친밀함과 낯설음: 이반 볼랜드의 유목적 주체로서 시 쓰기

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Eavan Boland’s poems evoke Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the nomadic subject, crossing over ‘intimacy’ and ‘estrangement’: the nomadic subject allows the poet to “think through and moves across established categories and levels of experience,” blurring boundaries. First of all, Boland’s poems deconstruct the hegemonic discourse of Irish nationalism and British imperialism, revealing the wounds of the past and its own weakness in the present. Boland’s earlier diaspora poetry describes an ‘in-between’ space between being marginalized and being privileged, based on her personal experience of exile and dislocation. Throughout the poems, Boland portrays the fallacy involved in patriarchal nationalists’ attempts to define Ireland, and advocates adopting a ‘in-between’ position with which to counteract essentialist notions such as ‘Irishness’ and ‘Englishness.’ In this sense, “As Irish Childhood in England: 1951” and “Fond Memory” highlight the speaker’s dispossession as a child who feels neither entirely English nor Irish. Disrupting the authority of nationalism as a hegemonic ideal, Boland formulates a workable idea of nationalism as a more inclusive and fluid ideology. Boland lays claim to a new understanding of what it meant to be Irish. Ultimately, her poems throw a new light on the notion of Irishness, which stands for a category that is beyond national boundaries.