Current PhD Student

Francisca Fernández Arce

Thesis Title:

Authenticity and Uncertainty in the Belfast Group’s Marginalia

Supervisor:

Professor Matthew Campbell

Description:

My doctoral research focuses upon the marginal works of three specific members of what became known as The Belfast Group, a gathering of teachers and students at Queen’s University, Belfast, under the helm of Philip Hobsbaum: Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Paul Muldoon (1951), and Medbh McGuckian (1950). Through an analysis of their pamphlets, limited editions, collected editions, and digital translations, I aim to confront questions of material precarity and authorial uncertainty against larger issues of social and political violence and incertitude within a Northern Irish context. My project draws from sociological notions such as Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field of cultural production’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘material labour,’ alongside empirical research conducted by myself, to posit precarity at an economic and thematic level, foregrounding the unstable nature of the works themselves as well as their representations of unreliability. Using Derek Attridge’s conception of singularity as intimacy, moreover, I argue that examining these authors’ marginalised texts offers significant insight into how they approach authenticity and identity as an act-event that destabilises the boundaries between self and other and, ultimately, our definition of work of art.