Abstract for New Irish, Old Irish conference (Galway, June 2009)

Title of paper:
Representing immigrant experience within Ireland in Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees

Abstract:
Since the mid-1990s there has been an unparalleled increase in the number of immigrants settling in Ireland. My interest lies in understanding how Irish writers, such as Roddy Doyle in his short story collection The Deportees (2007), have responded to the formation of new social and economic contact zones between the Irish and these new immigrants. I argue that Doyle, through his collaboration with the newspaper Metro Eireann, represents immigrant experience within Ireland as alienating due to new economic inequalities and exploitative power relations between both groups. Firstly, this paper will offer brief contextual background information on Metro Eireann to highlight the political agenda behind Doyle’s short stories on immigrant experience. Secondly, through close textual analysis of one of Doyle’s stories, ‘The Pram’, it will be demonstrated how Doyle exploits different literary genres, such as the Gothic genre, to reflect the diversity of ways of expressing the conflicting nature of the experience of cultural assimilation and integration. His use of ‘uncanny’ images in ‘The Pram’, where a Polish immigrant who tells a ghost story becomes haunted by her own experience of immigration, is just one way Doyle represents the effects of immigration on both the Irish and the immigrants.