Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T05:56:35.036Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Brian Dillon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2023

Mario Aquilina
Affiliation:
University of Malta
Bob Cowser, Jr
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Nicole B. Wallack
Affiliation:
St Lawrence University, New York
Get access

Summary

On the Growth of an Essayist

As a fifteen-year-old, my eye was not on contemporary Irish literature. I was thinking about music and I was thinking about music writing, and it was through writing about contemporary pop and rock music – British writing – that I started to get led towards, first of all, American writers, really obvious names for that period like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, and, to a much, much lesser extent, female writers of a similar era. So it was much later that I came to Sontag, say, or Didion.

And there was something very exciting to me, even as an adolescent, about the idea that there was a kind of writing that could bring together journalism and something more experimental, something more literary. And weirdly enough it was in the pages of British music magazines, like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker in the 1980s, that I first discovered Roland Barthes, that I first saw Barthes’s name and the names of Foucault and Derrida. And I started reading Barthes at age sixteen. It wasn’t really a continuum between that kind of adolescent enthusiasm for various kinds of nonfiction and theory and journalism, and what I then went on to study as a literature and philosophy student in Dublin in the early 1990s. I threw myself into theory – we in Ireland fought the theory wars a decade or two later than everybody else – and it seemed at that point – ’91, ’92, when I was an undergraduate – an immensely exciting place to be thinking and writing. And strangely I never connected it – or only connected it very partially – back to that enthusiasm I’d had as a teenager for certain kinds of much more mainstream and much more popular and populist writing.

In my twenties, while working on a PhD that was entirely in the field of literary theory – I did research on ideas about time in Barthes, Agamben, Paul de Man, Lyotard, a couple of other figures – I started to get quite frustrated with academia, frustrated with English as an academic discipline, and the kind of writing that it might make possible.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×