후기 식민주의 박물관에서 역사 다시 쓰기: 켈트 호랑이 시기 이반 볼란드의 시를 중심으로

Rewriting History at the Postcolonial Museum: Eavan Boland’s Poetry During the Celtic Tiger and After

This paper applies the concept of museum to read contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland’s first sequence “Writing in a Time of Violence: A Sequence” in her 1994 collection of poems. The conceptual framework relies on the periodic, generic, and thematic affinities between the ways modern Irish history museums have functioned in shaping the national identity and the kinds of questions at the core of Boland’s writing. Here, the term “museum” functions as both an actual institution and a spatial figure for a kind of repository for collective memory. Dubbed “the Celtic Tiger,” Ireland’s economic boom from 1995 to 2007, promoted the reconceptualization of Irishness, which had long been rooted in traumatic historical events such as the Great Famine and diaspora. Equipped with economic abundance and increased (reverse) immigration, it seemed that the Irish public could finally envision a better, more livable future. In short, postcolonial history museums in Ireland were responsible for outlining and articulating modern Irishness. Boland’s work, which repeatedly attempts to summon up hidden or unspoken voices, is most compelling when it is set in the context of a museum, or when it mimics and revises curatorial methodologies. Drawing on the relationship between the genre of poetry and the notion of museum and its curatorial displays, this paper has a two-fold purpose: examining how Boland’s writing is inspired by the growing significance of modern Irish history museums during and after the Celtic Tiger; tracking the ways it seeks─and fails at times─to recreate and reimagine national history, ultimately to better articulate what she views as an Irishness fit for the new era.