Counterfactual Geographies: Creating Urban Space in Post-Crash Irish Fiction
Files
Academic Unit
College of Arts and Sciences
Publication Date
2024
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
This chapter explores the depiction of the space of the International Financial Services Centre in Paul Murray's 2015 novel The Mark and the Void. In doing so it provides an analysis of the relationship between Irish fiction and the financialisation of Irish urban space. The chapter suggests that Murray's novel critiques the subjection of urban space to the logic of global financial capital, while also gesturing towards new ways of thinking about and constructing urban space that resist that logic. The Mark and the Void identifies the fissures in the financialised space of Dublin through which a different urban spatiality might be imagined and brought into being, and through which a ‘counterfactual geography’ might be imagined from within the conditions created by financial catastrophe. However, while the novel articulates the critical-utopian impulse to go beyond understanding the transformation of Dublin, towards the possibility of its being reimagined, it stops short of enacting that possibility in its own narrative structure. The chapter ends by noting that while Murray's novel critiques the conditions by which urban space has been remade by neoliberal capital, literature has the capacity to not just demand that we reclaim the city, but also enable us, imaginatively, to do so.
ISBN
9781003305392
Publisher
Routledge
City
New York, NY
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003305392
Recommended Citation
Lanigan, Liam, "Counterfactual Geographies: Creating Urban Space in Post-Crash Irish Fiction" (2024). Faculty Authors and Creators Reception. 88.
https://opus.govst.edu/fac/88
Description
Chapter 1
in The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing
Fogarty, A; O'Brien, E. (eds.)