Modern Languages Association Conference, Chicago, Illinois, December 30th, 2007

Special Session 701. ‘Reinventing the Nation’: New Directions in Scottish Literature
Organizer: Kenneth McNeil

Scottish culture and literature have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest of late in the context of what many have identified as a new Scottish renaissance. This revitalization, in turn, has taken place in the context of a new political resurgence after the restoration of the Scottish parliament and amid increasing calls for complete Scottish independence. The future of the Scottish nation has taken on a greater immediacy in Scottish cultural life, and Scotland has become fertile ground for the dissemination of ideas on the meaning and relevance of nationhood and national identity in the postcolonial, “postnational” world. Yet the question of “whither goes the nation” is not new to Scottish cultural life. Indeed, it is a question Scots have asked relentlessly throughout modern history, and the Scottish contribution to the British formulation of nation has been increasingly recognized. Yet, much of the scholarship on the subject has directed its attention to literature of the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Though such analysis often gestures toward the Scottish present, its object of study rests solidly in the past. This special session seeks to redress this imbalance by placing its study of Scottish ideas of nationhood and national identity firmly in the contemporary world, looking at literary culture in Scotland of the past 20 years or so. What happens when devolution meets globalization? Taken as a whole, these three papers reveal the ways in which contemporary Scottish literary culture is reacting to new possibilities and new realities, while maintaining some relation to longstanding Scottish narratives of the nation.

1. Kirsty Brash “Disunited Kingdom? Postcolonial Scotland and the Question of Identity," University of Queensland (read by Nancy Gish, University of Southern Maine)
Brash explores the hybrid position occupied by Scotland in the colonial paradigm. She addresses the voices of contemporary Glasgow fiction, especially James Kelman, as what was the once “second city of the Empire” passes the seven-year mark as the second city of a newly devolved and arguably postcolonial Scotland. She argues Kelman’s work is an example of Said’s notion of “resistance culture”; a wider assertion of a distinctive Scottish (rather than British) identity. Kelman’s troubled characters they can be best understood when considered alongside Scotland’s own damaged sense of identity.

2. Alistair McCleery, “The Contribution of Scottish Literary Magazines to Cultural and Political Debate 1979-1999” Scottish Centre for the Book, Napier University, Edinburgh
Much work has been and is being undertaken to chart the full range of contemporary ideas, practices, and activities that constitute Scottish cultural and political identity, distinct from other national identities within the UK. However, few if any studies have incorporated the role of literary magazines, and their contributors, in the formation and morphology of this contemporary identity. In the period 1979-1999, literary magazines like Cencrastus, the Edinburgh Review and Chapman were pivotal in encouraging a diverse and lively approach to the condition of Scotland and of Scottishness and Britishness. They broadened and deepened the debate about cultural and political identity in Scotland by providing a focus and distribution network for contemporary writing, fiction, poetry and polemic, that defined, reflected, rebutted and amended those identities.
Focusing on questions of editorial decision-making, production and distribution, and readership, this paper addresses the influence of the small, predominantly literary, magazine sector in Scotland on the formulation of cultural issues during the period between the failed referendum of 1979 and the establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999.

3. J. Derrick McClure, "Sydney Goodsir Smith," University of Aberdeen
A powerful motivating force in twentieth-century Scottish literature was the realisation that Scotland’s historically distinctive cultural identity had been increasingly eroded by the Anglocentric assumptions of the British state, and in particular by the lack of respect shown to Scotland’s history, languages (Scots and Gaelic) and literature in the educational system. A mainspring of the Scottish Renaissance, a revolutionary literary movement of which the dominant figures in the early stages were Hugh MacDiarmid (writing in Scots and later also English) and Sorley MacLean (writing in Gaelic), was a determination to proclaim, celebrate and regenerate Scottish culture, and to restore its place as an independent nation-state: the intimate association between those two aims was supported by the argument that it was during the period of the Stewart monarchy, when Scotland had been an active participant in European cultural movements, that the national artistic culture had reached its greatest development.
The present paper will examine the attitudes to the nation and nationalism in an outstanding, though now neglected, poet who represents the Scottish Renaissance in full flood. Sydney Goodsir Smith is one of the most literary and erudite of modern Scottish poets, his favoured medium being a Scots highly charged with the vocabulary of earlier periods. His poetry explores, with great imaginative power and expressive vigour, such themes as love, freedom, patriotism and the struggle against oppression, finding in Scotland’s history, mythology and contemporary life icons of those timeless forces. The paper will discuss his method of underwriting Scotland’s identity by placing it in a universal context.

Kenneth McNeil (presider) Eastern Connecticut State University