Annotated Bibliography: Sample Entry

Deane, Seamus.  “Civilians and Barbarians.”  Ireland’s Field Day.  Derry: Field Day Theatre
 Co., 1983.  33-42.

	In this essay, Seamus Deane argues that the discourse of irrationalism holds a privileged place in contemporary Irish political writing.  Basing his arguments largely on the history of  post-1850 Ireland, and particularly on the rise of the temperance movement,  Deane shows how many English commentators on Irish history draw an “undeniable relationship between civilization, the Common Law and Protestentism” (35) in order to derogate Catholic mass political and social action as “irrational.”  While Deane’s arguments are persuasive, there are many opportunities to assess the attribution of “irrationalism” in contemporary Irish culture to which Deane pays little attention.  In my essay, “Defending the Indefensible: Thomas Kinsella and the Discourse of Irrationalism,” I will be arguing that an appeal to rationalism still subtends the critique of much contemporary Irish literature, and that the poet Thomas Kinsella explores the roots of Irish “irrationalism” in a way that makes his poetry difficult for many critics to assess accurately.