The course I was teaching here at York was a large freshman humanities course of over two hundred students, because only at the freshman level could one avoid specialization and look at the Big Picture. My big picture was to consider the entire panorama of cultural evolution. The course was called “The Transformations of Human Culture,” and it went from the “Hominization of the Primates to the Planetization of Humanity.” The course was meant to be a performance of the very reality it sought to describe. In trying to understand the cultural shifts of the past, the course performed the presence of the cultural shift we were living through and it explored the myth of the future as the new horizon of human identity. For this sort of intellectual work, I felt that both the lecture and the essay needed to be transformed into more of a performance of pattern-recognition than the unfolding of a single line of academic indoctrination. For Wissenskunst, the mode of discourse is more polyphonic and fugual – more of a moiré than a line, the wave and not the particle; it was more of a risk-taking venture in which multiple disciplines came together in the Humanities Division here at York than it was a secure assertion from within the traditional confines of an English Department.

The New Historicism
Now in this study of mythic horizons of identity, I was building on the historical study of my first book in which I looked at the way in which the myth of the Irish past affected the identity-formation of the revolutionaries in the Easter Rising of Dublin, 1916.³ In seeking to study the role of the imagination in history, I was breaking away from the New Criticism that was popular when I was an undergraduate, and the Structuralism that was popular when I was a graduate student. I broke away from the New Critics to study the historical context of the literary work, because I felt a personal loss of history in growing up in Los Angeles in the post-war era. As the public transportation system of the red Pacific Electric trains was replaced with freeways and smog, and as orange groves were replaced with subdivisions, I looked around at the new theme-park approach to historical quotation in the form of a movie-set restaurant or apartment house, and wondered what was real, what was historical reality. I imagined that Ireland must be a real country, the true homeland, the mythical country of Yeats and Joyce. I became drawn to Yeats’s romantic mode of rejecting industrialization to posit an imaginary landscape with its exaltation of the mystical peasant. I was drawn to Yeats’s edge between Irish agricultural and English industrial because I was living through the transition from Eastern industrial to Western post-industrial. I had an old, used 1940s car in high school that I used to navigate through the cloverleafs instead of the shamrocks, and I went to Disneyland soon after it opened. But I wanted none of it. I wanted the Land of Heart’s Desire in a nostalgia for Ireland. My grandmother Margaret O’Leary was born in Ireland (another O’Leary like one of this conference’s sponsors, John O’Leary), but she died in Chicago when my mother was only a year old, so she was an imaginary relative, an ancestor, and not a visible member of the family.

Posthistoric L.A. was a landscape of gas stations looking like space stations and hotdog stands shaped like hotdog buns; object, sign, and symbol were all jumbled up together as one dined and lived in moviesets of historical fantasies. I wanted to be real. And when Dylan Thomas came to America and became in the fifties what a rock star was to become in the sixties, I wanted to be Celtic and not Californian. The Celtic Renaissance wasn’t over for me, and the literate world of Dylan Thomas, Yeats, and Joyce called out “Come away, O human child!” So there was something Celtic, something literary and mystical that called out to me in the midst of the postliterate electronic world of L.A. – that fake world that was about to become everybody’s reality as movies, television, and advertising would spread out from Hollywood around the world.