Singing Ideas

Tríona Ní Shíocháin is a whistle-player, singer and interdisciplinary scholar specializing in performance theory, oral theory and Irish-language song and poetry. She is Professor of Modern Irish and Performing Arts at Maynooth University, and was previously Lecturer in Irish Traditional Music at University College, Cork. She is author of Bláth’s Craobh na nÚdar: Amhráin Mháire Bhuí (2012).

Chapter 1. Singing Ideas: An Alternative History of Thought





(Un)doing History: The Authority of Literacy and the Performativity of Thought

Oral Trouble and Women’s Voices: Searching for Intellectual

Traditions Beyond the Written Word

Singing Politics and Power in Society: Some Comparative Examples

Seizing Agency: Women of Song

Beyond the Limits of Textuality: Performing the Past and Performing Thought



Chapter 2. ‘Where Everything Trembles in the Balance’: Song as a Liminal Ludic Space





The Theory of Liminality

Performing Liminality: Poetry as a Symbolic Marker for Liminality in the Irish Tradition

A Journey to the Sacred and Back: The Liminality of the Aisling (Vision)

Song and Oral Poetic Performance as Ritual

Separating from the Profane: Ekstasis and Song

Moments of Potentiality: The Antistructure of Melody and Verse in the Irish Tradition

The Ritual Powers of (Song) Poetry: Satire, Insult and Fearlessness

The Potentiality of the Play-Sphere: The Challenging Discourse of Song

The Singer of Ideas as ‘Seer of Communitas’: The Liminality of Song and the Generation of Ideas



Chapter 3. Singing Parrhesia: Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire, Song Performance and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland





Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire: Nineteenth-Century Song Poet

Irish-Language Song-Making: Poetry as Performance and the Aesthetics of Orality

Multiformity and Oral Formulaic Techniques

Local Agrarian Agitation and the Creation of the Poetic Radical

Crisis and Charisma: The Song Poet as Prophet and Truth-Teller

Identity and the Aesthetics of Orality: New Ideas and the Narrative of Belonging

Framing the Revolution: Performing Antistructure and the Vision of the Revolution through Song

From Generation to Generation to Regeneration: The Legacy of Ideas through Song



Conclusion: Singing Ideas in Society: Experience, Song and ‘Passing Through’



Appendix of Songs and Lore



Bibliography

Index