“Building Up a Nation Once Again”: Irish Masculinity, Violence, and the Cultural Politics of Sports in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

It is true that advanced capitalist orders need to ward off alienation and anomie with some kind of collective symbolism and ritual, complete with group solidarity, virile competition, a pantheon of legendary heroes and a carnivalesque release of repressed energies. But this is provided by sport, which conveniently combines the aesthetic aspect of Culture with the corporate dimension of culture, becoming for its devotees both an artistic experience and a whole way of life. It is interesting to speculate what the political effects of a society without sport would be.1