Public works
Subtitle: infrastructure, Irish modernism, and the postcolonial
By: Michael Rubenstein
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Notre Dame, Ind
Language: eng
Number of pages: 261
ISBN-13: 9780268040307
Description: "" ... one of the most original and important contributions to Irish studies, and to a number of other fields as well, that has been written by a young scholar in recent years. It will be an important and much discussed book. It participates in, and outlines the future of, significant new directions in areas such as Irish studies, modernist studies, postcolonial studies, and the study of the relations among technology, materiality, and culture."--Marjorie Howes, Boston College" ""Public Works, Michael Rubenstein's pathbreaking book, brilliantly explores relationships between modern èngineering cultures' and literary cultures. Juxtaposing literary texts and electric power generators, plays and water schemes, he offers us nothing less than a new way to read literary modernism's engagement with the real. His book represents a major intervention in postcolonial studies, uncovering new and pragmatic models of imagined community after colonialism. Additionally, Rubenstein's work marks a significant move in contemporary Irish studies by developing paradigms that help us read Ireland's postcolonial statehood in a global context. It also offers highly original readings of a series of Irish late-modernist writers, all in a timely and truly interdisciplinary project, beautifully done."---Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara."

""Can you imagine a Joycean appeal for the payment of taxes? If you do not find it easy, you may be ready to take in the superb literary flair and pitch-perfect sense of present urgencies that puts Public Works at the sharpest edge of new scholarship. Michael Rubenstein makes a tiger's leap into the recent past, when the intimacy of the home had not yet learned to take for granted its connection to networks of electricity, gas, and water. He has written the book on the very hot topic of infrastructure, and he's done so while also figuring out a new direction for postcolonial studies. You will never be able to read Ulysses the same way again."--Bruce Robbins, Columbia University"--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The postcolonial comedy of development: public works and Irish modernism; title: Aquacity: plumbing consciousness in Joyce's Dublin; title: A fountain of nationality: haunted infrastructure in Flann O'Brien's The third policeman; title: Electrifiction, or dramatizing power: the Shannon scheme, the free state, and Denis Johnston's The moon in the yellow river; title: Other rough beasts: comparative postcolonialism and the dream of infrastructure.