Mapping Memory and Violence: Spatial Form, Mediation, and the Urban Imaginary in Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003)
JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE AND LANGUAGE STUDIES, cilt.14, sa.30, ss.202-214, 2026 (Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 14 Sayı: 30
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.59045/nalans.2026.105
- Dergi Adı: JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE AND LANGUAGE STUDIES
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Directory of Open Access Journals, MLA International Bibliography
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.202-214
- Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Abstract:
Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003), published in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement that followed violent disputes known as the Troubles, explores the problematic transition from conflict to negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Although the Agreement marked a political transformation, the city’s entrenched divisions persisted, continuing to influence both collective psychology and everyday experience. This article examines Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003) as a poetic reinscription of Belfast as a city space in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Carson treats Belfast’s urban space as a medium for memory, political agenda, and linguistic displacement. Through disruptive syntax, genre collages, spectacle, and auditory mapping, the collection both records and resists sectarian violence while generating an urban imaginary. The Belfast Carson portrayed here is multilayered, unstable, and under surveillance. His poetry does not passively depict space but actively recontextualises it, using reportage, broadcasts, and maps as bearers of memory and agency. The poetic persona, occasionally adopting the role of flaneur, possesses a heightened awareness of urban dynamics, surveillance, and political tension. This study questions the assumed natural link between place and its representation by reading Belfast as a city shaped not only by geography but by memory, violence, media narratives, and ongoing social negotiation.
Keywords: Ciaran Carson, Breaking News (2003), the Troubles, city space, mapping, mediation