Responsable de l’atelier
Philippe CAUVET (Université de Poitiers)
Bourdeau, Marion, Univ. Jean Moulin Lyon 3, marion.bourdeau@gmail.com
Hagstone (Sinéad Gleeson, 2024) : Dépeindre les mécanismes d’émancipation, explorer la zone grise entre communauté et individualité.
Dans Hagstone (2014), Sinéad Gleeson utilise la figure de Nell, une artiste résidant sur une île où résonne de temps à autre un bruit surnaturel et dont les principales habitantes sont les Iníons, une communauté de femmes vivant en autarcie, pour raconter une saison de transition dans la vie de cette femme qui se voit contactée par la figure de proue de la communauté, Maman, pour créer une œuvre d’art visant à célébrer les trente ans de cette sororité au fonctionnement mystérieux et au rapport à la hiérarchie et à l’autodétermination parfois paradoxal.
Le roman se lit ainsi comme une réflexion croisée sur l’insularité, l’isolement, le groupe, le féminisme, l’art et l’étrange. Ces différents axes sont ordonnés autour de la figure de Nell d’une part, et autour des Iníons de l’autre ; toutefois, la question de l’émancipation – ou plutôt, les mécanismes d’émancipation – constitue une autre clé de lecture permettant de lier ces notions. En effet, Nell comme les Iníons illustrent le « processus continu de lutte, d’adaptation et de réinvention » mentionné dans le CFP, en utilisant les outils à leur disposition (la vie en réclusion et en non-mixité pour les Iníons, l’expression artistique d’une sensibilité modelée par l’insularité pour Nell) pour s’inventer ou se réinventer une existence qui leur conviennent sur une île marquée par une forme de spiritualité syncrétiste. Au fil du texte, et alors que Nell est invitée à découvrir et partager une partie du quotidien de la communauté qui se fissure sous ses yeux face aux contradictions révélées par les deux projets artistiques auxquels elle s’est ouverte, se pose la question de savoir si le processus d’émancipation (de la société patriarcale, du capitalisme, du matérialisme notamment) – dont les personnages espèrent qu’elle les mènera à un état de liberté synonyme de bien-être –, est émancipation par la communauté ou si au contraire il s’agit d’une émancipation de la communauté ; par ricochet, se pose aussi la question de savoir si l’émancipation est nécessairement individuelle ou si elle peut être collective.
Cette communication se propose donc d’analyser la manière dont l’autrice étudie ce qui se trame entre communauté et individualité lors des divers processus d’émancipation dépeints dans le roman.
Marion Bourdeau, Maîtresse de Conférences à l’Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3, a effectué sa thèse de doctorat en Études Irlandaises à l’Université de Caen Normandie sous la direction du Professeur Bertrand Cardin. Sa recherche, qui utilise notamment un angle d’approche stylistique, porte sur la littérature irlandaise contemporaine, et en particulier sur l’écriture de la spatialité et de l’éthique dans l’œuvre fictionnelle de Colum McCann.
Brancaz-McCartan, Lauren, Univ. Savoie-Mont Blanc, lauren.brancaz-mccartan@univ-smb.fr
From slavery to inclusivity – St. Patrick’s Day as a case study on emancipation
From the US to Argentina, from Australia to Malaysia, St. Patrick’s Day is nowadays celebrated in over two hundred countries.1 Originally a Christian tradition marking, on 17 March, the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick, a fifth-century slave from Roman Britain who converted the pagan Irish to Christianity, St. Patrick’s Day has now turned into an international celebration of Irish culture and heritage.
This paper does not purpose to focus on the major tourist attraction that St. Patrick’s Day has become. It offers instead to concentrate on how St. Patrick’s Day has contributed in the modern era to empowering LGBTQ+ communities to gain greater social recognition after decades of exclusion. Key efforts made in the USA and Ireland to make St. Patrick’s Day more inclusive of all people regardless of their sexual orientation will be analysed. This will serve to demonstrate that this form of emancipation from social constraints has sprung from a partnership between Irish Americans and the Irish, with the former inspiring the latter to try and integrate innovations in Ireland. Overall, this paper will discuss how the Irish and people of Irish descent have re-imagined themselves as a community beyond geographical and social borders.
Lauren Brancaz-McCartan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen and the École Doctorale de Grenoble. She currently works at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc, where she teaches British history, business English, legal English, communication, and translation. Her research interests include the relationships between states and nations, diasporic movements, the shaping of collective memories, and nation branding.
Lacoste, Chloé, Univ. d’Orléans, chloe.lacoste@univ-orleans.fr
Popular emancipation and the politics of respectability – tensions and contradictions in Fenian funerals
In the struggle for Irish Independence, the group known as the Fenians – emerging with the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858 – distinguished itself by its focus on reaching not only administrative and political emancipation from the British Empire, but the establishment of an independent republic which would promote social, cultural, and religious emancipation (from the Catholic Church as well as from the Empire). The Fenians were identified as revolutionary, insurrectionary, and anticlerical.
The IRB’s clandestine character and the specific context of the Party Processions Act, which prohibited political display in processions from 1850 to 1872, led the Fenians to invest Ireland’s popular funerary culture and promote their politics of emancipation via massive processions, starting with the 1861 funeral of Terence Bellew McManus (an 1848 leaders) and continuing into the 20th century.
Starting as a way around a prohibitive imperial law, these funerals were used as opportunities to highlight the organisational capacities of the Fenians, boast popular support, and encourage popular autonomy from both Church (which condemned these demonstrations) and Empire. This meant positioning themselves as challengers of the established institutions, able to build and organise the future republic – leading to insistence on a form of respectability whose definition was still imposed by the imperial and religious elites. Such tension between emancipation and respectability would lead to contradictions which allowed appropriation of the Fenian aesthetic by less revolutionary groups.
My research starts with the McManus funeral in 1861 and ends with the Rossa funeral in 1915 – shortly before the 1916 Easter Rising. The legacy of the Fenians and of the IRB was explicitly claimed by the organisers of the Rising, with reference to the Fenian dead whose work for an independent republic was frequently commemorated through the previous century. This is often interpreted as a victory for them, and in terms of insurrectionary culture, it was. But the politics established by Irish leaders after the Rising were far from the Fenian vision of popular emancipation.
In this paper, I plan to focus more specifically on the trend towards a form of standardisation of political funerals in Ireland by the turn of the century, which I interpret as one of the reasons why it was possible to symbolically appropriate the Fenian struggle without truly integrating its emancipatory ideology. I will use this angle to discuss the inherent tensions and contradictions of a struggle for emancipation which also exhibited an ambition to rule the country.
Naugrette, Marion, Univ. Sorbonne Nouvelle, marion.naugrette@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Do Bogs Have Rights ? Exploring the Emancipation of Nature in Modern Irish Literature and Art
In December 2023, an Oireachtas legislative committee recommended that the Irish government begin drafting constitutional amendments recognizing nature’s inherent rights and affirming a human right to a clean environment and a stable climate. If enacted, Ireland would become the first European state to constitutionally acknowledge ecosystems as legal subjects. This unprecedented political momentum, emerging from the Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss (2022), offers an opportunity to reconsider how Irish cultural production imagines ecological agency and the more-than-human world.
This paper situates contemporary Irish literature and art within the broader theoretical frameworks of ecocriticism, posthumanism, and postcolonial studies, arguing that these works construct alternative epistemologies of the Irish bog at a moment when activists seek a referendum on the Rights of Nature. The bog—long framed as a colonial “wasteland,” and today repurposed as technological infrastructure for AI data-processing—functions as a crucial site where ecological, political, and epistemic struggles converge. As Roisin Agnew (“Bog Communism”, 2025) and Bresnihan & Brodie (From the Bog to the Cloud, 2025) show, the bog has historically been subjected to extraction, abstraction, and infrastructural domination, revealing a continuity between imperial land management and contemporary techno-capitalist forms of enclosure. My contribution is to bring together these political developments with a close ecocritical reading of literary and artistic representations of the bog, highlighting how they articulate a form of ecological and postcolonial emancipation that anticipates, complicates, or even exceeds current legal debates. Through Brian Friel’s play The Mundy Scheme (1969) and H. P. Lovecraft’s2 short story taking place in Ireland, “The Moon-Bog” (1921), I intend to demonstrate how the Irish bog has been imagined as both a vulnerable resource and a resistant, memory-laden, more-than-human protagonist—aligning with posthumanist conceptions of distributed agency. I shall then turn to “bog art,” including works by Barrie Cooke, Padraig Larkin, and Sean Lynch’s Irish Energies (2007), inspired by an artwork by Joseph Beuys, made on one of his frequent visits to Ireland in 1974, to show how Irish contemporary artists foreground materiality, multispecies entanglement, and ecological subjecthood.
I will argue that these imaginative practices constitute a cultural groundwork for the Rights of Nature in Ireland, offering conceptual tools—such as more-than-human agency, decolonial ecology, and the re-enchantment of damaged landscapes—that may help reconfigure the bog not as a resource but as a sovereign ecological subject.
Marion Naugrette-Fournier is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies & Irish Studies in the
Department of Anglophone Studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She is currently working on a monograph about the recycling processes at work in Irish poet Derek Mahon’s poetry, which will include critical perspectives influenced by environmental studies and material culture studies, as well as object-oriented ontology. She is also a translator and has translated several poems from English and Irish into French in the bilingual anthology of poems entitled Femmes d’Irlande en poésie: 1973-2013, published in 2013 by Clíona Ní Ríordáin (Editions Caractères). In 2015 she has been awarded the EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) translation prize for her translations of Yeats poems, as part of the “Yeats Reborn Project” launched by EFACIS. Her translations of Yeats’ poems were published in 2015 in the book Yeats Reborn by Peeters Publishers, Leuven, and on the “Yeats Reborn Project” website (www.yeatsreborn.eu). She has also co-translated Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth into French, which will be published at the Editions de l’Oxalide in September 2026.