The position of the child in Irish literature

Mooney, Mick (2007) The position of the child in Irish literature. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The thesis is fundamentally an interrogation of what is called the 'position of the child' vis-à-vis the 'position of the father'. The concept of the child as defined by age, knowledge, experience, or innocence is dismissed. The concept of position is drawn from Lacan's Schema L and Schema R which map out relations between the registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Schema L is used to define the position of the child, or the subject who is both defined and excluded from a relation, and also what is called the position-as-child in a father-occluded Imaginary, produced from a culture with phallic jouissance as its dominant mode of pleasure and pain. The logic of such a culture is of the phallic exception. Schema R is skewed in Figure 3 to sketch a model of 'phallic mobility' and 'feminine mobility' between the father and child positions, as well as a Law of the Father and a Law of Desire. Foucault's analysis of Western sexuality from the eighteenth century onwards is proffered as the historical basis for the Law of the Father, when the parent-child relation becomes preponderant as the socialisation process. Around this period, literature develops a notably half-articulated (Imaginary) relation between writer and reader in Sentimental and Romantic discourse, and the position-as- child becomes a staple of aesthetic as well as regulatory, political interest. The military and structural violence of colonialism forcibly imposes an English 'position-as-child' on a native populace. The colonial ideology comprising a half-articulated, nostalgic, analeptic and Imaginary framing of both native culture and the child is considered a means for overdetermining a proleptic path the native and child then must follow towards a colonial and patriarchal position of the father. The glaring (phallic) exception to half-articulation is Romantic Hamlet. Dispossessed of land and title, incredibly articulate yet politically inept, Hamlet falls every time in Act 5 just like MacPherson's ideal for the Celt in Ossian (1765). How the reception of Hamlet in Romanticism peculiarly ignores the question of land, and how Hamlet invites a neighbouring, Nordic nation to establish a government is, at a period of colonial expansion, eminently gratuitous. Hamlet is the idealised position-as-child in a historically situated, colonial-inspired, father-occluded Imaginary. The main body of the thesis then proceeds by chapters on authors and the voices of characters reaching for a healing in a father-occluded Imaginary.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities
• Supervisor's Name: Radford, Dr Andrew
• Date of Award: 2007
• Depositing User: Mrs Monika Milewska-Fiertek
• Unique ID: glathesis:2007-39036
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 20 Dec 2018 15:08
• Last Modified: 11 Jul 2021 17:17
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.39036
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/39036