Mapping Memory and Violence: Spatial Form, Mediation, and the Urban Imaginary in Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003)

Buket Doğan

doi:10.59045/nalans.2026.105

Authors

Buket Doğan Ankara University, Faculty of Language and History-Geography Author https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6847-645X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2026.105

Keywords:

Ciaran Carson, Breaking News (2003), city space, mapping, mediation

Abstract

Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003), published in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement following violent disputes known as the Troubles, involves the problematic transition from conflicts to negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Although the Agreement marked a political transformation, the city’s entrenched divisions persisted, continuing to influence both collective psychology and everyday experience. This article examines Ciaran Carson’s Breaking News (2003) as a poetic reinscription of Belfast as a city space in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Carson treats Belfast’s urban space as a medium for memory, political agenda, and linguistic displacement. Through disruptive syntax, genre collages, spectacle, and auditory mapping, the collection both records and resists sectarian violence while generating an urban imaginary. The Belfast Carson portrayed here is multilayered, unstable, and under surveillance. His poetry does not passively depict space but actively recontextualizes it with the help of reportage, broadcasts, and maps as bearers of memory and agency. The poetic persona, occasionally adopting the role of flaneur, possesses a heightened awareness of urban dynamics, surveillance, and political tension. This study problematizes the organic link between a place and its mimetic representation by inscribing Belfast as a city space that is ideologically produced and shaped by memory, violence, media representation, and ongoing negotiations as markers of urban epistemology.

Author Biography

Buket Doğan, Ankara University, Faculty of Language and History-Geography

Buket Doğan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Ankara University. She received her B.A. in Foreign Language Education and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Middle East Technical University. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature in 2011–2012. Her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, spatial theory, memory and temporality, and twentieth-century British and American literature. She has published in refereed journals and edited volumes.

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