A Brief History of Ricorso

Introduction
This website consists of a large body of biographical records, bibliographical listings, and textual extracts from primary works and commentaries on them which, taken altogether, offers an overview of Irish literary scholarship as it stands today. The general intention embodied by RICORSO is to summarise in all important details the findings of Irish literary scholarship in 40 years past - hence the name RICORSO. As such, it is a monument to the achievement of Irish critics in turning their subject into the highly-evolved and fully-theorised area of cultural and intellectual research since the foundation of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL - online).

Irish literature, as a category, can be taken as referring to the literature of Ireland from the advent of letters in the fifth century to the present time. It embraces two languages and their corresponding literatures: Irish and English. For the former the term “Gaelic” is sometime used though considered derogatory in some quarters as belittling the older tradition and injuring its claim to primacy in national terms. For many years the latter was known as “Anglo-Irish literature” - a term more recently restricted to a body of writing that strictly pertains to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy during the colonial period in Ireland and after (hence an predominantly social and ethnographical term).

RICORSO covers as much of both these bodies of writing as the ability of its editor permits, admitting a limited grasp of Irish in spite of (or because of) the Irish school-room. In practice, it reflects the supposition, true or false, that older Irish literature either feeds into Anglo-Irish writing - as the leaders of the Irish literary revival liked to think - or that modern Irish literature significantly conforms, both in genres and substance, with the general character of modern European literature which was primarily made manifest in Ireland through the medium of English, the majority language of the country if not the “first national language” in the eyes of the Constitution.

RICORSO is, above all else, an attempt to gather an encyclopaedic volume of information about Irish writing and Irish writers on the basis of a continual qui vive as regards literary sources of all kinds. It is also the result of a confessedly personal response to the amazing potential of information technology as this became manifest in the late 1980s. At that moment it seemed as if the use of electronic memory and digital recall, whether on hard-disk or in internet, would revolutionise the way in which we “do” scholarship, as to some extent it has - as, pointedly, it has revolutionised the way in which we “do” teaching and learning.

The “Bibliography” region contains the titles of books and journals listed annually and by topic. The “Library” contains a growing number of “Classic Irish Texts” - some protected by password. Also held there is a growing collection of reviews, interviews, and essays scanned from older sources, captured on internet (frequently from subscribed journals) or else supplied by their authors. The “Gateway” region is a rudimentary digital hub for Irish studies - that is, a hold-all of links roughly organised into classes such as ‘Irish-study Centres’, ‘Libraries & Catalogues’, ‘Bibliographical Resources’ and subdivisions of the same.

In first launching RICORSO the supposition was that a simple and traditional structure based on the alphabetical scheme of biographical dictionaries, with additional sub-divisions for the well-tried categories (“Life”, “Works”, “Criticism”, &c.) would serve to tie down everything in regard to classic texts and their authors considered needful by the interested reader and the student. Soon however both the methods of compilation and the kinds of copying involved led to the creation of separate regions in which records not subject to the law of the biographical dictionary could be conserved and this resulted in bibliographical listings, digital collections, a portal giving to other sites, and a website bulletin - all browsable in the same fashion.

A browsable dataset was considered more suitable than a searchable database for the whole website on the grounds that the kinds of information (or simply language) embedded in such a compilation was not intrinsically susceptible to categorisation by field - not, at least as regards the component words and their assignable meaning, though the categories already mentioned might be regarded as fields just as well as headings.

The great strength of databases is their instantaneous return of data in response to given questions applied to the said fields. However, the installation of a powerful search engine aimed at each of the designated “regions” of this website, together with the addition of frequent links from one region to another, more than adequately makes up the deficit of a non-database design while retaining the browsing aspect of the whole collection.

Sources & copyright
The majority of texts excerpted or represented in full within RICORSO have been manually copied from printed works even if, inevitably, an ever-rising proportion is being captured from digital sources on internet today. No payment is sought from visitors for access to these records and, where a given text is known to be in copyright, it is protected from access by password pending negotiations with its owner(s). In general the RICORSO website is subject to the principle of “fair use” as laid down by the Society of Authors - i.e., 400 words by way of illustration in a secondary work without copyright liability attaching thereto.

In view of the difficulties involved in such practices, it is envisaged that - subject to the necessary funding and management conditions - a régime of “permissions and commissions” will be established enabling all such contents to be made available on the basis of payments to their legitimate owners. Pending such arrangements, those visiting RICORSO are asked to comply with the “Terms & Conditions” set out at the entry-point to the website. In brief, these stipulate that any infringement will be remedied as soon as notification is received via email and that no visitor to RICORSO will take legal action against its owner without a reasonable opportunity to rectify any known errors and eliminate any perceived cause for offence.

Lastly ... why Ricorso?
RICORSO takes its name and motto (‘eclectrically filtered for all Irish earths and ohmes’) from Finnegans Wake - James Joyce’s encyclopedic masterpiece in which all of human culture is woven into a pattern that strangely emulates the “Great Memory” of the Kabbala remodelled in the pattern of a ‘universal history’ under the tutelage of Giambattista Vico. (It is, of course, an Irish universe more pointedly than an Italian one.) In a similar spirit - though without any pretensions to such a imagination like Joyce’s - I have attempted to mirror the ‘owl globe’ of Irish culture as it stands in my own time on the website with an unmistakeably Joycean name.

Such a claim immediately raises questions of methodology and value. Is the resultant corpus truly representative and what might a systematic survey of any literature look like? What guiding principles are involved in the process of selection? What conception of canonicity, of “major” and “minor” literature is involved? What are the cultural and political implications of a chronological and alphabetical surview of Irish (or any) literature, and what philosophical presuppositions are hidden in it, or revealed by, such an undertaking? Does every literature capture or reflect a national essence, and is “nationality” an important and defining characteristic in relation to the thing that literature really is?

These are far from imponderable or uninteresting questions but they have little bearing on the actual structure of the website which is, or - rather - with the way in which it came about and functions on a day-to-day basis. The actual method of compilation has been dictated by its origins as a means of recording and consolidating the “findings” lodged in a wide range of existing reference works, literary histories, key monographs and articles, review organs, as well as the original texts themselves. The result is a kind of rationalised scrapbook organised horizontally by regions and vertically by types of information.

It is also a monument to the belief that the gift of electronic technology has afforded a unique means of recording a personal odyssey in Irish literature, wihtout contesting the idea that the analytical and intuitive response characteristic of the complete critic is always superior to any form of encyclopedism, be it aspirational or achieved. RICORSO is both a summation and a point of departure - in Joycean terms, once again, a ‘cropse’ and a ‘seedfather’. It is only of value in so far as it permits interpretative ideas to sprout and grow, to seek affinities elsewhere in the literature and to carry forward the tradition of though which is Irish criticism today.