‘Irish Fiction and Migration in the Long Twenty-First Century’ observes that while migration has been a topic prominent in Irish fiction since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, more recent novels have considered the Irish subject overseas as a product of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, migrants in a world characterised by neoliberalism and globalisation. The chapter considers works of outward migration in the long twenty-first century, beginning with William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and extending to later works, such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and E. M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as historical fiction including Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The flows of migration into Ireland are also considered, in relation to Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Oona Frawley’s Flight (2014), and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (2020), concluding that recent Irish diasporic fiction is characterised by multiple displacements.

This chapter introduces the Rashomon effect – a cinematic reference – to illustrate the power of perspectivism. We extensively present details of the UK Post Office case concerning their attempts to deny defects in software provided by Fujitsu.

This chapter examines how the Holocaust affected thinking about the humanities and social sciences throughout the West. It offers an intellectual history of key responses to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on political philosophy and social theory. Major intellectuals (Arendt, Adorno, Agamben), as well as less well-known thinkers (Günther Anders, Moishe Postone) are considered. The trajectory of post-Holocaust thought forms the throughline. In the first postwar decades, the Jewish genocide was considered as part of a broader eruption of war and totalitarian violence, while more recent thinkers have tended to subsume the entire history of Western violence, perhaps even “the West” itself, under the sign of the Holocaust.

This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted exploration of the ironies of a value-free society and of literature’s responses to dehumanization, from the 1950’s “Age of Anxiety” to the postmodern vanishing of the author and its much-awaited re-materialization. From the ambivalence of liberal humanism in Eating People Is Wrong to the bitter satire of sociology as a threat to free will and accountability in The History Man, from the caricature of intellectual arrogance in Doctor Criminale and Mensonge to the problematization of anti-foundational epistemologies that legitimize interpretation in To the Hermitage, Bradbury’s novels of ideas dissect the institutional conditions of knowledge in democratic societies. They offer us not only a humorous outlook on postwar England but also a critical lens to examine the role of the humanities and the mission of academic institutions on a broader scale, issues that continue to be timely.

The experience of uncertainty is outlined at two levels: individual and societal. On the individual level, uncertainty has both positive, constructive implications and negative, maladaptive ones. As a main response on the individual level, the function of promoter positions is delineated, with the Rogerian concept of “organismic valuing” as a prototypical example of an “inner compass.” Organismic valuing as a bottom-up approach is critically discussed, and the dialogical self is proposed as an interchange of bottom-up and top-down processes. On the societal level, the experience of uncertainty is addressed with reference to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society and Ulrich Beck’s risk society. Some adaptive and some less adaptive responses to several of the main challenges of our time are sketched: climate change and the corona pandemic. An identity model is presented that consists of identity positions at four levels of inclusiveness: individual, social (group), collective, and ecological, each with their specific types of responsibility.

The chapter explores the person in control. It is the predominant form of subjectivity traversing privacy rights. Engaging with the work of Bauman, the book explores the individualism of this notion.