The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nightdress

So there I was roysh, life focked, reputation focked, finances focked - everything completely focked, roysh, and we're talking big time. And it's all Fionn's fault, basically. He's the four-eyed focker who told me that, like, the first time you do it, roysh, you're firing blanks. Like an unloaded Uzi - seriously impressive, hard as fock and totally ready for action, but the safety's, like, on, you know. Well that was a pile of stinking turds for storters. And of course it's muggins here who ends up with the kid - life is SO focking unfair. On top of all that, roysh, the goys stort to, like, totally lose it - JP has gone all Jesus on my orse, Oisinn is basically trying to fock over Interpol and Christian is talking about weddings and, I don't know, love and stuff. I mean, I am seriously beginning to feel like I am the only good-looking, loaded, sane goy in the whole of, like, Dublin.

Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll Kelly offers a thorough examination of narrative devices, satirical modes, cultural context and humour, in Howard’s texts. The volume argues that his academic critical neglect is due to a classic bifurcation in Irish Studies between high and popular culture, and will use the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida to critique this division, building a theoretical platform from which to examine the significance of Howard’s work as an Irish comic and satirical writer. Addressing both the style and the substance of his work, this text locates him in a tradition of Irish satirical writing that dates back to the Gaelic bards, and includes writers like Swift, Wilde, Flann O’Brien and Joyce. Through textual and contextual analysis, this book makes the case for Howard as a significant and original voice in Irish writing, whose fusion of the three traditional types of satire (Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean), has created a parallel Ireland that shines a satirical light on its real counterpart. As Freud suggests, humour is a way of accessing aspects of the psyche that normative discourses cannot enunciate, and Howard, through the confessional voice of Ross, offers a fictive truth on twenty years of Irish society, a truth that is not accessed by discourse in the public sphere or by what could be termed literary or high cultural fiction.

The multiplicity of interpretations available in the word ‘passages’ is engaged with in this collection of essays that perceptively navigate the ideas of literal and metaphorical crossings, sites of liminality and interstitial zones, the traversal of boundaries and the complex notion of rites and rights of passage. This passages topic is elucidated through discussions on writers as diverse as James Joyce and the Palestinian poet Tawfīq Sāyigh and genres that include the novel, short story, poetry and drama. The diversity of texts is matched by a diversity of theoretical readings that stimulate debate around central ideas such as: how are old texts revisited and re-imagined in the context of new theories? How do contemporary texts re-appropriate the past to critically appraise the present? How is identity renegotiated in cross-cultural texts and in translations? The combination of close textual readings with broader philosophical and cultural deliberations allows for a vigorous examination of texts and theories. The authors, in capturing the cultural moment of their work while acknowledging the ongoing movement of the texts and theory, allow the reader to both contextualise the work and recognise the creative evolution of ideas that are simultaneously at play. Academically orientated, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in changing theoretical ideas and how they are re-invigorating a reading of literature. It will be of interest especially to students and scholars of English literature, philosophy and cultural studies. Its close textual analysis and multiple perspectives will also make it a very useful classroom text in the aforementioned areas.

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic, fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

This book offers a detailed engagement between the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the contemporary Irish author Paul Howard, aka Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. The book offers insightful analyses of Derrida’s deconstructive theory with all its concepts, non-concepts and neologisms, thus showing how they can be used in order to provide a critique of the socio-linguistic realm of Howard’s fictional series. Through his work, Howard set in ink a depiction of Ireland, and specifically Dublin, throughout the Celtic Tiger era and its aftermath. The book promotes a dialogue between Derrida and Howard in order to cultivate a succinct and accessible overview of critical theory.

Intimate discourse – that between couples, family and close friends in private, non-professional settings – lies at the heart of our everyday linguistic experience. It creates and sustains our closest relationships. Using an innovative blend of the community of practice model with a corpus linguistic methodology, Brian Clancy expertly reveals the patterns that characterise the shared linguistic repertoire of intimates. Corpus methods such as frequency and concordance are thoroughly introduced, exemplified and systematically employed in order to operationalise the concept of the community of practice in relation to intimate discourse. A half-million-word corpus of intimate data collected in various settings throughout Ireland provides the data for insights into patterns such as intimates’ use of pronouns, vocatives, taboo language and pragmatic markers. The intimate linguistic repertoire that emerges is shown to facilitate the delicate balance between our instinctive desire to be involved in the lives of those closest to us while at the same time recognising their need for privacy and non-imposition. Investigating Intimate Discourse will primarily be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working in the area, and to those working in related areas such as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Advanced undergraduates taking modules in those subjects will also find the book useful.