Today was one of the busier days of out trip. We visited the Abbey Theatre for No’s Knife, saw a statue of people who suffered thought Irish famine, saw a ship, that took Irish emigrants to America, and participated in a James Joyce walking tour.

This morning in class we discussed major themes in modern and post modern literature. Themes such as death, class consciousness, existentialism, illusion versus reality, etc.  I spoke about The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield published in 1922 and how it is about Laura does not seem to empathize with the Dead man or his family but rather romanticize his death and collect this new experience for herself.  We spoke about that to lead into the topic of liminality present in Eveline. How there are many moments where Eveline herself seems to be caught between two places, neither fully in one nor the other.

We also discussed Beckett’s Text’s for Nothing and it’s obscurity. It being a sort of stream of consciousness with out plot

I thought of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how fulfilling one’s basic need allows for one to ponder existence and consciousness. Maybe that is something that separated Joyce and Beckett from Ireland. Because of the paralysis and because the people were not elevating into those higher levels of thinking due to their socio economic status preventing them from doing so.

We finished off at the Abbey Theatre and it was quite interesting to see and hear Beckett’s words being acted out. The performance made me understand the texts more because The actress Lisa Dwan uses so many different inflections in her voice and body language.