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Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn centres on Eilis Lacey’s migration from Ireland to Brooklyn. The protagonist’s spatial mobility is accompanied by an identity change, as her self evolves when she settles in New York. Although she embarks on an initiatory journey through migration, Eilis faces various forms of immobility: the American territory resembles Ireland, and she is confronted to family duty when she thought she would escape it. This article therefore shows that the protagonist’s migration in Brooklyn is paradoxically mainly static, in terms of both space and identity. However, Eilis’s mobility still fosters a form of inner transformation as she is faced with a division between her Irish and American homes and between two selves that are irreconcilable.

Dans The Gathering, Enright dresse un sombre portrait allégorique de l’Irlande contemporaine. Dans son microcosme familial, Veronica Hegarty est victime d’un déséquilibre mental et émotionnel, en proie au traumatisme causé par le récent suicide de son frère Liam, qui réveille le souvenir d’une terrible expérience survenue dans sa jeunesse, l’agression sexuelle dont elle ou son frère furent victimes et/ou témoins. Enright analyse les effets de l’effondrement des piliers de la société irlandaise sur la psyché d’un personnage endeuillé. La perte de ces repères fondateurs ouvre un espace de vertige dans un roman qui brouille les frontières entre vivants et morts.

Cet article se propose d’aborder la manière dont The Nation, organe du groupe Young Ireland, réagit à la Famine. Le reproche fut parfois fait aux nationalistes irlandais d’avoir eu la critique facile, sans rien avoir proposé de concret. Nous verrons que des propositions existaient bel et bien, mais d’une faisabilité pour le moins hypothétique: à cause du flottement, des évolutions ou des ruptures doctrinales du mouvement, mais aussi parce qu’elles se heurtaient à l’idéologie dominante. Une approche essentiellement chronologique permettra de suivre le traitement de la question dans les colonnes du journal, en fonction des contextes domestique et international.

This article aims at exploring the available means of political response in Ireland to the issue of the Famine. What comes first to mind is the case of the representative function, democratic, or approximately so, by the standards of the day; i. e., parliamentary activity. Compiling the records of all individual Irish MPs in Parliament over the period is a tempting intellectual task but clearly beyond the scope of this paper; instead, I approach electoral activity during the period, since elections provide the opportunity of assessment of past contributions, and of confrontation. In the specific context of the Famine, theoretically at least, Irish MPs at Westminster were instrumental in bringing about a better knowledge of what was going on – and indeed some did so in quite a sustained, articulate, and often humane manner. Conversely, elections are moments in a country’s life when voters can take their representatives to account; and clearly, there was much to account for.

Parts of this article were presented at the Agrégation/Research conference at the University of Caen, 23rd January, 2015. An earlier version appeared in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women and Irish history: essays in honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997), pp. 109-124.

A Londoner by adoption, Kate O’Riordan grew up in the small city of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland. With Le Garçon dans la lune, published in 2008 and Pierres de mémoire, in 2009, O’Riordan signed two new remarkable opuses in which she questions family relationships. A novelist and short-story writer, Kate O’Riordan also writes for the cinema and continues to confirm her legitimate place among Irish authors who count. She came to the Villa Gillet to take part in a discussion on 'Ireland by Irish writers'.

It’s a stormy night in Dublin. My father comes into the bedroom to close the window. But the old sash window is rotten. As he tries pull it down, the wooden frame comes apart in his hands like a piece of fruit cake. The glass is smashed. So my father has to find a way to cover over the gaps. He looks around and picks up the nearest thing at hand. In the corner of the room there is a map of the world, a big rolled up school atlas which he’s kept from the time he was a schoolteacher. He rolls it out and nails the atlas up against the window frame. It’s a temporary solution, he says. Go to sleep. So that’s how I fall asleep, with the wind blowing across the world, flapping at the oceans and the continents. The world is there in the morning with the sun coming through.

Somebody mentioned the word confusion. That is probably the word that describes my childhood most clearly. It was a confusion of languages, confusion between the inside of the house and the outside of the house, confusion between my father’s idealism and my mother’s memories. There’s always been confusion in my life.

Anne Enright came to Lyon in May 2010 to take part in the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. She was kind enough to answer our questions and to read an extract from her novel entitled The Gathering which won the 2007 Booker Prize.