Gottesdienstubertragungen werden von einem Teil der Theologen abgelehnt. Skeptisch sind viele, wenn es um die Artikulation des Religiosen geht. Niemand bestreitet, das das Fernsehen ein Medium fur die politische Auseinandersetzung und die Darstellung politischer Vorgange ist und das es zugleich ein Medium der Unterhaltung geworden ist. The commensurate commercial and affective impact of Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), which became ‘an emotional episode, somehow, in public life in Ireland’ (O’Faolain, 1998: 215), suggested that in an era of burgeoning narcissism and affluent secular individualism, personal stories that were once admitted only to partner or priest were now more likely to be committed to the page. By the time its sequel, ‘Tis, appeared in 1999, booksellers’ shelves were sagging under the weight of copycat texts, proof that the autobiographical gesture was becoming endemic in ‘Celtic Tiger Ireland’ a.k.a. To date, there has been no systematic book-length survey of an autobiographical tradition persisting across four centuries and, with a few notable exceptions, critical studies of the place of life writing in the oeuvre of individual authors remain unwritten.1 None of the leading Irish Studies journals has seen fit to devote a special issue to the topic, conferences on Irish autobiography are rare and the subject seldom merits more than a cursory mention in literary companions and encyclopedias.2 This critical neglect seems all the more curious when one considers the preponderance of life writing in contemporary Irish culture, spectacularly spearheaded by Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), a book which ‘transcended bestsellerdom to become a publishing phenomenon - a million-seller, a prize-gatherer, a cult-former’ (Foster, 2001: 165). When weighed against the welter of scholarship on Irish poetry, drama and fiction, the critical literature on life writing seems remarkably slight, in quantity if not quality. If, in these days of voluminous literary criticism, Irish literature can be said to have a Cinderella genre, then surely it is autobiography. However, it generated an enormous amount of emotional identification, particularly from Irish women, who not only bought the book, but wrote to O’Faolain, and stopped her in the street, to tell her what her book - as an act of speaking out - meant to them, and who felt that she had articulated their lives for the first time.3 O’Faolain’s appearance on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show in October 1996, Ireland’s most important television entertainment programme, pushed the book to the forefront of the national consciousness and the book sold out.2 It might not have been this way, for the kind of narrative that O’Faolain presents is not a necessarily endearing or popular one, nor one perhaps that many can identify with in a literal way. This mix of deference, assertiveness and, at times, wonder, struck a chord with the Irish reading public. There is something almost defensive in her tone - who is trying to make her accept her own life’s insignificance? - yet also something defiant in her burning and howling. In the opening pages of Are You Somebody?, Nuala O’Faolain justifies her decision to write a memoir, claiming a need to speak, to assert the significance of her life.
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