역사 탈/신화화하기: 브라이언 프리엘의『역사 만들기』를 중심으로

Abstract

With Northern Ireland still a colonial base of sorts, Irish writers in literature and other discourses are in the process of rewriting Ireland today. In particular, Brian Friel and Field Day Theater Company have founded a “new Irish literary movement” in the sense that they aim to examine and analyze the established opinions, slogans, myths which have gone to the creation of the present troubles in Ireland. In Making History, Friel questions the stability of myth/memory/history by exploring the most crucial and decisive loss in Irish history, and investigates the complex processes by which events are transformed into texts. Discussing and illustrating the extent to which to write history is indeed to translate the past, to make a story, he suggests that all historical narratives are partial, selective, and incomplete. The difference between two characters’s attitudes on the historiography, O’Neill’s and Lombard’s, designates the degree of which the same historical fact can be remembered and written into different versions. Recognizing the inevitability of hybrid Anglicized Ireland, Friel seeks to puncture the overinflated myth of an Irish Ireland that was deployed by the narrow conservative, isolationist nationalist. Friel attempts to imagine a truly liberating cultural alternative and seeks to establish a new identity to redefine their present situation by rewriting Irish history with Irish-English more powerful than English-English.