Book News: the gramophone's influence in Irish literature

 Ireland’s Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

BY ZAN CAMMACK

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97977-0

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55431/

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

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The specificity with which this book, as quoted above, documents the arrival of the Edison’s invention is characteristic of its good use of historical sources to evoke the impact of the phonograph and later the gramophone in Ireland. Another strength is the alignment of such historical details to the machine’s technical realities; this is a book that uses diagrams, graphs, and tables to considerable critical effect. [...] In its marrying of careful textual analysis to historical detail and conceptual sophistication this lucid and engagingly written study should have a significant impact on future considerations of the intersection between technology and memory in Irish writing.

--Tom Walker, Estudios Irlandeses

Zan Cammack is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University. Her research primarily focuses on studies of material culture in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. She has published on Elizabeth Bowen, G.B. Shaw, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Austen (the latter two publications are manifestations of deep fangirling of said authors). Her current work is situated at the intersection of material culture and gender studies, including work on female performance studies in Samuel Beckett’s plays and flapper fashion and British politics.