The Forms of Irish Modernism

Abstract

Reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman through Roberto Schwarz's notion of misplaced ideas, this essay demonstrates how these key works of Irish modernism formally mediate the experience of incongruity generated by Ireland's semiperipheral status. This experience is most visible when the characters grapple with the various discourses that do and do not describe their everyday realities. Thematizing questions of scale—and internalizing the dialectic of tradition and modernity out of which they emerge—the forms of Irish modernism reflect on the world economic system that conditions them.