期刊名称：Estudios Irlandeses : Journal of Irish Studies
电子版ISSN：1699-311X
出版年度：2007
期号：2
出版社：Asociación Española de Estudios Irlandeses
摘要：This paper examines recent accounts by Americans who have learned Irish. Their narratives from the West of Ireland express what translation theorist Michael Cronin calls 'individualist politics of language'. He claims that the English-speaking majority will determine the survival of 21st century Irish. Cronin shifts Irish into a globalized, 'late modern' network. Foreign-born learners enter this network when they choose to study Irish. They counter the stereotype of Irish schoolchildren forced into rote recitation of a moribund language. Patricia Monaghan combines goddess-worship with academic research into indigenous spirituality, place-name lore, literature, and the Irish environmental inheritance. Her travelogue and reports by five other American visitors to Gaeltachtaí are compared with John Montague and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's literary depictions of 20th-century Irish-born school-level learners. Feminist, post-colonial, and literary criticisms enrich understanding of how American students apply ecological and cultural strategies that seek to recover this indigenous language. Choosing to make the case for Irish, adult students share Cronin's 'individualist politics'. In English-language books, American advocates preserve and expand a linguistic ecology in which Irish may survive.
关键词：Eco-criticism. Irish language learners. Irish Americans. Feminist spirituality. John Montague. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Post-colonial. Dindshenchas or Irish place-name lore
