How the concept of electricity has emerged in Irish writing since Joyce, connecting digital-global communications and the ecological imagination in Irish writing. Points of focus range from the conceptual convergence of national electrification and grammatical network construction in Finnegans Wake, to dissociated networks of electricity production and consumption in Heaney’s poems, to Carson’s invention, in poetry and prose, of the hypertextual urban centre emerging of complex, electrical communications circuits.
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Rewilding’s tactics take as a given a vast complexity of interacting processes, with interventions focused on rearranging elements in the dynamic system to encourage (bio)diverse ends. Recent criticism suggests that similar things are happening in the literary arts, as emergent textual practices seek to allow complexity to flourish. This project will engage a humanities-led exploration of complexity in the classroom, with an innovative pairing of Irish literature and digital games. A central concern is how the texts defer to wildness or complexity as the “natural” form of cultural and biological processes.
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