Sounding Difference: Paul Muldoon’s “The Lass of Aughrim”

Abstract

In the present paper, I focus on a single short poem “The Lass of Aughrim” by Paul Muldoon with a view to showing that it invites the reader to participate in the process of approaching in language the foreignness of another culture. The persona depicts a situation in which an ethical choice is vested in the act of speaking, which either acknowledges the irreducible otherness implicit in the poem or imposes an essentially colonial point of view. The ethical dimension as it is probed here is derived from some insights of Jacques Derrida, especially his lectures delivered in the 1990s.

Keywords

• Paul Maldoon
• foreignness
• ethics
• deconstruction