Abstract for IASIL conference, Glasgow University July 2009

Title: Flann O’Brien’s minor modernism: deconstructing Anglo-Irish heritage in At Swim-Two-Birds

In their study Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari define a minor writer’s role as one which deterritorializes or decodes major discourses in order to negotiate textual spaces which question the assumptions of dominant groups. My interest lies in understanding how post-independence Irish writers decode nationalist discourses contained in realist literary texts by employing modernist techniques. In an attempt to re-configure their subjectivities in the politically and culturally conservative post-revolutionary era, Irish authors often re-empowered themselves through an experimental quest for alternative modernist forms which reached beyond the constraints of nationalist literary discourses and identifications contained in much contemporary realist Irish literature. This paper investigates how Flann O’Brien decodes his Anglo-Irish heritage in the novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) within the context of post-revolutionary Ireland. Through an exploration of O’Brien’s modernist style, and a comparison with Kafka’s short story ‘The Burrow’, I will demonstrate how O’Brien produces a minor literature which subverts the signifying processes of Irish texts which confirm a stable national identity and territory. O’Brien takes pre-existing dominant models of cultural expression that define Ireland as nationalist and Gaelic and disrupts these traditional structures by exaggerating and amplifying their assumed signifying practices. O’Brien’s literary production, due to its openness to experimentation and refusal to reterritorialize Irish identity, should be placed in a minor relation to other Irish texts. By engaging with modernist techniques relating to the fragmented nature of modern subjectivity, O’Brien develops an elaborate structure and political metanarrative about the nature of post-revolutionary Irish nationalism and identification.