| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
|
|
| 3. |
- Gray, Billy, 1961-
(author)
-
“A thrilling beauty”? : Violence, Transcendence and the Shankill Butchers in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man
- 2014
-
In: Estudios Irlandeses. - 1699-311X. ; :9, s. 54--66
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Shankill Butchers, a small group of Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) members based in aprotestant enclave in Belfast called the Shankill Road during the 1970’s, acquired areputation for indulging in pathological violence to a degree unparalleled in the annals of‘Troubles’ related murders. Led by a prominent U.V.F. member called Lenny Murphy, theShankill Butchers became notorious for the kidnapping, torture and murder of randomlyselected Catholics. As Conor Cruise O´Brien has noted, the Shankill Butchers “remain uniquein the sadistic ferocity of their modus operandi” and according to Feldman, the extremity oftheir actions push all conventional notions of violence in Northern Ireland to the backgroundand mark an “outer limit” in relation to what he terms “the symbolics of sectarian space andthe radical reduction of the Other to that space”.Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, while unable to lay claim to being the first literaryinvestigation into the atrocities carried out by Lenny Murphy and his associates, isnevertheless a text which has been accorded the greatest degree of critical attention in relationto the controversial manner in which it has attempted to remediate the Shankill Butcherlegacy. My paper will attempt to prove that the novel’s metafictive universe, self-consciousreflectivity and innovative generic hybridity, represents an attempt to transcend the spatialborders of Northern Ireland in order to present the conflict as an allegory of existential,postmodern alienation. Moreover, the violent psychopathology of the Shankill Butchers is, inMcNamee’s text, of universal as opposed to local, significance. Violence is portrayed as asearch for intimacy and transformation, a performative act that conveys agency in a worlddefined by virtual reality
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
|
|
