Irish Classics (review)

Abstract

Critics and journalists frequently employ the term "public intellectual" when describing Declan Kiberd, a Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin. Kiberd can lay claim to the title of public intellectual because of his accessible prose and his cogent commentary on trends in Irish culture. Kiberd's last book, Inventing Ireland (Harvard University Press, 1995), a study of twentieth-century Irish writing, has been the single most influential text in the growing discourse of Irish postcolonial studies. Many critics worked to situate Ireland in a postcolonial context before Kiberd, and some, like David Lloyd, did so with more theoretical sophistication. But Kiberd's use of the work of Fanon and Said, especially, to frame a narrative about Irish writers' response to British colonialism made a postcolonial approach to Ireland seem inevitable, and quickly paradigmatic. Kiberd's critics, like Denis Donoghue, criticize him for the very thing that gives him the title of public intellectual—i.e., the fact that his arguments are convincing to a large number of readers, both in and out of the academy. Donoghue and others argue that Kiberd simplifies Irish colonial experience, and in doing so becomes politically correct.