Anna burns Milkman
For the sake of brevity,want to use an extract from Claire Hutton’s recent essay “The Moment and Technique of Milkman” to outline some of ‘Milkman’s main preoccupations.
In this text, Hutton contextualises the production and circulation of Burns’s “Milkman” in relation to Faber&Faber’s other publishing success of the same year, Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People.’
Hutton identifies three main preoccupations in ‘Milkman,’ she writes, ‘first, Milkman is an indictment of how vulnerable people, particularly children, suffer in the face of extreme violence; second, it is an analysis of the psychological impacts of harassment; third, it provides a carefully observed anatomy of Northern Irish society in the 1970s.’ (Hutton, 2018, p.11) My research questions will aim to interrogate the veracity of these three claims, using a range of critical and creative texts.
1 The first of these research questions is, in which ways does Burns’ use of repetition (and/or) renaming in “The Milkman” explore modes of, late twentieth century, Irish resistance to British occupation?
2 What do you understand by relational psychoanalysis, and what do you want it to help you to do? You can formulate this as a question/hypothesis: e.g.
This explores how relational psychoanalysis contributes to an understanding of …. ‘
Wanted to do a literature search on ‘Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing’ (via the online Library) to check for psychoanalytic material on the Troubles and on transgenerational trauma/civil war/nationalism. There may be more search terms you can think of.
When you have done that – and seen what is there – you can revisit the three themes you’ve identified – repetition, intertextuality and renaming – to see how they map on to your wider socio-political questions about cultural memory/social violence/nationalism.