeats who adduced many English influences. But with the rise of Irish Studies over the last few decades that context has faded, and we have seen the emergence of a critical discourse that, however theoretically sophisticated, rarely questions its own boundaries. To reinstate the old category of genre – in this case poetry, no matter what nation it comes from – can be helpful.
Ó Seaghdha’s negative response seems to arise from our different ideas of the legacy of Irish nationalism, and more specifically the aims of the Literary Revival. He says that in my introduction I pose a series of “non-questions” when trying to define my field of inquiry, one of which is “Is [Irish poetry] written in Irish or can it be written in English too?” He rightly points out that “there is no significant body of opinion today that confines the term Irish poetry to work written in Irish”.
For my purposes, it is beside the point that such a body of opinion does not exist. In my reading of two centuries of poetry, I wished to inquire whether a work can be Irish yet not be in that language. I ultimately don’t think that it meaningfully can be, and that it forms a kind of sub-section of Anglophone poetry, which is not identical to English or British poetry.
Not only Irish poetry, but Irish society in general, tries very hard to forget how its law and culture has remained indebted to Britain. (As index of this, in my introduction I referred to the way that monoglot Irish audiences do not find it strange that The Playboy of the Western World or Translations are performed in English.) To acknowledge this fact is not to fail to “get to grips” with the Revival, as Ó Seaghdha claims, but rather to acknowledge its failure to de-anglicise Ireland.
Ó Seaghdha seems disappointed that my discussion of Allingham “does not lead to any excoriation of unionist ideology”. I don’t see why it should. If I criticised nationalist ideology throughout the book, I did so only because its strong interpretation of Anglophone poetry in Ireland has prevailed in different forms for so long and requires correction. The same cannot be said of unionist ideology. I am not sure whether it is necessary here to point out that this does not make me a unionist (though I see scant difference between an Anglophone Irish Republic and an Anglophone Ireland within the United Kingdom).
I made the point that Louis MacNeice, because he lived in Britain, was edged out of ideas of Irish poetry; Ó Seaghdha remarks that “there has been no conspiracy to remove him from the national annals”. I quoted Austin Clarke in his Poetry in Modern Ireland (1961), where he says of MacNeice that he “achieved rapidly a reputation as one of the leaders of the English advanced group which was so active in the years before the war”, and otherwise says nothing further about him, preferring to dwell at greater length on the likes of Lyle Donaghy and Joseph Campbell. Not a conspiracy (which I did not write), but definitely a hit job, with Clarke’s characteristic resentment.
I asked the degree to which we can consider Ferguson an Irish poet. Ó Seaghdha says: “Ferguson demanded to be read as Irish; outside of Ireland or the field of Irish studies, nobody is laying claim to him; nor has there been any attempt over the last fifty years to evict him from Irish literary history or to call him a British writer.” This is true, as far as it goes. However it simplifies Ferguson so much that we lose his Unionism, and how he saw his translation and original poetry as an integral part of the strengthening of Ireland’s political union with Britain. Such an omission suggests that Ó Seaghdha’s response here, and indeed throughout the review, is somewhat tendentious.
By remarking on the general failure of the Revival, and the opportunist way that Anglophone Irish nationalist culture frequently treated Gaelic culture as a kind of sub-soil, I did not wish to suggest any disrespect towards revivalist aspirations or Gaelic culture. Rather, to unhook Anglophone Irish poetry from the nationalist agenda is also a liberation of sorts for Gaelic culture. The latter has for some time now been learning modes of existence outside nationalism, and to analyse these would require a separate book.
Yours,
Justin Quinn
Prague
Czech Republic
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Rushdie wins Best of Booker
LONDON (AP) — Salman Rushdie is probably the Booker Prize’s best-known winner. Now he is officially the best.
Rushdie’s 1981 novel “Midnight’s Children” was named Thursday as the greatest-ever winner of Britain’s most prestigious literary award. The book received more than a third of the 7,801 votes cast in a competition to mark the prize’s 40th anniversary.
The book beat five other finalists, including Pat Barker’s World War I novel “The Ghost Road” and South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace.”
Rushdie, who is promoting his latest novel, “The Enchantress of Florence,” in the United States, said in a videotaped message that he was “absolutely delighted” with the accolade.
The Indian-born British writer had been strong favorite for the “Best of the Booker” award. “Midnight’s Children” won a similar contest held in 1993 to mark the Booker’s 25th anniversary.
“It’s a book which always appears on polls of people’s favorite books, so it’s no surprise to see it win,” said Jonathan Ruppin, promotions manager of the Foyles bookstore chain. “He’s not to everyone’s taste, but from a bookseller’s point of view, authors who get books into the news are always welcome.”
The 41 Booker winners were winnowed down to six finalists by a panel of three judges that included a biographer, a broadcaster and an English professor. The public was then asked to vote online or by mobile phone text message.
The other finalists were Australian novelist Peter Carey’s “Oscar and Lucinda,” Nadine Gordimer’s “The Conservationist” and — the outsider — “The Siege of Krishnapur” by the late J.G. Farrell.
Born in Mumbai in 1947 and educated in England, Rushdie shot to literary fame with “Midnight’s Children,” a magic-realist saga that weaves the story of a narrator, born at the moment of India’s independence in 1947, with the subcontinent’s modern history.
His 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” angered many in the Muslim world and brought a death sentence for blasphemy from Iran’s then-leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Rushdie lived in hiding for a decade until the Iranian government distanced itself from the order in 1998, saying it would not back any effort to kill Rushdie. He has since gradually returned to public life, and spends much of his time in New York.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II last year and received the honor at Buckingham Palace last month.
The prize is formally known as the Man Booker after its sponsor, financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC. It was first handed out in 1969 and is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. There have been 41 winners because there were joint champions in 1974 and 1992.
Winners receive 50,000 pounds (US$100,000) and a burst of publicity that usually brings a surge in sales.
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Perry Anderson Lecture
Perry Anderson, founder-editor of the New Left Review and polymath writer, will give a public lecture in the Irish Seminar series tonight (July 1st) at 8 pm at the National Gallery (Merrion Square West entrance). Anderson will discuss challenges to American global hegemony and the
situation of the contemporary left in the rapidly changing world order since
1989. An essayist and historian of enormous verve, range and ambition, Anderson has
been one of the more influential figures on the intellectual left for
decades. He teaches at UCLA and is the author of such classic works as
Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), Considerations on Western Marxism
(1979), A Zone of Engagement (1992), The Origins of Postmodernity (1998) and
Spectrum (2005).
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Banville on Yeats
The National Library of Ireland’s two-week celebration of WB Yeats ends this week with a lecture by John Banville on Thursday (June 26th) and a reading by actor Patrick Bergin on Friday.
Both events are at 1 pm, last half an hour, and no booking is required.
yeats@nli.ie
www.nil.ie
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Future of the Book
Only half of young people aged 18-24 years old think people will still be using bookshops in 20 years’ time, writes Alison Flood in The Bookseller. The statistic was revealed at The Bookseller’s Reading The Future conference, which presented new consumer research into the reading and buying habits of 1,000 adults across the country.
Delegates heard from William Higham of agency Next Big Thing, which conducted the research. Higham reported that 56% of 18-24s think people will still be using bookshops in 20 years’ time. Looking deeper into 18- to 24-year-olds’ reading habits, he found that 28% were favourable towards the idea of e-readers, compared to 9% of 65+ year olds, and 40% liked the idea of downloadable chapters of books, compared to 7% of 65+ year olds.
Speaking at a panel session after the research was presented, Transworld publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said the statistics about younger readers all pointed “to where we as publishers are going in the future”. He added: “We all know the book is a great piece of technology – you can’t drop e-books in the bath. But we as an industry are in a lot of trouble; we don’t know where we are going.”
“Should we follow the iTunes model of providing content and making money out of the hardware, like Amazon with the Kindle, or the Google model which is all about content? Looking at the level of indifference of 18- to 24-year-olds has got to give us all cause for concern. They will be wanting to take a role in the devolution of content, and we must provide them with an environment to do it in.”
The Book People chief executive Seni Glaister was more positive about the future of the book. “Content is king – always. As an industry I hope we don’t spend too much time worrying about technology and let’s protect our copyright, make sure downloads are available – but as content providers we shouldn’t worry too much about technology.”
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Remembering the 1968 Revolt
“In 1968 the planet caught fire, as if in response to some global signal”, is how Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in the mid-1980s, summed up the situation. The social revolt of 1968 was an international phenomenon that occurred simultaneously in just about every country in the world and, as it evolved, became increasingly interlinked internationally. The Goethe-Institut website “1968 – 2008 worldwide” examines these global events and motives. Forty years after the protest movement the essays look back on the events from today’s perspective.
The website also features an essay by journalist Nell McCafferty, “Breaking the Shackles”, on the Irish situation.
www.goethe.de/dublin
Essays are available in both German and English.
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