'Entre Deux Mers: Strands and Collages in Contemporary Irish Poetry

The moment a conference organiser decides to use the term ‘postmodern’ in the conference title, a number of reactions can be predicted. The call for papers will elicit a huge variety of abstracts, ranging from traditional academic literary criticism to more daring swipes at the sacred cows of intellectual debate. The term postmodern, loosely defined and even more
loosely interpreted, jumps headlong into the sea of eternally elusive signifiers in which meaning becomes an ever-receding target of the drive to
escape what Fredric Jameson referred to as the prison house of language. The poor conference organiser will look at the motley crew of
abstracts and attempt to cobble together panel sessions marked by a distinct lack of cohesion and unity. Key words in abstracts will be scoured
in order to shoehorn Seamus Heaney, Quentin Tarantino and Jacques Derrida into the same panel. However, postmodernity’s very useful getout clause is that this very heterogeneity is its defining characteristic. The fundamental difficulty with an attempted definition of postmodernity is that the very concept itself resists the imposition of any form of cultural
or intellectual hegemony. The critic of the postmodern, therefore, is left in a similar position to the crowd who observed Hans Christian Anderson’s naked Emperor as he paraded his sumptuous new clothes through
the streets of his town, applauding and praising something that clearly defies definition, and vaguely clapping the deluded monarch simply because everyone else is doing so.