Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Boston, Mass.--Boston university. / Bibliogr. p. 197-203.

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Seamus Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” form the center of his 1979 collection Field Work. The sonnet series pose an interesting topic of study not only because they constitute a formalist move for a free verse poet, but also because of the way Heaney uses the sonnet form to demonstrate his view of time. In my examination of “Glanmore Sonnets,” I am interested in how Heaney fulfills and expands the traditional role of the sonnet.In this paper, I examine how Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” both enact the sonnet’s traditional concern with immortality and time and expand the form to embody his view of the fluid nature of time and being.

Na pesquisa de Mestrado intitulada \"Seamus Heaney: Polifonia (da) Poética do Exílio\" concluímos que o poeta desestabiliza a noção de subjetividade à medida que se afasta de seu lugar de origem. Nesse sentido, encontramos o eu lírico em uma peregrinação católica em que reconstrói, simbolicamente, as fragmentações e divisões de sua comunidade nativa, uma vez que ele próprio cria diálogos imaginários entre seu passado, presente e futuro. Rompendo com as noções lineares de espaço e tempo, Heaney compõe uma poética do exílio como fruto de uma consciência polifônica, em que a atividade poética depende: 1. das personas (subalternas ou literárias) que fizeram parte de sua constituição artística; 2. da culpa de ter-se afastado da Irlanda do Norte em meio à crise civil; e 3. o desejo de liberdade proveniente da visão crítica de James Joyce. Ao fazer movimentos circulares em torno de si mesmo e de sua terra, o autor reproduz o símbolo celta do triskele, através do qual ele reflete sobre as implicações do fazer poético do autor na literatura contemporânea. / The masters research entitled \"Seamus Heaney: Polyphonic Poetics of Exile\" enabled us to conclude that, as the poet distances himself from his native homeland, he de-constructs the notion of poetic subjectivity. Therefore, in order to display this feature, the persona embraces a catholic pilgrimage through which he reconstructs symbolically the fragmentations and divisions of his own community, whilst he himself creates imaginary dialogues between his past, present and future. Overcoming the traditional chronotope of linear time and space, Heaney gives rise to an exile poetics whose polyphonic consciousness stems from: 1. the personas (subaltern or literary) that have belonged to his artistic constitution; 2. the guilt of distancing himself from Northern Ireland in the middle of a civil war; and 3. the desire of liberty provided by the critical vision of James Joyce. As long as he performs circular movements around himself and his land, the author reproduces the Celtic symbol triskele through which he reflects about the implications of writing poetry in contemporary society.

Na pesquisa de Mestrado intitulada \"Seamus Heaney: Polifonia (da) Poética do Exílio\" concluímos que o poeta desestabiliza a noção de subjetividade à medida que se afasta de seu lugar de origem. Nesse sentido, encontramos o eu lírico em uma peregrinação católica em que reconstrói, simbolicamente, as fragmentações e divisões de sua comunidade nativa, uma vez que ele próprio cria diálogos imaginários entre seu passado, presente e futuro. Rompendo com as noções lineares de espaço e tempo, Heaney compõe uma poética do exílio como fruto de uma consciência polifônica, em que a atividade poética depende: 1. das personas (subalternas ou literárias) que fizeram parte de sua constituição artística; 2. da culpa de ter-se afastado da Irlanda do Norte em meio à crise civil; e 3. o desejo de liberdade proveniente da visão crítica de James Joyce. Ao fazer movimentos circulares em torno de si mesmo e de sua terra, o autor reproduz o símbolo celta do triskele, através do qual ele reflete sobre as implicações do fazer poético do autor na literatura contemporânea. / The masters research entitled \"Seamus Heaney: Polyphonic Poetics of Exile\" enabled us to conclude that, as the poet distances himself from his native homeland, he de-constructs the notion of poetic subjectivity. Therefore, in order to display this feature, the persona embraces a catholic pilgrimage through which he reconstructs symbolically the fragmentations and divisions of his own community, whilst he himself creates imaginary dialogues between his past, present and future. Overcoming the traditional chronotope of linear time and space, Heaney gives rise to an exile poetics whose polyphonic consciousness stems from: 1. the personas (subaltern or literary) that have belonged to his artistic constitution; 2. the guilt of distancing himself from Northern Ireland in the middle of a civil war; and 3. the desire of liberty provided by the critical vision of James Joyce. As long as he performs circular movements around himself and his land, the author reproduces the Celtic symbol triskele through which he reflects about the implications of writing poetry in contemporary society.

Translation has been at the heart of Seamus Heaney's career. In his poem, "The Riverbank Field," from his latest collection, Human Chain, Heaney engages in metatranslation, "Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / 'In a retired vale...a sequestered grove' / And I'll confound the Lethe in Moyola." Curiously, with a broad spectrum of classical works at his disposal, the poet chooses a particular moment in Virgil's Aeneid as an image for translation. What is it about this conversation between Aeneas and his dead father, Anchises, at the banks of the Lethe which makes it uniquely fitting for Heaney to explore translation? In order to fully understand Heaney's decision to translate this scene from Aeneid 6, it must be clear how Heaney perceives the classical tropes of katabasis (descent into the underworld) and nekyia (communion with the dead). Due to the particularly violent and destructive history of the 20th century from the World Wars to the Holocaust, contemporary poets tend to portray katabasis and nekyia in their works as tragic (See Falconer's Hell in Contemporary Literature). Heaney subverts this view of a tragic descent and communion with the dead in his poetry, instead opting for a journey through Hell which is more optimistic and efficacious. Heaney's rejection of the contemporary tragic katabasis and nekyia allows these classical tropes to become a metaphor for translation. I argue Heaney demonstrates how he views translation and the role of the translator through this metatranslational instance in "The Riverbank Field." For Heaney, not only can a poet descend to the underworld where spirits of the literary dead wait for translation into a new medium, but the translator actually can succeed in bringing an ancient author to a modern readership.

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As an Irish farm boy turned educated poet, Seamus Heaney navigates a liminal space between the world of agriculture and the world of letters. Many of his poems draw upon his rural childhood experiences, infusing them with firsthand accounts of life on an Irish farm. As a result, most scholars label Heaney's poetry as antipastoral, noting its failure to provide the idyllic look at the countryside that is characteristic of traditional pastorals. However, reconsiderations of the pastoral mode reveal a unique aspect to Heaney's poems that is derived from his liminal existence as both a rural Irishman and as an educated writer. This thesis aims to analyze Heaney's particular version of the mode, noticing not only specific characteristics of his pastoral but also charting his development as a pastoral poet throughout his career. Through close readings of select poems contextualized by events in Heaney's life, I demonstrate not only why Heaney should be considered a pastoral poet but also how he transforms the pastoral mode. / Master of Arts

This dissertation examines a twentieth-century lineage of writers and poets concerned with signatory inscription. By this, I mean the writing, tracing, branding, embossing, tattooing, or engraving of the name of a person or place onto various kinds of surfaces, as well as other forms of marking that approximate autography. My contention is that James Joyce's novels demonstrate an explicit, underexplored concern with signature and the different imaginary investments (erotic, legal, preservative) that accompany its presence in the world. In Joyce's wake, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Don DeLillo all produce texts that both engage with Joyce's novels and think carefully about the potential of the signature as a material object. My first chapter, 'James Joyce's Signatures', explores how nineteenth-century developments in graphology and forensic identification inherit ideas from the medicinal doctrine of signatures. I argue that this expanded sense of signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. The presence of legal trials in Ulysses adds a forensic element to Joyce's signatory imagination. This element is taken to its logical extreme in 'Nausicaa', where scents, sounds, and impressions become bodily, as opposed to alphabetical, signatures - produced by humans, waves, and stones. The second chapter, 'Samuel Beckett and the Endurance of Names', continues this line of argument, showing how Beckett inherits Joyce's interest in autographic inscription, but employs it for different ends. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ('First Love') and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to 'return to the mineral state', to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. The third chapter, 'Seamus Heaney and the Phonetics of Place', turns from the signature of persons to the signature of places, from prose to poetry. Explicitly glossing poems like 'Anahorish', 'Toome', and 'Broagh' as inspired by Stephen Dedalus, Heaney performs a critical repatriation of Joyce's work. Joyce uses fictional, motivated relations between names and referents to construct a linguistic correlative for Stephen's youthful naivety - a technique that personalises his lexicon, privileging Stephen's own associations over those of nationality, language, or religion. Heaney, on the other hand, politicises this process, utilising phonetic association to forge imaginary correspondences between Irish place-names and the people and places they denote. The final chapter, 'Don DeLillo, Encryption, and Writing Technologies', examines the novels of Don DeLillo and his interest in signatory technologies. Drawing upon archival research conducted on the manuscripts of Americana, Ratner's Star and The Names, I show that Joyce influenced the composition of these texts to a greater extent than previously thought. In particular, DeLillo uses Joyce to think through the technological dimensions of writing, comparing older methods of inscription like boustrophedon to modern communication technologies via Ulysses.

My research in this thesis covers the religious discourse of six contemporary poets who write belief from a position of calamity. Yehuda Amichai writes from the constant wars fought since the founding of the state of Israel; Anne Sexton from psychiatric illness; Seamus Heaney from the sectarian violence of Ireland; Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs from the twentieth century’s greatest calamity, the Holocaust; and Yves Bonnefoy, from the language theories of post-modernism, which are calamitous for a poet. (For complete abstract open document)