This chapter argues that contemporary Irish-language writing demands a critical response that recognizes its increasingly transnational or global thematic range. The endangered status of the language, far from demoralizing writers, seems to provide them motivation to transcend limiting sociolinguistic realities. The minority subject position becomes a lens for engagement with global issues, as witnessed in a large and diverse body of poetry related to contemporary wars and international conflicts and in a body of fictional writing that engages with transnational history and cultural critique. Contemporary Irish-language writers collectively display an acute awareness of Irish participation or collusion in oppressive imperial or colonial projects. A selection of examples is cited to demonstrate how the resources of the Irish linguistic and literary tradition have been brought to bear on contemporary and historical events and predicaments. In giving voice to global concerns, the Irish language ironically becomes a potent medium with which to question the primacy of national ethnic identification.

The chapter argues that John Dos Passos in his novel Manhattan Transferappropriates cinematic immediacy effects and documentary aesthetics for the sake of literary innovation and cultural intervention. His formal innovations—the narrative’s montage structure, shifting focalization, and sampling of mass media item—allow the novel to convey the complexity of modern city life while opening up a critical perspective on mass media discourse and urban consumer culture. The chief strategy Dos Passos uses to critically refract popular mass culture is the creation and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects that encourage the readers to grapple self-reflexively with the text, their reading strategies, and the represented social realities. The novel’s documentary style creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than imagined. Yet the novel continually disrupts this impression of immediacy: its disjunctive structure and surprising narrative shifts confront the readers with their interpretive routines and push them to develop new ways of reading that enable them to cope with both the novel’s experimental form and the depicted cultural practices.