Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth

Authors

  • Inés Praga Terente University of Burgos

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v9i0.3689

Keywords:

Memory, Childhood, Youth, James Joyce, Seamus Deane, Patrick McCabe

Abstract

In this paper we aim to analyze three different works – The Dead,
The Butcher Boy and The Speckled People – and to show the capacity of
music to activate memory and to act as a catalyst for nostalgia. Ballads and songs create in these works a landscape of its own, functioning both as a barrier and as a link between different characters and different worlds. An instrument or a song can become an objective correlative to the characters‘broken dreams or truncated hopes, synchronizing with their life’s rhythm, their emotional shades and accurately echoing their passions and frustrations, since the music that interweaves in the text is by no means accidental. Quite the opposite, it emanates from a carefully selected repertoire that sounds at the crucial moments and that operates as a sort of musical variation on a threefold theme: a failed love experience, a truncated sentimental journey and an intense feeling of otherness.

Author Biography

  • Inés Praga Terente, University of Burgos

     ERENTE, INÉS PRAGA is Professor of English at the University of Burgos ( Spain). She is the author of Una belleza terrible: la poesía irlandesa contemporánea 1945-95,
    (1996), co author of Diccionario Cultural e Histórico de Irlanda ( 1996) and Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics (1998) and editor of Irlanda ante un
    Nuevo Milenio ( 2002) and La novela Irlandesa del siglo XX ( 2005) . In 1998 she received an honorary degree in Literature from The National University of Ireland (Cork).
    She is presently the Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies( AEDEI) and a member of the steering board of EFACIS ( European Federation of Irish Associations
    and Centres of Irish Studies ).

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Published

2007-06-17

Issue

Vol. 9 (2007): ABEI Journal 9

Section

Fiction

How to Cite

Praga Terente, I. (2007). Ways of Remembering: Musical Reveries Over Childhood and Youth. ABEI Journal, 9, 27-42. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v9i0.3689