“synthesis Of Resistance”: An Investigation Into The Poetic Resistance Traditions Of Ireland And Palestine

This thesis is an investigation into the echoes and correspondences of poetics across the geographies and temporalities of the respective colonized experiences of Ireland and Palestine. By using a malleable understanding of temporality, one that is not necessarily equal in scale, this thesis seeks to illustrate how poetic literature is often written as a mode of response and resistance to violence and colonization. Since the colonization of Ireland is an extensively long timeline in comparison to Palestine, this thesis claims we can use a timeline where key moments (the moment of colonization, moments of disaster, and moments of resistance) are placed in parallel in order to analyze the poetry surrounding the events in an act of cross-cultural identification. Placing Ireland and Palestine in parallel can be difficult due to their distinct geographic, temporal and cultural differences, however there are many preexisting postcolonial theorists that use Ireland and Palestine as examples of cross-colonial identification such as Edward Said and Joe Cleary. While an understanding of their complex histories of corresponding experiences is an important step in the identification process, this thesis goes a step further and analyzes their lineages of poetic literatures together through a process of parallel close readings. This style of framing allows for analysis indigenous themes across the respective poetries while also preserving their alignment for analysis of identification and correspondence. By framing each close reading with the colonial history, this thesis illustrates how colonialism impacts the thematic and formal poetic stylings of communities.