Cover not available
Part of
Language in Place: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment
Edited by Daniela Francesca Virdis, Elisabetta Zurru and Ernestine Lahey
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37] 2021
► pp. 65–84

Chapter 4
Liminal islands

A cognitive stylistic analysis of “Beyond the Pale” and “Rathlin” by Derek Mahon

ORCID logo | University of Gloucestershire |

This chapter uses Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) in conjunction with Stockwell’s model of literary resonance (2009) to analyse the mechanisms by which liminal spaces are created and developed in two poems by Derek Mahon. The analysis will focus on how liminal spaces are used in the poems to effect co-presences. In ‘Beyond the Pale’ a sense of loneliness and longing is created through the superimposition of topographically similar but distant landscapes, allowing wished co-presences to be made tantalisingly close, but never realised. While in ‘Rathlin’ a liminal seascape allows for the possibilities of temporal co-presences in a space which is outside of our normal conception of time. The study will show that the combination of Text World Theory with the attentional tracking capabilities of the resonance model offers a more dynamic version of Text World Theory that attends to text-worlds in attentional relation to each other over time, which in turn helps to create the liminal effects of the poems.

Keywords: liminality, Text World Theory, resonance, poetry, Derek Mahon
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Liminality
  • 3.Text World Theory
  • 4.Resonance
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1“Beyond the Pale”
    • 5.2“Rathlin”
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 15 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.37.04mcl
References
Bradshaw, B.
2015 ‘And So Began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness, and Nationalism in Pre-Modern Ireland. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Clark, W.
1971 Rathlin, Disputed Island. Waterford: Volturna Press.Google Scholar
Carstensen, K-U.
2007 Spatio-temporal ontologies and attention. Spatial Cognition and Computation 7 (1): 13–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gavins, J.
2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Homem, R. C.
2005 “Neither here nor there”: Representing the liminal in Irish poetry. Irish University Review 35 (2): 288–303.Google Scholar
Kruczkowska, J.
2012 Derek Mahon’s seascapes mediated through Greece: Antiquity in modernity, nature in abstraction. In Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts, M. Mianowski (ed), 69–80. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mahon, D.
2011 New Collected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Press.Google Scholar
McLoughlin, N.
2013 Negative polarity in Eavan Boland’s “The Famine Road”. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 10 (2): 219–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016a Into the futures of their makers: A cognitive poetic analysis of reversals, accelerations and shifts in time in the poems of Eavan Boland. In World Building: Discourse in the Mind, J. Gavins & E. Lahey (eds), 259–276. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
2016b Being gone: A Text-World analysis of ambiguity in Eavan Boland’s “Suburban Woman: A Detail”. In Old and New, Tried and Untried: Creativity and Research in the 21st Century University, J. Kroll, A. Melrose, & J. Webb, (eds), 123–140. Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing.Google Scholar
2018 Resonance and absence: A text-world analysis of ‘Tuonela’ by Philip Gross. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 16 (1), 89–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serée-Chaussinand, C.
2012 Derek Mahon’s literal littorals. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 251 (1): 51–58.Google Scholar
Simpson, P.
1993 Language, Ideology and Point of View, London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stockwell, P.
2009 The cognitive poetics of literary resonance. Language and Cognition 1.1: 25–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Ethics and imagination in literary reading. In Discourse and Creativity, R. Jones (ed), 36–51. London: Pearson.Google Scholar
Thomassen, B.
2015 Thinking with liminality. In Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, A. Horvath, B. Thomassen, & H. Wydra (eds), 39–58. New York: Berghahn Books. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turner, V.
1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
1974a Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
1974b Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. Rice Institute Pamphlet – Rice University Studies 60 (3): 53–92.Google Scholar
Van Gennep, A.
1960 The Rites of Passage, M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee (Tr). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ward, T. B., Finke, R. A., & Smith S. M.
1995 Creativity and the Mind: Discovering the Genius Within. Cambridge MA: Perseus Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Werth, P.
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
1995 How to build a world (in a lot less than six days and using only what’s in your head). In New Essays on Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature, K. Green (ed), 49–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar