Mapping New York Irish-American Identities: Duality of Spirituality in Elizabeth Cullinan’s Short Story “Life After Death”
Mapping New York Irish-American Identities: Duality of Spirituality in Elizabeth Cullinan’s Short Story “Life After Death”

Summary/Abstract: Elizabeth Cullinan’s short story “Life After Death” depicts a day in the life of a young New Yorker, Constance, walking along Lexington Avenue, attending the evening Mass at a Dominican church and visiting the Catholic college where she worked part time to pick up her paycheck. Though the woman is involved with the married Francis Hughes and confronted with the burden of the past and of intricate family dynamics, her voice, which is “the Cullinan narrative voice has become that of one of those skeptical granddaughters grown into a reasonably assured and independent adulthood [...] balanced between then and now, the ethnic and the worldly, and better able to judge self and others because of the doubleness” (Fanning qtd. in Bayor and Meagher 528). Thus, the paper will discuss the manner in which Elizabeth Cullinan maps, in her story, the oscillation of Irish Americans between the ethnic drive and a cosmopolitan individuality gained in New York, with a focus on the value of the duality of consciousness and spirituality, which facilitates enriching and clarifying answers to identity dilemmas.

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