“Writing can be a form of action. Few writers in recent decades have embodied this maxim better than the Irish critic Seamus Deane, who died two years ago in May 2021”
“Deane’s criticism challenged the revisionist intellectual current that sought to downplay the impact of British colonialism on every facet of Irish development, political, economic, and cultural. Yet Deane also rejected the kind of nationalism that, in his view, simply turned colonial ideology inside out”
“Deane went to Cambridge to pursue a PhD on the reception of French Enlightenment thinkers in the works of nineteenth-century English republican writers such as William Hazlitt, William Godwin, and Percy Shelley”
“The fruit of this research, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832, was the foundational text in Deane’s critical enterprise, although it was only published in book form in 1988”
“It laid down the basic theoretical framework within which he would proceed to dissect the various aesthetic paradigms of Irish literature and the inherited discourses through which Irish and British writers have articulated the Irish predicament since the eighteenth century”
“It was during the 1980s that Deane became one of the most commanding and controversial voices on the Irish intellectual scene. He was appointed professor of American and English literature at University College Dublin in 1980, and soon came to lead the largest university English department in the country, elevating his stature significantly”
“In this decade, he published pamphlets on the “Irish question” — “Civilians and Barbarians” (1983) and “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea” (1984) — and three volumes of criticism: Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980 (1985), A Short History of Irish Literature (1986), and The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (1988)”
“Each of these volumes proved to be influential in shaping the preoccupations and interpretations of Irish literary and cultural scholars. Yet it was in his pamphlets that Deane arguably presaged a new departure in Irish studies that had become a new orthodoxy by the 2000s — namely the shift toward examining the Irish situation within a postcolonial framework”
“He took inspiration from Edward Said but also from French poststructuralism and the mode of Marxian cultural criticism espoused by the Frankfurt School theorists”
“Deane sought to redirect the focus of Irish literary and cultural scholars toward discursive analysis and the critical examination of the cultural paradigms within which the Irish situation had been conceptualized — by writers of fiction, of course, but also by political writers, social commentators, and colonial administrators”
“Seeking to explicate the Irish situation as clearly and comprehensively as possible, Deane advocated a return to a historical mode of cultural criticism that would bring into focus the material or intellectual-cultural systems of contemporary Irish life”
“He insisted that these mutually determining systems were accessible through the study of Irish writing in its various forms”
“Deane pursued this work initially as part of a collective, the Field Day Theatre Company, which was established in Derry in 1980 by the actor Stephen Rea and the playwright Brian Friel to produce the latter’s Translations”
“Field Day was soon being dismissed as “the literary wing of the IRA,” a judgment of the novelist Colm Tóibín that was representative of broader intellectual opinion in the South at this time.”
“Field Day was embroiled in yet more controversy on the publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), an elaborate undertaking overseen by Deane. The purpose of the anthology was to define a new Irish literary canon, one that would be inclusive of all the major cultural formations that had contributed to the making of Irish society from the early Christian period to the late twentieth century, encompassing the various forms of writing through which these formations had been expressed”
“He nevertheless remained active in Irish cultural and intellectual affairs, becoming editor of the Field Day Critical Conditions series in 1996 and publishing his central work, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790, the following year”
“It was during this period that he achieved international renown as a leading postcolonial scholar, a gifted lecturer, and an accomplished novelist with 1996’s Reading in the Dark. In addition to publishing Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke in 2005, he established and edited (with Breandán Mac Suibhne) the Field Day Review, which was a leading outlet of cultural and political criticism in Ireland until its final issue in 2015”
“For Deane, “modernization”’ served as a euphemism for the process that brought most aspects of Irish life — including artistic, academic, and intellectual work — into conformity with the logic of free-market capitalism”
“Out of the old republican trinity of Liberty, Egality, and Fraternity — values enshrined in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic of 1916 — only the first was now recognized as a social value”
“It represented the preservation of individual consumer sovereignty rather than the collective emancipation of a people”
“Revisionists, according to Deane, “downplay the oppression the Easter Rising sought to overthrow and upgrade the oppression the Rising inaugurated in the name of freedom.” They saw the Troubles as stemming from the emotional, impulsive nature of nationalism, which was antithetical to “reason” in all its forms.”
“From their perspective, Irish nationalism was a romantic, anti-modern remnant of the nineteenth century that had no place in the twentieth let alone the twenty-first. Liberal commentators engaged in vituperation against the “senseless” violence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) while downplaying the violence of the British state and loyalist paramilitaries”
“He sought to expand the horizons of Irish cultural and political possibility and break the stasis into which Irish intellectual life had fallen since the early twentieth century, as a succession of conservative nationalist governments stifled the radical potential of the Irish revolution”
“Divorced from the intellectual stimulus of socialism that the 1916 leader James Connolly had once provided to it, Irish republicanism could not proceed into the future. It could only regress back into the suffocating mentalities of Ireland’s postcolonial inheritance”
“For Deane, the discourse of Irish nationalism merely appropriated and redeployed the discourses to which the colonized people had been subjected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “Nationalism, cultural or political, is no more than an inverted image of the colonialism it seeks to replace.””
“Deane was not an Irish nationalist in a conventional sense. The complexity of his alternative nationalism and his critique of the staid, ahistorical liberalism that pervaded political and cultural discourse in the South meant that it was easier for opponents to label him an IRA sympathizer than to engage honestly with his critical enterprise”
“He set himself to exposing the assumptions on which that establishment rested and to investigating their historical genealogies:
To remain critical, to develop a methodology, to sustain a philosophy, to retain contact with actuality and to recognise official fantasy when one sees it — these are difficult, almost impossible ventures, but they are honourable, not parasitic”
“In this, he was not concerned with formulating concrete alternatives or adopting dogmatic standpoints — to the chagrin of critics — but rather with foregrounding the imaginative possibility of devising alternatives, whatever these might be”
“Deane sought to inspire us to thought and to reveal the impediments that encumber our thinking, not to dictate its course”