One paper down, one more to go

I finished my paper on Kierkegaard and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Now I only have to write one more major research essay (plus a three-page abstract for my Greek drama class) before May. So it's time to start thinking of some potential paper topics.

The class is on mediation and dictation, and all of the literature is from the modern period with a heavy emphasis on Irish literature. I think I want to write my final paper on The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien. This novel was originally written in Gaelic and parodies the Irish obsession with reclaiming a Celtic identity. The Poor Mouth was first published in 1941, and this especially intrigues me; I wrote my undergraduate thesis on post-WWII British literature, and love Irish literature. Ireland's neutrality in WWII is also interesting to me, and I think I understand it better now after reading The Poor Mouth, even though the novel never mentions WWII directly. The obsession with a mythicized Celtic tradition, of Irish lords locking themselves in a stone tower to wait out the Viking invasion, untouched by the foreign aggressors, played a big role in Irish neutrality, and that spiritualized national identity is mercilessly lampooned in this novel. Another aspect of Ireland's neutrality was its self image as a small, poor nation; the Irish prime minister at the time stated that small states like Ireland should stay out of the affairs of the grand powers. Ireland was a very poor nation, especially in the south; I don't dispute that, but what The Poor Mouth elucidates is the peculiar approach to poverty in Ireland (by the upper classes, of course), the pride in abject poverty, the identification of poverty and parochialism with true Gaelic-ness.

I loved the acerbic wit of this book and I'd like to read it again (it's short, only about 180 pages) and think more about the fetishization of the Gaelic language, referred to in the book almost exclusively as "sweet Gaelic," contrasted with bitter English.