In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the
Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship
between Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material
culture of the modern state known colloquially as "public
utilities" or "water, gas, and electricity." The water
tap, the toilet, the gas jet, and the electrical light switch: these
are all sites, in Irish modernism, of unexpected literary and
linguistic intensities that burst through the routines of everyday
life, defamiliarizing and reconceptualizing that which we might not
normally consider worthy of literary attention. Such public
utilities--material networks of power and provision, submission and
entitlement--are taken up in Irish modernism not only as a nexus of
anxieties about modern life, but also as a focal point for the hopes
held out for the postcolonial Irish Free State. Public utilities
figure a normative and utopian standard of modernity and
modernization; they embody in Irish modernism and in other
postcolonial literatures an ideal for the postcolonial state; and
they figure a continuity between the material networks of the modern
state and the abstract ideals of revolutionary republicanism
(liberty, equality, and brotherhood). They define a new territory of
contestation within the discourses of civil and human rights.
Moreover, public utilities influence the formal qualities of both
Irish modernist and postcolonial literature.
In analyses of literary works by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien,
Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick
Chamoiseau, Rubenstein asks us to think about the industrial networks
of the twentieth century alongside self-consciously "national"
literary works and to understand them as different but inherently
related forms of public works. In doing so his book maps thematic and
formal relationships between national infrastructure and national
literature, revealing an intimate dialogue between the nation's
literary arts and the state's engineering cultures.
