Scholarcast 48: Everybody Speaks: Utopia and Polyphony in The Commitments
UCDscholarcast
English - April 24, 2015 09:00 - 21 minutes - 1023 Bytes - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsEducation ucd scholarcast art culture literature english dcu paige reynolds frank mcguinness claire wills Homepage Download IPFS Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Scholarcast 46: Children and the Irish Cultural Revival
Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitably return. This holds true for the utopian imagined community – a "Dublin soul band" – proposed and tested in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. If the imagined community represented by the band is haunted by the inevitable return of the political, the novel nonetheless embodies a utopia of speech – a Bakhtinian polyphony in which no one voice is figured as the privileged arbiter of meaning.