![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Although Rooney could appear as a negative image of Joyce – for she is a young woman whose concerns and writing style are deeply rooted in the globalised twenty-first century’s issues – her treatment of youth trying to navigate an intellectual awakening therefore resonates within Joyce’s literary heritage. Indeed, Rooney’s characters act just like Stephen Dedalus, rejecting the sham pedantism of Dublin in their own time, while contributing to it through their adolescent posture of rebellious creation and their carving of an intellectual ethos, hence their shunning of Joyce. Paradoxically, this very refusal of “literary Irishness” seems to be part of literary Irishness itself. ![]() The omission therefore seems deliberate and tests the limits of hyper-canonicity in the field of literature and its study. Quite the opposite, they seem particularly resentful towards the notion of an Irish canon. However, they never mention reading or writing about any Irish author, which seems hardly believable for Irish students reading English at Trinity College Dublin. Sally Rooney’s first two novels Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018) are teeming with erudite references in the mouths of well-read characters. ![]()
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