Book of Abstracts

Michelle Andressa Alvarenga de Souza (University of Brasília; University of São Paulo). A dreadful reckoning: colonial, racial and gender violence in Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter.

 

In his latest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter (2018), Martin McDonagh brings to the stage the story of two black pigmy women imprisoned by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens, two of the most prominent European writers of the 19^th century. Set in Copenhagen and England in the late 1800’s, it addresses the innumerous types of violence that these two female characters must endure while being kept in a box, forced to write Andersen’s and Dickens’s stories for them. Aside from this, the play also concentrates on the tragedy perpetrated by Belgium on these women’s home country, the Congo, where 10 million natives were killed in a bloody and shameful genocide.

 

This paper intends to analyse how McDonagh intersects colonial, racial and gender violence in this play. It aims to interrogate how the too many types of violence that the black female characters face are presented, as well as to relate them to the notion of peripherality and identity and to the Congolese genocide itself.

 

There is a moment in the play when Mbute/Marjory, the protagonist and one of the imprisoned Congolese women, sings: “And all the world will rue, what Europe did to you, a dreadful reckoning, from Hell to you”. These four lines not only inspired the title of this paper but also evidence the need to discuss the extent of Europe’s responsibility in the forms of aggression inflicted against colonized peoples, either actively or passively. Therefore, this research aspires to add to the debate on how the powerful and oppressing system of colonization intersects with social and historical imbalances related to race and gender by exploring McDonagh’s contribution within Irish contemporary theatre.

 

 

Sophie Anders (University of Salford). The ‘Wee English Fella’ – Queering the Representation of Masculinity in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls.

 

Whilst there has been an exceptional amount of research produced around the concept of hypermasculinity through a Northern Irish lens, the analysis of queer masculinities remains a unique, yet albeit obscure, field of study. It is necessary to state that when we use the term ‘queer’, this does not mean creating a binary between heterosexuality/homosexuality. Rather, queer is attributed to anyone that deviates from what is culturally engrained as the ideal forms of masculinity/femininity (Oswin, 2008; Addison, 2012). Likewise, when we use the phrase ‘masculinity’, we do not use this as a summarising term, but rather as reference to a specific form of masculine representation e.g., Northern Irish masculinities (Connell, 2005; Rolston & McKeown, 2017). Masculinities are ultimately complex, and a specific focus on one form of masculinity will not speak for nor be identical to other countries depictions of ideal masculinities.

 

The following paper utilises both queer theory and masculinity studies to discuss how James, in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls (2018-), offers a rare perspective of what it means to enter a world of conflict masculinities without prior knowledge of Northern Irish masculine socialisation. Little research has been produced regarding Derry Girls, and as a contemporary depiction of the ‘Troubles’ that has generated international interest – it would be remiss of me to not to use this opportunity to open up a wider dialogue of masculine socialisation and the importance of deviations. This paper will also examine how James’s alternative masculinity has a profound affective impact upon the girls’ conception of masculinity and what it entails, whilst simultaneously allowing them to not only question and alter their previous perception of masculinity, but also aids in creating an inclusive space that allows for the discussion of what it means to be a man, and the validity of alternative identities in Northern Ireland.

 

 

Dr Kate Antosik-Parsons (Trinity College Dublin). The Embodied Encounters of Amanda Coogan’s They Come Then, The Birds (2021).

 

This paper focuses on Amanda Coogan’s They Come Then, The Birds (2021) a multi-faceted performance work comprised of a performance to camera, video installation and live performance. Coogan’s work was commissioned for Rua Red’s Magdalene Series which aims to explore the complexities Mary Magdalene and her associations with the incarceration and institutionalisation of women. They Come Then, The Birds was inspired by the Wrens of the Curragh, a marginalized group of women who lived near the military encampment at the Curragh, County Kildare in the mid-nineteenth century. These sex workers and societal outcasts lived in abject squalor in ‘nests’, crude shelters constructed of furze bushes. The Wrens were unique in that they lived a communal existence sharing food, child-rearing duties, labour and money earned from their sex work collectively, thus proposing a different type of kinship not reliant on the patriarchal, heteronormative familial structure. In the work seven wrens come together in the pungent furze, amongst them twin bards use Irish Sign Language and British Sign Language to tell the story of the women whose bodies were perceived as a threat because they evaded containment. I was both a performer and a writer for this project, enabling me to gain new insights into performance art and embodiment. In this paper I consider how They Come Then, The Birds provokes a re-imagining of meanings ascribed to women’s bodies in a specific Irish cultural context and explore the radical potential of feminist performance art to propose rich embodied encounters.

 

 

Katie Barnes (University of Salford, Manchester). “Mothers are more than bodies”: Ireland’s relationship with motherhood in Claire Lynch’s small: on motherhoods (2021).

 

The memoir form has traditionally been used to explore the lives of those with public standing, however, the women’s memoir has become a form increasingly used to represent issues that are seldom discussed publicly. Claire Lynch’s small: on motherhoods (2021) is one such memoir that seeks to normalise and explore what it means to be a queer mother in heteronormative society. This paper considers the complex position of Lynch as second-generation member of the Irish diaspora and how this has affected her perception of motherhood. Through examining the role of the memoir in the 21^st century, this paper explores how Lynch queers the memoir form through the inclusion of experimental sections which enable a deeper exploration into the emotional landscape of her experiences. This paper considers how Lynch actively challenges ideas of heteroactivism (Browne & Nash, 2020) by drawing attention to heteronormative bias through her experiences. It will also look at how the definition of the term ‘mother’ has changed to encompass those who have not given birth to their children as well as the changing role of the mother within the family, Lynch’s text in particular exploring changing attitudes towards traditional gender roles. This paper ultimately analyses how small: on motherhoods offers an alternative viewpoint on motherhood among the second generation Irish, shifting away from the traditional attitudes found in much of Irish society today.

 

 

Doug Battersby (Stanford University/University of Bristol). Eimear McBride’s Bodily Forms.

 

This paper examines Eimear McBride’s dazzlingly reinvention of modernist stream of consciousness techniques to unflinchingly inhabit the perspective of victims of sexual violence in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)—novels that powerfully dramatise the intersection of class- and gender-based oppression. In interviews and essays, McBride has openly acknowledged the influence of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), though, like other late modernists, she has also found fault with the verisimilitude of its interior monologues, specifically lamenting their putative neglect of bodily affect. This paper’s reading of McBride’s most accomplished novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016), focuses on how its startling prose exploits first-person present-tense narration, the syntactical ambiguity and unorthodox punctuation employed by Samuel Beckett (whilst abandoning his commitment to grammatical resolution), and McBride’s own corporeal modes of affective description. It argues that these formal innovations are central to the novel’s representation of the deep-rooted effects of sexual abuse on its victims’ emotional lives, through which McBride explores the kind of philosophical questions about subjectivity, affect, and ethics that have long animated late modernist aesthetics. McBride’s narration of the body and meta-fictional dramatisations of the unpredictable ways in which we can be affected by other people’s narratives together present us with a writer who is at once cautious about the inherent emotional and ethical virtues of late modernist forms and emphatic about their continued necessary for conveying intensities of erotic experience that exceed the bounds of both realist and modernist narration. The conclusion to the paper considers McBride’s larger relation to and exemplification of wider trends in contemporary Irish fiction—both the reanimation of modernist form and dramatisations of the intersection of class and gender oppression in manifestations of sexual violence and abuse, found in novels such as Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018).

 

 

Alessandra Boller (University of Siegen, Germany). Shared Experiences and Grievable Lives: Engagements with Subjectivity and Community in Post-Celtic Tiger Migration Narratives.

 

The proposed presentation takes as its starting point reactions to immigration to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years and subsequent engagements therewith in Post-Celtic Tiger literature and society. The 2004 referendum on entitlement to citizenship by birth and the Direct Provision system are only two exemplary aspects that point to the apparent perception of inward migration as a threat to the traditionally and frequently evoked idea of a particular Irish identity. This reaction to the presence of immigrants, particularly to people of colour, seems surprising when considering that the experience of migration has been an integral aspect of Irish history and identity.

 

Even though writers such as Roddy Doyle and Donal Ryan attempted to counter negative reactions by telling stories about refugees and immigrants, they have been criticised for glossing over systemic failures or for eventually re-centring Irish identities. “Immigrant writers,” on the other hand, have introduced different perspectives on migration and migrants’ lives in Ireland, but have, with few exceptions, not received the same amount of attention. However, instead of lingering on categorisations of “migrant” or “native” writers or certain texts’ shortcomings, my talk seeks to explore shared experiences, questions of agency and vulnerability, and subject positions in Post-Celtic Tiger short fiction by drawing on Butler’s concept of grievable life in relation to Rancière’s framework of the distribution of the sensible. Regarding short stories by Emma Donoghue, Melatu Uche Okorie and Ifedinma Dimbo as transnational literature and thus as a form of “cultural production that takes place in the liminal space between real and imagined borders” (Jay, Global Matters 1), I argue that these female writers’ individual narratives simultaneously highlight shared experiences and systemic discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity/race. By providing multiple points of identification, their texts however engage in the creation of new (imagined) communities and the highlighting of subject positions and thus potentially contribute to a redistribution of the sensible.

 

 

Esther Gazzola Borges (University of São Paulo). Queer Diaspora, Identity and Community in contemporary Irish literature.

 

Through the past few decades, through globalization and social development, many physical and conceptual borders have been either forgotten or have lost their importance and effect. As a result, there has been a new focus on the importance of calling attention to marginalized identities. Queer and immigrant issues start to take up space in media, arts and politics, and so does Queer diaspora. As defined by Fortier (2002), Queer Diaspora is “the condition of exile and estrangement experienced by Queer subjects, which locates them outside the confines of ‘home’: the heterosexual family, the nation, the homeland.” (8). By this, all Queer subjects are placed into some type of diaspora as they are inherently rejected by the social structures that should be representative of home, due to their Queerness. Furthermore, Queer subjects that are placed within diaspora, are doubly placed in this limier of never fully belonging to one space or another, possibly being ostracized by both their culture of origin and the culture of their newfound community — due to their sexuality and to their status as migrants. Their double marginalized identities makes them disconnected from all aspects of society.

 

As an object of study, this paper analyses two Young Adult novels by Adiba Jaigirdar, a Queer, Muslim, Bangladeshi-Irish author. Through different angles, ‘Hani and Ishu’s guide to fake dating’ (2021) and ‘The Henna Wars’ (2020) explore the diasporic experience of sapphic characters in Irish contexts, and the feeling of living in between two cultures.

 

Through the analysis, it is possible to have a further understanding on how the characters are placed within both their culture of origin and the culture that they currently live in, how they face the struggles proposed by living in this in between, and how these struggles are created by their Queer and immigrant identities.

 

 

Phyllis Boumans (University of Leuven). Promoting the Short Story: David Marcus, Irish Writing and Irish Literature.

 

David Marcus has often been hailed as Ireland’s most influential literary editor. He edited countless short story anthologies, including the annual Faber Irish Short Story Anthology series, founded the ‘New Irish Writing’ page in the Irish Press which presented a new short story every week to a wide readership for almost two decades, adjudicated numerous literary prizes, and co-established Poolbeg Press, a publishing house dedicated to promoting the short story. As ambassador for the short story genre, his imprimatur determined what qualified as good short fiction for much of the second half of the twentieth century: publication in his ‘New Irish Writing’ page soon became a rite of passage for an entire generation of writers, with Marcus standing at the beginning of the literary careers of many now-renowned short fiction writers, such as Claire Keegan, John McGahern and Éilís ní Dhuibhne. If recent scholarship in short fiction has come to recognise the ways in which editors shape the course of short fiction and are crucial players in processes of canon-formation – think of Seán O’Faoláin in The Bell or William Maxwell in The New Yorker – it is important to explore Marcus’ contribution to the short story in Ireland in more detail. The aim of this paper is to begin mapping out Marcus’ literary legacy and editorial influence through his role as founder and co-editor of Irish Writing, a landmark mid-century magazine devoted to the short story. It will offer an analysis of the type of stories, writers, trends, subject matter and short story poetics fostered in the magazine, and will draw on new archival material to elucidate Marcus’ views on the short story form.

 

 

Margaret Brehony (NUI Galway). Intersections of Gender, Race, and Irish Genealogies of Slavery in Colonial Cuba.

 

The study of historical relations between Irish migration and plantation slavery in colonial Cuba raises many new questions and un-acknowledged connections. In this account of Irish genealogies of slavery my intention is not to frame Irishness as an identity or to connect to a national origin story. Instead, my analysis responds to the vexed question of Irish involvement in Atlantic slavery through an examination of immigrant families and their creole descendants in the overlapping colonial processes of class, gender, labour and race. I pay particular attention to the connected lives of women of Irish and of African origins shaped through the violent power relations of transatlantic slavery. Though an examination of Irish surnames in Cuban archival records we can establish genealogical lines through generations of Irish and African families. When conceptualised as acts of possession or markers of human property these surnames open up multiple histories that have been erased or subsumed in colonial narratives of gender and slavery. We also see how Irish slave-owners accumulated wealth in a system of racialised dispossession dependant on the heritability of enslavement extracted from African maternal lines. This critical reading of violence and dehumanisation codified in ‘banal chronicles’ of colonial reportage reveals how processes of class and gender connected Irish and African diasporas asymmetrically in the colonial logic of race.

 

Consequently, my analysis engages methodologies from Area Studies of Ireland, Cuba and the Caribbean with critical analysis from Black Feminist theory, Women’s History, and Black History to develop a critical discourse that links colonial capitalism, Irish migration and African slavery. In rethinking these interrelated processes this paper contributes to a critical transformation in knowledge about our common diasporic pasts and the continuities that impact on culture and identity today.

 

 

Charlotte Buckley (Trinity College Dublin). Curing the Outdoors: An Ecofeminist Reading of Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry.

 

Literary criticism examining 20th century Irish women poets is frequently rooted in domestic spaces, while little has been written about the woman poets' place in the outside world. The outdoors has come to carry inherently masculine values with a great canon of Irish male poets writing intrepidly about prairies and canals, glades and bogs. Meanwhile women’s writing has been relegated to the interior, allowing only a comprehension of the world through the rooms which surround her. How radical then, for a woman to use the language of the outdoors to describe her experience?

 

There is an alluring ability in the language of the natural landscape to reflect the inner experiences of Irish women writers. Through analyzing the poetry of Colette Bryce, Leontia Flynn, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, and Jessica Traynor, I will explore how their work subverts these previously charted territories and creates new projections of the world.

Through an ecofeminist reading, the relationship between women and nature is made primary, drawing parallels between their respective oppressions. I will argue that in using landscape to convey the female experience, these poets perform an eco-feminist act in reclaiming the natural environment. To connect the female with the outdoors through the poem is to perform a linguistic curing. In being relieved of the symptoms of a disease or condition, they are put through a process of preservation. There is a poetic salting taking place that looks to assert the significance of the natural world and environmentalism.

In the face of an environmental crisis, the woman poet takes her place as a 21st century cartographer, recording female experience in this space as well as remapping its future.

 

 

Dr. Jessica Bundschuh (University of Stuttgart). The Ecological Border Textures of Maurice Riordan’s Prose Poem Sequence “The Idylls.”

 

“The Idylls” is a prose poem sequence situated midway through Maurice Riordan’s 2007 volume, The Holy Land, with few Irish or Northern Irish precursors, aside from Seamus Heaney’s 1975 Stations.  As an elegy for his father and his polluted farmland, Riordan begins with an epigraph on poetic embodiment from Dante’s Purgatory: “when I forget our emptiness and treat our shadows as bodied things.” Herein, Riordan resuscitates his and his father’s memories by patiently waiting in the companionship of human and nonhuman ghosts, those “bodied things” who provide access to a rural Ireland long gone. In this geography, no static border protects the disappearing ecosystem already traveling along an arc of tragic causality.

 

Although Riordan’s farmhand subjects, alongside his father, repeatedly engage in the act of (re)securing fences, walls, and boundaries, their labors are fruitless against an abundance of border crossers – mobile and fluid, dashing in and out of vignettes that shape each section – which mostly assume the form of natural subjects (red deer, rabbits, pigeons) and natural forces (water, mud, erosion). Riordan’s model of border crossing extends to the various genres “The Idylls” simultaneously inhabits: the eco-elegy, the idyll, the sequence, the prose poem, and the border narrative. Thus, Riordan’s sequential structure – wherein each snippet of dialogue-driven narration maintains its autonomy while participating in a larger poetic mediation – offers readers the perpetual motion of compression and expansion. The result is a textured and vibrant Irish ‘borderscape’ on ecological displacement with ghost figures – including one personifying the Higgs boson – as literary tour guides.

 

 

Prof. Mary Burke (University of Connecticut). The 2022 reissue of Traveller-Romany novelist Juanita Casey’s The Hose of Selene (1971).

 

Juanita Casey (1925-2012), novelist and horse trainer, was born to an Irish Traveller mother and an English Romany father and raised by English circus industry parents. Casey identified with her many heritages and moved between the often-intersecting subcultures she considered her own: she resided with English Romanies, worked as a circus horsemaster, and moved within Ireland’s 1960s rural ex-patriot scene, a dispersed, creative, and colourful community that contributed to post-war Ireland’s diversity. The Horse of Selene was written during 1964 while Casey camped on Achill Island, and her Traveller roots received publicity on both sides of the Atlantic on publication, with John Huston expressing interest in directing a film version. The novel’s setting on the fictional Aranchilla, an unceremonious synthesis of the twin islands of Revival pilgrimage, Aran and Achill, is the first clue that the traditional reverence with which the western island had been approached by male creatives is absent. Aranchilla, populated by untamed horses and over-tamed residents, is overrun one summer by mainland Travellers and cosmopolitan Selene and her wanderer friends. Selene has “Gypsy” and Traveller associations, heritages that facilitate her ability to master both the island’s wild “tinker” stallion and her islander lover, Miceal. A smallholder who must choose between farming and a future on the move with Selene, Miceal eventually accedes to the demands of hearth and land, overturning the folkloric fantasy of “running away with the tinkers.” The cynical islanders inhabit an outlandish tourist trap of their own perpetuation; authenticity inheres in “nature” (animals, restless women, and Travellers) rather than the rooted islanders. Aranchilla’s grotesqueries anticipate the impious rural Ireland of Synge, Carr, McDonagh, and Barry, and Casey’s neglected classic links Synge to those contemporary representations. Altogether, The Horse of Selene deserves to be rediscovered in this century when it is increasingly apparent how much so-called “alternative” communities have contributed to the revitalization of mainstream Irish life.

 

 

Dr Giulia Bruna (Radboud University). Ulster and New England Village Heroines: Reviewing the Stories of Erminda Rentoul Esler and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

 

Donegal-native but London-based Erminda Rentoul Esler (1860-1924) wrote three popular collections of village idylls—The Way They Loved at Grimpat (1893), ’Mid Green Pastures (1895), and Youth at The Prow (1898)—all set in a fictional hamlet named Grimpat. Contemporary Irish reviewers of Esler were keen on locating Grimpat in her native Donegal, even if her stories often lack the geographic and ethnographic specificity which characterizes much of the British, Scottish, or American regional writers of the time (for example, Esler’s characters are not made to speak in a heavy dialect).

 

Moreover, Esler was often associated with earlier nineteenth-century British women writers of village life such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Russell Mitford. In addition to American editions of her collections, some of her stories were also published in American magazines: “Bessie,” a story from her first volume, had previously been featured in The New York Times, and is aptly a story with a transatlantic dimension whereby Grimpat girl Bessie finds love and prosperity by marrying her love interest from the village and relocating with him to America.

 

Esler’s stories were often compared to the work of New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, as Stephanie Palmer notes in her recent study Transatlantic Footholds (2020) on the reception of Freeman in Britain, particularly due to their common focus on unconventional, determined yet inflexible, older female characters in a close-knit community (81). Drawing on reviews in American periodicals, this paper illuminates the early American reception of Esler, and the way reviewers fashioned these transatlantic encounters in the virtual space of the periodical review and in their short stories.

 

 

Maria Butler (University College Cork). The Anatomy of a Female Brand: Marian Keyes the Brand Managed Author.

 

Marian Keyes is a brand name author. This means that she sells large amounts of books based off her reputation and fan loyalty. To this end she has sold over 35 million books globally making her one of Ireland’s most commercially successful novelists. However, she remains largely underappreciated by the academy. This is likely a result of her positioning within the chick lit genre – a genre that has been considered lightweight from its inception due to its focus on the experiences of contemporary women. First published in 1995 Keyes’ career runs parallel to several major changes within the publishing industry including the rise of the digital age of publishing, the conglomeration of publishing houses, and the domination of online retailers like Amazon. In addition to this, she was an early adopter of many of the innovations to arise out of these changes like sharing her brand via websites, Twitter, and fan newsletters. For this reason, examining the creation and maintenance of her brand adds not only to a greater insight into her cultural impact but also to understand what it means to be a female popular fiction writer in the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this paper looks at the wider context by detailing the changes in the publishing industry since the end of the twentieth century, the subsequent importance of brand name authors, and the techniques used to build and maintain these brands before situating Marian Keyes within this context.  My analysis of the Marian Keyes’ brand encapsulates some of the techniques, including cover design, employed by her publishers; the importance of an authorial celebrity persona to her branding; parasocial relationships; and representations of brand managed authors in her fiction. 

 

 

Theo Campbell (Villanova University, USA). “Customs Handed Down to Us”: Empire and Vulnerability in Glimpses of my Life in Aran.

 

Glimpses of my Life in Aran, a memoir by district nurse B. N. Hedderman, is usually read as a morally unambiguous, historical record of the successes of early twentieth century district nursing schemes in rural Ireland. However, a literary analysis of the language and tone in Hedderman’s memoir uncovers the morally vexing role that imperialism and classism played in the early years of Ireland’s district nursing scheme. Hedderman's memoir is thus more than a historical record of a public health program: it is a literary text, demonstrating the complex infectiousness of colonialist ideology within and across communities in Ireland. 

In her memoir, Hedderman identifies herself as ethnically related to the Aran islanders while also viewing herself as superior to and separated from them by her elevated economic and educational status. She not only sees nursing as a vocation centered on curing immediate bodily ills, but also as a way to alleviate the vulnerability of the islanders, which they suffer from as the result of their marginalized cultural practices and their poverty. Drawing on recent work on vulnerability, particularly that of Judith Butler and Susan Dodds, I will show that Hedderman’s memoir illuminates how the district nursing scheme could simultaneously seek to ameliorate the bodily harms of imperialism in Ireland while also operating as a part of that imperial system and using its injurious language. Hedderman fails to appreciate that vulnerability is not only a negative state that unjustly afflicts people at certain intersections of social positions, but also a universal feature of humanity and therefore fertile ground for solidarity across differences. A literary analysis of this failure thus presents us with a morally ambiguous picture of the successes of the district nursing scheme in the Irish revolutionary period.                       

 

 

Deirdre Canavan (King’s College London). Testimony and tolerance in Anna Burns’ Milkman.

 

Narratives of the Troubles that platform underrepresented voices are gaining increasing cultural recognition, indicating a broader desire to move away from the dominant machismo of the legacy of the conflict. Thus far, the kind of violence that has been prioritised and platformed in the narratives of the conflict have determined the primary actors who sculpt the conflict’s legacy in public memory. As the testimony of gender-based violence, the protagonist of Anna Burns’ 2018 novel Milkman has always already been written out of histories that prioritise the experiences of masculinist violent actors involved in sectarian and state violence. In this paper I will examine the way Milkman speaks from a marginal position within histories of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the ways the character of Middle Sister exposes the socially-binding ‘stickiness’ of history (Ahmed, 2004) and how her marginal ‘mode of seeing’ (hooks, 1984) can inform a fresh methodology for researching the post-conflict society.

 

Adopting an intersectional approach encourages a consideration of the dynamics of conflict in terms of oppression and power within the bifurcated communities pitted against one another. In this way, we can see how the individual is perceived as an internal threat when the collective has mobilised politically under a unified identity through its shared experience of sectarian conflict. This demonstrates how the collective feeling becomes monolithic and dominant, with zero tolerance for ‘messiness’ (Magennis, 2021). I contend that the emotional ‘messiness’ depicted in Milkman cultivates an important space to think about how and why certain kinds of experiences are actively written out of histories, and how these violent exclusions take place.

 

 

Dr M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera (University of Vigo, Spain). Intersectional Vulnerabilities and Reciprocal Resistances: Dialectical Itineraries of Irishness across the Atlantic

 

The Atlantic, like any cultural or imagined construct, is less a fixed space than an agglomerate of processes of encounter and mobility that are always multidirectional since the transit/translation of ideas takes place along a zigzagging dialectical itinerary that highlights the presence of dialogism, mediation, borrowings and métissage. The notion of the Atlantic as a geopolitical space of cultural mediation has been articulated upon the notion of translation since the colonial period and yet within the fragmentary fields of transatlantic studies what tends to get lost is precisely the fluid and circulatory form of intersectionality inherently connected to translation processes. Cultural phenomena imagined to be representative of one particular community may, in fact, be identified as shared when translated across the Atlantic, redefined through the semantics and politics of another interpretive community. An important part of my research in recent years has concentrated on the translation and circulation of Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in post-revolutionary Cuba. What began as a comparative textual analysis between Joyce’s text and its 1964 Cuban counterpart, in which I concentrated mainly on the translator’s ideological project, has more recently led to the discovery of complex and unsuspected yet highly significant (translational and transatlantic) intersections. In the light of all the above, I will discuss how, to this day, the translation of Irish literature in Cuba is informed by a dialectical itinerary, originated through the back-and-forth exchange of ideas of (colonial) vulnerability and imaginaries of (revolutionary) resistance between the two island nations.

 

 

Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade do Porto, Portugal). ‘Someone who knew what they were doing’: intermediality and politics in Muldoon’s Howdie-Skelp.

 

The poetry of Paul Muldoon has consistently been described as citational, translational, and characteristically marked by indirection. However, his latest collection, Howdie-Skelp (2021), addresses in many of its poems a series of public concerns – the rise of right-wing populism, the Covid-19 pandemic – with a directness and explicitness that could hardly be found in most of his earlier writing. The book’s title, which refers to ‘the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn’, announces this approach from the outset; and yet it does so through a phrase that many readers might not promptly recognise, were it not for a blurb that (besides explaining what a ‘howdie skelp’ is) describes the volume as ‘a wake-up call’, ‘a call to action’ (blurb, Muldoon 2021). 

 

Such tension between the cryptic and the explicit has a curious homology in the creative design that informs the sequence ‘23 Banned Poems’. This title is suggestive of writing with the capacity to energise censors in illiberal or autocratic regimes because of its evidently contentious or denunciatory significance. The sequence, however, consists of poems that, rather than bearing immediately on fraught political realities, relate to them at best in a mediated manner – since they ostensibly refer to other works of art, each of them naming in its title a particular painting, ranging chronologically from the late fifteenth to the late sixteenth century.

 

This paper will offer a discussion of some of the pieces in the sequence ‘23 Banned Poems’, focusing on the specific manner in which they balance the transparency of intent proper to politically engaged art against the mediations required by ekphrastic writing. The discussion will bring out the centrality that Muldoon’s recent writing accords to such culturally sensitive issues (for early twenty-first-century societies) as colonial history, sexual politics and geopolitical iniquities.

 

 

Dr. David Clare (Mary Immaculate College, UL). Otherness in Ursula Rani Sarma’s Blue.

 

As numerous critics have noted, the work of Indian-Irish playwright Ursula Rani Sarma has been heavily shaped by her formative years in Lahinch, Co. Clare. Some critics have expressed surprise that, with the exception of her hit stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2017), “her work does not explicitly address themes of immigration, nor the lives of minority ethnic individuals” and people of colour. However, as Charlotte McIvor and Matthew Spangler rightly point out, Sarma’s plays “illustrate a more subtle interculturalism”. In this paper, I will show that, in her early, powerful play Blue, Sarma demonstrates an understanding of widely-held (negative) Irish attitudes towards ethnic difference, as well as additional forms of “Otherness”. Blue is set in a fictional version of Lahinch called Killshoran, and, while the plot involving the three main characters (usually assumed to be white Irish) may not seem to be centrally concerned with the marginalisation of particular groups in Ireland, the play has much to say about “traditionalist” Irish attitudes towards ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Stray remarks by the characters regarding “funny last name[s]”, the “Chinese” language [sic], and “feckin Calcutta” all reveal the town’s relative lack of openness to “foreignness”. Additionally, Danny’s “tomboy” identity, which challenges the restrictive, traditionalist, binary beliefs around gender which prevail in the town, is the cause of many of her social problems (including the bullying she endures at school). And critics have failed to adequately address the possibility that Joe (usually assumed to be heterosexual) may actually be in love with Des.

 

 

Lucy Collins (University College Dublin). Lola Ridge and the Spaces of Radical Resistance.

 

The early decades of the twentieth century saw New York culturally transformed into a city of modernity, an arbiter of modern culture with a vigorous publishing and visual arts scene.  The social conditions of many of New York’s districts, in particular of the Lower East Side, fostered an activism that brought different political groupings – anarchists, socialists and feminists – together. Irish-born Lola Ridge was a memorable figure in this scene: a poet, editor and activist within the anarchist movement, her convictions found expression both in her political involvement and her poetry, which was celebrated in her lifetime but neglected by later generations of readers and critics.

 

The space of the city was influential on Ridge’s vivid and polemical work and shaped her education as a feminist, as well as her opportunities for literary networking and publishing. In the absence of material comfort, Ridge found her home in the lively, multicultural spaces of her neighbourhood. For her, the streets were sites of everyday experience but also of radical resistance, where her Irish origins could be articulated through solidarity with other marginalised groups and in the language and imagery of her poetry. In this paper I will consider Ridge’s place as an immigrant within the radical political culture of New York and explore how her public role shaped the experimental energies of her poetry.

 

 

Prof. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University). “One emigrant more”: The Transatlantic Reception of Jane Barlow’s and Katharine Tynan’s Regional Irelands.

 

In the preface to the 1893 New York edition of Irish Idylls Jane Barlow imagines her collection, reissued by Dodd, Mead & Co, as “one emigrant more” (i),expecting that it will await a warm reception across the Atlantic. As such, Barlow frames her publication in the contexts of nineteenth-century Irish immigration to America, comparing her collection to those who left Ireland to find new homes across the Atlantic. At the same time, by thus positioning her ‘travelling’ text at the intersections of Connemara and the United States, Barlow imagines an act of cultural transfer between what Stefanie Stockhurst calls “communicative communities” (2010: 21): a transmission of Connemara folklore and traditions to American readerships.

 

These transatlantic readerships varied greatly. Some audiences consisted of Irish-American communities, but many readers came from different ethnic backgrounds, and were moreover familiar with North-American regional fiction by, amongst others, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. It is therefore interesting to research how Barlow’s local colour stories and those of her friend and contemporary Katharine Tynan were reviewed in various American magazines, ranging from those that catered for educated urban audiences as well as those that targeted specifically Irish-American or Catholic readers.

 

This paper will present the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses of a selected corpus of reviews of Barlow’s and Tynan’s American editions of local colour fiction. In so doing it will discuss the terms that are used to typify these two women’s regional literature, the perceptions of Ireland that underlie these recurrent repertoires of representation, as well as assumptions about the genre of the stories that are conveyed. Furthermore, this presentation will explore the writers to which Tynan and Barlow are compared in these reviews, thereby mapping out the transnational literary networks in which their American reviewers placed them.

 

 

Dr Kate Costello-Sullivan (Le Moyne College, New York). “I still consider myself a lucky person”: Intersectionality and Entitlement in The Wych Elm and Bad Day in Blackrock

 

 The plots of Tana French’s 2018 novel The Wych Elm and Kevin Power’s lesser-known 2008 work, Bad Day in Blackrock, both focus on a murder and the attempt by the narrator to trace the culprits and the cause of the crime.  Set in the world of an upper-crust Ireland replete with big houses and private schools, however, both novels also paint a damning portrait of white privilege.  Toby, in The Wych Elm, is notable not only for the crime he suffers and the one he unveils, but also for the alternate narrative that he himself cannot read –a story of obliviousness and culpability by a character positioned in the intersections of male heterosexual norms and class privilege. In the same way, the narrator of Bad Day in Blackrock, who remains unnamed for much of the novel, exposes the presumptions and privileges of class and gender with a similar flippance and unawareness.  Through the heavy use of dramatic irony and the unrelenting portrayal of entitlement and its absence, both authors paint a damning picture of a particular segment of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

 

 

Alexander Coupe (University of Liverpool). Sticking Power: Arts Funding and the Agency of Applied Theatre in Northern Ireland.

 

Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, policy makers have promoted the arts as capable of transforming conflict in Northern Ireland. Over the past two decades, funders have required practitioners provide them with ever more information on the contribution of their work to this agenda. However, short-termist and decontextualised methods of evaluation obscure, and even hinder, the complex, long-term legacies of particular applied arts projects. These bureaucratic systems of arts administration in fact entrench top-down assumptions about the nature of conflict transformation and art’s contribution to it, assumptions that are, in turn, informed by a dominant (neo)liberal paradigm of peacebuilding. Drawing upon research into the Derry Playhouse’s Theatre of Witness project, this paper analyses participant interviews to reconsider what makes the experience of applied theatre stick, or come unstuck. It argues that situating participant experience within the broader material conditions of inequality and scarcity they face not only offers a better insight into the transformative power of applied theatre projects, but offers us an opportunity to rethink how arts funding could and should work in the North.

 

 

Dr Chris Cusack (Radboud University). “The Present-Day Prince of Irish Storytellers”: Seumas MacManus’s American Market and the Construction of Irishness.

 

From the start of his literary career in the 1890s, Donegal writer Seumas MacManus was a frequent contributor to leading American periodicals such as Harper’s, Century, and McClure’s, where he featured alongside noted American champions and practitioners of local colour fiction such as Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The first book he published in the United States, Through the Turf Smoke (1899), was an instant success and went through several reprints, as did his later collections of Irish folk tales. He also went on several well-received lecture tours around the US, presenting on topics such as “The Glories, Sorrows and Hopes of Ireland” and “Irish Wit and Humor.”

 

In the US, MacManus’s reinterpretations of Irish folklore catered to a mainstream and largely urban reading public with a taste for Irish local colour fiction, as the contemporaneous popularity of authors such as Jane Barlow and Katharine Tynan also demonstrates. Yet while MacManus rooted his work explicitly in the Donegal Gaeltacht and its seanchaí tradition and was a prominent member of Conradh na Gaeilge, the author, his American publishers, and periodicals that published and reviewed his work also reframed his stories, poems, and collections for an American audience hungry for romantic tales of Ireland and its peasantry.

 

In this regard, while MacManus’s credentials and his oeuvre’s regional emphasis functioned to bolster claims of verisimilitude, his works nevertheless tended to be promoted as representative of a generalised “authentic” Celticity, purportedly showcasing “the good old Gaelic characteristics, unspoiled by so-called modern civilization,” as the New Catholic World stated. Using reviews, profiles, promotional materials, and MacManus’s self-presentations, this paper explores how his work engaged in the transatlantic construction and commodification of images of Irishness, in the context of the popularity of local colour fiction in the United States.

 

 

Orlaith Darling (Trinity College Dublin). “Town’s Dead”: intersectional approaches to contemporary Irish music and the City.

 

High living costs, the housing crisis, the soaring cost of venue insurance, and the closure of clubs and gig spaces means that Dublin is no city for musicians.

 

This talk centres on the work of three music acts – Kojaque, Pillow Queens, and TPM – who foreground their working-class (and queer) experiences in their engagement with corporate contemporary Dublin. I focus, in particular, on “Town’s Dead” (2021) in which Kojaque expresses the increasing public unease about the corporate domination of Dublin’s urban landscape and the gentrification of working-class areas; “A Dog’s Life” (2020) as Pillow Queens’ meditation on the housing crisis; and “TPM Don’t Have Your Money” (2020) as a vehicle of anti-establishment convictions married, I argue, with a strong grassroots political activist message.

 

As well as acute awareness of the manifold problems with contemporary Ireland, these acts also demonstrate a certain loyalty to it: Kojaque answers the accusation of his song, “Town’s Dead”, with the recurring refrain “My town’s not dead, it’s just dormant”, Pillow Queens return to Dublin again and again as inspiration, and TPM’s roots in traditional and folk music demonstrate sustained interest in place and dinnseanchas. Hence, I argue that these acts are forging a new sense of place-specific ownership that sidesteps tropes of possession and territoriality, and an awareness of working-class identity in a collective, historical and spatial context as well as a subjective one.

 

Drawing on the lyrics, music videos, and performance of the songs mentioned, this talk explores questions of who gets to live in a city; what and who a city is for, and, in context of dying nightlife and closing venues, who can access, create and perform culture in contemporary Ireland.

 

 

Dr Christa de Brún (Waterford Institute of Technology). ‘Strange Flowers, Unblemished Whiteness and the Pain of Difference’

 

This paper will focus on social identity and intersecting oppressions in contemporary Irish literature with a particular focus on the work of Donal Ryan. Intersectionality requires recognition of the voice of those oppressed by structures of inequality, voices that are frequently excluded from the dominant narrative. Ryan’s The Spinning Heart is an amalgamation of twenty-one monologues delivered by the inhabitants of an unnamed small town in Ireland who are some of the many victims of the country’s financial collapse.  In Ryan’s polyphonic novel, each perspective bears a certain amount of weight and validity echoing Bakhtin’s assertion that each person’s experience is ‘unique and irreplaceable’, enabling characters and types to develop into personalities by granting them freedom from others’ perspectives and their environment. Similarly, in Strange Flowers, Ryan explores race and difference with the arrival of a black Englishman in North Tipperary in the 1970s and his othering by the local community as ‘his blackness here was as remarkable as his son's whiteness had been in Notting Hill, and all the pain of difference now was his, and this was how it had to be’. Ryan’s novels explore marginal identities, existing between dominant spaces and such identification is never simply a movement from one identity to another but rather a constant process of engagement, contestment and appropriation as characters navigate intersecting oppressions, from Farouk, the Syrian refugee fleeing his war-torn country in A Low and Quiet Sea to the characters from the Irish travelling community in All We Shall Know. Ryan’s novels address the multiple dimensions of identity and explore the relation of identity to society to introduce readers not only to new worlds but new perspectives.

 

 

S.J. De Mattio (Trinity College Dublin). Contextualizing the Erasure of “Ireland’s Forgotten Genius,” Teresa Deevy.

 

In the first half of the 1930s Teresa Deevy, a deaf writer from Waterford, was one of the most prolific and acclaimed female playwrights in the world. At the height of her career, Deevy was a favorite of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, heralded as “the most important dramatist writing for the Irish theater” by Abbey producer Lennox Robinson. Reviews from her contemporaries named Deevy “the new voice of the Irish theatre,” and a rather relentless voice at that. Deevy was a political radical and proto-feminist whose early writings chronicled the lives of working-class Irish women, all caged in by social convention and left with limited options. Her subject matter was most likely informed by her time as a member of the Cumann na mBan, fighting alongside women like Constance Markievicz during the Irish War of Independence. Perhaps it was her gender politics that caused the increasingly conservative Abbey Theatre to turn its back on her in 1936, effectively ending her career as an “Abbey playwright.” Like countless women authors who came before her, Deevy was celebrated in life, forgotten in death, and ultimately relegated to the margins of literary and theatre history. Distinguished Theatre scholar Jill Dolan notes that “patriarchal authority has determined the canon’s selection and then mystified its terms, so that this relied body of work seems always to have been in place. The invisibility of both its constructors and the origins of its construction render the canon peculiarly remote from question or attack.” This paper seeks to demystify Deevy’s omission from the canon by contextualizing her work with the pervasive social restrictions placed on Irish women of the period. Restrictions embedded in Eamon De Valera’s Oireachtas Bills of 1937, and mutually enforced by the ideologies of the Catholic Church and the burgeoning Irish Free State. 

 

 

Prof. Leszek Drong (University of Silesia, Poland). Under Foreign Eyes? James Joyce’s Journalistic (Re)discovery of the West of Ireland.

 

In Joyce’s two journalistic pieces for Il Piccolo della Sera, based on his sojourn in the West of Ireland in 1912, Galway and the Arans appear to be uniquely multicultural and historically complex milieus. Clearly, the descriptions and historical anecdotes that Joyce offers in “The City of the Tribes” and “The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran” are underpinned by his own experiences and direct contacts with continental Europe. Rather than idealize the West of Ireland in a manner characteristic of the Celtic Revival, Joyce extends in his articles an invitation to see Galway and its environs as transcultural locations, with barely hidden layers of earlier cultural hybridity and interbreeding. Simultaneously, Joyce the journalist positions himself as both an insider (‘a genuine Irishman’ educated in Catholic institutions and conversant with his ‘native Catholic tradition’) and an outsider who comes from a foreign place (Trieste) and has a foreign readership in mind. Also, he has a personal agenda, to be sure, which is connected with elevating the provincial and peripheral status of Galway, the city where his partner, and later his wife, Nora Barnacle, was born and raised. Finally, his journalism is intertextually linked with the character of Gabriel Conroy who is accused of being a West Briton in “The Dead”. On Conroy’s behalf, prompted by another character that he himself created (Miss Ivors), Joyce eventually undertakes a journey west, to Galway and the Aran Islands. Taken in 1912, his second trip to Galway is discursively transformed into an encounter with a uniquely multicultural milieu, where Spanish, Italian, Celtic and Catholic influences contribute to the impression of a cultural melting pot in the West of Ireland. Joyce’s reportage is informed by several social, political and cultural factors to do with his background, status as a self-imposed exile, literary reputation, gender and interplay of the languages he chooses for his communications. All those factors are reflected in the narrative perspective and tone that he uses in the two pieces written for Il Picollo della Sera.

 

 

Dr Alinne Balduino P. Fernandes (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil). Radio Drama in times of COVID-19 — Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? in Translation.

 

Making art during the Covid-19 pandemic has proven challenging in both negative and positive ways. In times of social distancing, theatre-making more specifically has been reshaped and reimagined to adapt to the internet as it has become, more than ever, our omnipresent medium. In this paper, I will reflect on my own translation into Brazilian Portuguese and adaptation of Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1989) from a digital perfomance to a radio framework. Throughout her career, Reid herself dealt with different artistic genres, adapted and co-directed her own plays, from stage to radio. Set in 1986, My Name deals with social isolation due to ageing and imprisonment in times of political and religious bigotry and war, which, in many ways, resonates with the political turmoil Brazil has been facing since 2016. The malaise provoked by beliefs and ideologies that are different from those held up by Northern Irish Protestantism during the Troubles are at the centre of Reid’s play. In many ways, the hate that stems from those differences may reflect those of contemporary Brazilian society. Our ‘strangers’, although not the same of 1980s Northern Ireland, are similarly stigmatised. In this vein, theatre translation is seen as an opportunity for intercultural encounters which stem from the dramaturgical agency of the translator. This research is, thus, practice-based and relies on the praxis of translation and radio drama in order to reflect theoretically on theatre translation. The case study in question is part of my on-going broader research project titled “Making (Northern-)Irish Radio Drama in Brazil: Reflections on Drama, Translation, and Technologies in Times of Social Distancing”. The project aims to foster the dramaturgical study, translation, and production of Irish and Northern-Irish plays as part of the Irish Studies research cluster at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

 

 

Professor Andrew Fitzsimons (Gakushuin University, Tokyo). ‘Barbarism Begins at Home’: Derek Mahon’s ‘The Snow Party’ and Bashō.

 

Derek Mahon’s poem ‘The Snow Party’ sets up a contrast between the civilized and the ‘barbarous’: the refinement and grace of the social formalities of Bashō and friends in Japan attending a snow-viewing party and a murderous European ‘elsewhere’ of public execution in ‘boiling squares.’ Readings of the poem tend to concentrate on the social and political background out of which the poem arose: the violence of the mid-1970s in Northern Ireland. What I want to explore in this paper, however, is the Japanese context, how Mahon’s poem, though inaccurate in almost all of its detail about Japan, arises out of and reflects Bashō’s own exploration of the theme of the civilized and the barbarous. I will outline how the ‘silence’ of the Japanese scene evoked by Mahon bears within it the trace of the strategic silences of Bashō’s own engagement with the political conditions of Tokugawa Japan.

 

 

Dr Eóin Flannery (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick). “When Species Meet”: Scale and Form in the poetry of Ciaran Berry and Moya Cannon.

 

The quotation in the paper title is taken from Donna Haraway’s 2007 book When Species Meet, which deals with the longstanding problems raised by myths of human exceptionalism. Eschewing the blunt dualisms that have contoured much rationalist thought and that underpin historical, and extant, socio-cultural hierarchies, Haraway insists that ‘all mortal beings […] live in and through the use of one another’s bodies’ (Haraway 2007, 79). The porosities implicit in Haraway’s arguments span the physical and the affective, as she alights upon a host of exploitation across species boundaries. Rather than persist in accepting the perpetuation of ethically neutered objectifications of nonhuman species, syncing with work by critics like Cary Wolfe, Haraway demands that we acknowledge the dignity of the latter (Wolfe 2003; Wolfe 2012),  and it is in the context of her aforementioned point on the deeply historical and deeply embedded mutualities of the human and the nonhuman that Haraway’s work strikes a useful initial keynote to our analyses of contemporary Irish poetry and climate change.  Taking critical impetus from Haraway’s arguments, this paper will look at a selection of poems by both Ciaran Berry and Moya Cannon in terms of the relationships between human and nonhuman ecologies. While neither Berry nor Cannon explicitly invokes global warming, pollution or environmental justice in the works scrutinized in our discussions, the ways in which they attend to the relationships between signifier and signified; human history and natural history; the relative scales of human civilization and planetary deep time; and the intimacies of individual encounters with the natural world make their combined works vital ecopoetic interventions.

 

 

Roundtable: Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980-2020

 

Dr Deirdre Flynn (MIC, UL)

Dr Ciara L. Murphy (NUI Galway)

 

To coincide with the launch of the new Routledge Edited Collection Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980-2020, this roundtable focuses on the underrepresented relationship between austerity and Irish women’s writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this roundtable considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women’s writing and culture during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, the book analyses women’s writing through a multi-medium and intersectional approach. We ask two questions; what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women’s writing and culture from 1980 to 2020 this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland’s consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Twelve essays, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women’s life writing,  and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. 

 

 

Marine Galiné (University of Reims Champagne Ardenne, France). The bog in Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground (2019): liminality, motherhood and abjection.

 

Colonial discourses have always identified the Irish bog land with primitivity and savagery. In his seminal monograph, Derek Gladwin reminds us of the liminality inherent to the bog: geographical and mineral, it is an in-between space where bodies are uncannily preserved but which is also celebrated for its homely qualities.

 

This paper wishes to study the representation(s) of the bog in Lee Cronin’s 2019 neo-gothic³ film The Hole in the Ground. Cronin’s first feature film focuses on a single mother, Sarah, and her quest for solace as she hides away from an abusive partner in the Irish countryside with her son, Christopher. If direct references to the bog are subtle (none apart from the ‘Rattlin’ Bog’ rhyme sung by Christopher and his fellow classmates at school), it is obviously symbolised by the deep excavation mother and son come across in the forest surrounding their isolated house. Thus, the film offers a modernized take on the Irish lore: once Christopher has touched this sucking hole, he starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him.

 

Cronin’s film aptly questions notions which have always obsessed writers of the Irish gothic: the burden of the past, trauma, motherhood, split identities, mental health but also abjection. Christopher’s monstrous and hybrid body indeed seems to echo his mother’s fear of losing him, but also the unending cycle of violence and abuse which she might perpetuate by hurting her son the way she was herself abused.

 

Back and forth, Cronin questions Ireland’s gothic legacy and eventually transcends traditional readings of the bog: the ending contradicts the very notions of waste and stagnation usually associated with it by transforming this liminal place into a portal which allows Sarah to face her own fears and potentially move on with her life.

 

 

Marie Gemrichova (Charles University, Prague). Boundaries and Border Crossing in Nick Laird’s Utterly Monkey (2005) .

 

 While the concept of transnationalism may primarily give a perspective on the processes accompanying individuals who are border-crossing between sovereign states and nations, it can also aid us in the discussion of “migrants,” who move across different borders while staying within the boundary of a particular state. The definition of a border then may change as it seizes to be only a physical one but also a historical or psychological one, as is the case of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Although we are talking about one country, the residents on the islands may differentiate themselves or be differentiated by others when they move from one place to another. 

 

An example of the difficult position of people moving specifically from Northern Ireland to the UK can be found in Nick Laird’s novel Utterly Monkey (2005), which portrays several characters, all travelling for different reasons to London from a small village, Ballyglass. The paper aims to look at the motivations and experiences of these characters through the move as well as at the communities they depart from and arrive to, and at the intercultural communication depicted. Is there a border that they need to cross and if yes, what kind? What is the aim of portraying these journeying characters in the novel? What are the effects following their relocation and dislocation?

 

This paper will thus ask whether we can approach the novel through the lens of transnationalism and what issues subsequently arise. What border is retained between these two places and what kind of sovereignty does Northern Ireland have within the United Kingdom based on Laird’s novel in comparison with other texts?

 

 

Dr Tara Giddens (University of Limerick). Representation of Spaces in Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’ Novel, The Matrimonial Lottery (1906).

 

During her career, Irish journalist Charlotte O’Conor Eccles (1863-1911) was a well-known writer of both literature and journalism yet has since become almost entirely forgotten. It is argued that due to her connection with the New Woman, Eccles was pushed aside and quickly ignored after her death. Through extensive research I have worked to learn more about Eccles and compile a thorough list of her fiction and journalism in the late nineteenth, early-twentieth centuries. It is through this compilation that we gain a better understanding of just how popular Eccles was and the impressive amount of work produced over her career. However, more importantly, by analysing Eccles and her writing, we have rediscovered yet another forgotten Irish woman writer, one who so passionately worked to better the lives of all Irish citizens and promote better treatment and training for women from all social classes.

 

In her well-known article “The Experience of a Woman Journalist” (1893) in Blackwood’s Magazine, Eccles’ criticised women’s inability to network in clubs and other public spaces due to social rules. By analysing Eccles’ journalism, I argue that Eccles’ personal experiences influenced her representation of spaces in her fiction, especially those spaces that were restricted to women. After introducing Eccles, my paper will then focus on her novel, The Matrimonial Lottery (1906) where she challenges public and private spaces of early twentieth-century London. For example, within the novel women can be found in clubs, offices and the outdoors while a dangerous Dandy invades the home and the private space becomes unsafe and morally corrupting. This inversion of spaces allows Eccles to subtly challenge conventional ideas about where women should be allowed and, even further, draws attention to what can happen in assumed “safe” spaces.

 

 

Nemo Gorecki (Université de Lille SHS CECILLE, France). Queering the Gaeltacht, a trans-reading of The Roads by Padraic Pearse.

 

In his collection of short-stories Mháthair, agus sgéalta eile relating the everyday life and legends of the people of Connemara, Patrick Pearse includes The Roads, about the strange evening of Nora, a little girl who wishes she was a boy and takes advantage of her parents’ absence to run away after cutting her hair and putting on her brother, Cuimin’s clothes. She believes she could then roam the country free from her perpetual house chores and domestic prison. It would be interesting to use the recent ‘Queering Ireland’ studies by J.Valence and Patrick R. Mullen and the works on trans studies by Jack Halberstam to cast a light on this unique if brief moment of queerness and defiance at the heart of the Gaeltacht.

Nora eventually gets scared and injured on the roads, then has a very literal come-to-Jesus moment and is returned to her home and caring ways, never to leave again. The tale’s ending showcases the limitations of revolutionary inspirations in a deeply religious Ireland which would not be free from the yoke of Catholicism for many years after its independence from the English, only evil depicted in the short-stories.

The story represents a little girl (potentially a little boy) belonging to the last traditional Irish community, lauded by the Celtic revival movement as a model for a free Ireland, but who actually feels suffocated in her (his) socialisation as a girl. The poverty and reality of the Gaeltacht was often blissfully ignored by the educated, middle-class members of the Gaelic League. This story of swift return to conformity might just be a symptom of this disconnect: to Pearse, all little girls of pure, unspoiled Irish-speaking Ireland should be content with hard domestic life and motherhood and never try to escape it or else.

 

 

Dr Alan Graham (Independent scholar). “Repeat Play”: repetition and truth-telling in Beckett, Friel and Irish monologic theatre. 

 

Brian Friel has long been credited as the “the father of contemporary Irish drama.” In particular, his 1978 masterpiece Faith Healer is perceived by critics and theatre practitioners alike as the origin play for the tradition of monologic drama which has dominated Irish theatre since the 1990s, the play which, according to Conor McPherson, created the “modern Irish monologue.” This consensus, however, overlooks the indebtedness of Faith Healer to the monologic dramaturgy of Samuel Beckett and, in so doing, obfuscates Beckett’s influence in the evolution of an Irish monologic theatre. Reading Friel’s first monologue play in relation to the triptych structure it shares with Beckett’s Play (1963), this paper argues that the subversion of drama as a vessel for truth-telling in these key plays has exercised a profound influence on the approach to the monologue form in contemporary Irish theatre. Tracing both Beckett’s and Friel’s fascination with musical structures of variation and recurrence, the paper discerns the reach of the interrogation of dramatic storytelling in both Play and Faith Healer. I examine how Play operates a comprehensive critique of the aesthetic and epistemological traditions upon which western theatre has developed, and how through its compulsion to repeat itself Play reduces theatrical specularity to a visceral and futile demand for judgment. The complex forms of duplication in Faith Healer are similarly read in relation to an audience’s demand for narrative coherence and, reading the play against its Beckettian precursor, the paper demonstrates how these dramas not only problematise dramatic narrative but, more fundamentally, disrupt an audience’s relationship with theatrical presence. The paper concludes with a consideration of Play and Faith Healer as predecessors to the monologue tradition in Irish theatre, arguing that the “modern Irish monologue” not only speaks back to socio-political narratives but contests theatre’s claim to truth-tell.

 

 

Adam Hanna (University College Cork). Rhoda Coghill's Birds.

 

This paper will focus on the birds that flit through Rhoda Coghill's (1903-2000) poetry, arguing that they represent the possibility of liberation, their songs a counter-sound to the hegemonic pressures of mid-century Ireland. Her collection The Bright Hillside (1948) includes a poem that centres on a robin which interrupts the solemn celebrant of a Mass: “Through the grave, holy rite the happy bird / Drove a light counterpoint”.  My discussion of this poem will be a starting point for an exploration of the multiple pressures that shape Coghill's poetry, including her statuses as a member of the small Quaker minority in a strongly Catholic state, and as a woman speaking to a male-dominated literary world and public sphere. The world that Coghill creates in her poems, in which birds swim like fish through the rainy air and bushes branch like coral, is a markedly impressionistic and synaesthaesiac one. However, Coghill’s painterly music is not poetry of fey charm or local colour: an uncertain sense of menace shadows the changeful, wakeful, landscapes that she depicts. This paper will argue that Coghill's poems, which simultaneously recognise and fly by several nets, offer a ‘light counterpoint’ to the Ireland of her time. 

 

 

Dr. Keelan Harkin (Trinity College Dublin). Fascism, Anti-Communist Violence, and the Spanish Civil War in Mary Manning’s Mount Venus.

 

Mary Manning’s Mount Venus (1938) continually cycles through several points of interest and competing novelistic genres. Throughout its length, Mount Venus morphs between a post-independence Big House novel in the vein of Elizabeth Bowen, a roman á clef of the Irish Revival, a satire that skewers a rudderless Irish Left, and a fictionalisation of right-wing political violence in 1930s Dublin. Although primarily known as a playwright, having trained under Sara Allgood, Manning took up the novel in 1938 to explore more clearly the intricate forces at work in an Irish Free State still consolidating its statehood against a backdrop of rising fascism on the European continent. Rather than a lack of focus or polish, Manning’s mercurial approach to style and critique in Mount Venus might more readily be understood as an attempt to demonstrate the volatile political landscape of Ireland in the 1930s. The novel centers on the Anglo-Irish Caroline Crosbie who rebels from her Ascendancy upbringing and becomes an integral part of the Irish Left during the War for Independence. By the 1930s, however, she has been cast aside by a younger generation of left-wing activists who, rather than organising labour movements, squabble over participation in the Spanish Civil War. Caroline’s two sons, Michael and Barry, come to symbolise this fracas; Michael fights Franco in Spain while Barry abstains and rests from illness in the west of Ireland. Both die in futility. Manning depicts with frightful clarity a burgeoning anti-Communist and fascist movement within her contemporary Ireland, and as such her novel advocates for a broader coalition of liberal and left-wing organisation against right-wing agitation by lamenting factional in-fighting. This paper argues that Mount Venus affords a unique opportunity to examine how continental political movements influenced the ideological landscape of the Irish Free State at a time of uncertainty and consolidation.

 

 

Liam Harrison (University of Birmingham). Insistent Styles in Contemporary Irish Non-Fiction

 

Writing in The New Irish Studies, Julie Bates has recently proposed that ‘[t]he most exciting new writing in Ireland is happening in the field of nonfiction’. Within this field of non-fiction there is a formally capacious and diverse kind of ‘essayism’ that, as Bates suggests, allows for a ‘footloose, permissive type of writing’, which ‘involves varying degrees of political radicalism or quietism’, and ‘is oriented toward the future, in terms of the new forms of thought it presents’. This paper examines how writers such as Brian Dillon, Claire-Louise Bennett, Emma Dabiri, Rob Doyle, Roisin Kiberd, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Kevin Brazil, and many others are often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, formally innovating the essay and other kinds of writing, or otherwise deeply engaging with the stylistic and political capacities of non-fiction.

 

Susan Sontag’s essay ‘On Style’, famously states that ‘every style is a means of insisting on something’, and that ‘every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive’. Similarly, Zadie Smith in her essay ‘Fail Better’ proposes that style is integral to issues of representation, and that it is more than ‘merely a matter of fanciful syntax’, but is rather ‘the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness’. This paper unpacks the expressive capacities of style, established by Sontag and Smith, to closely examine inter-related questions of formal expression and political representation in contemporary Irish non-fiction, autofiction, and the writing that falls between. Rather than proclaiming a cohesive generic category of “contemporary Irish non-fiction”, this paper explores the diversity of creative paths being taken, as these writers assume a stylistically and formally inventive approach to explore subjects such as sex, gender, racial injustice, class, labour, and identity.

 

 

Dr Hawk Chang (Education University of Hong Kong). “Watch her carefully, every movement, every gesture, every little peculiarity”: Women in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come.

 

Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964) is undoubtedly a canon in contemporary Irish drama because it deals with a pivotal issue in modern and contemporary Irish society—emigration. This psychological play centers around Gareth O’Donnell and his intended move to Philadelphia, with Public Gar representing the Gar whom people see and Private Gar signifying the protagonist’s unconscious self on the night before and the very morning of his departure to America. Torn between the traumatic memory of Ballybeg, his destitute hometown in the play, and the dream projected on the brand-new life in America, Gareth enacts the part of “Everyman” in modern and contemporary Ireland. However, while the play’s historical, political, and psychological aspects have been widely parsed, women in relation to critical notions such as nation have not been thoroughly examined. Consequently, female characters such as Gar’s Mother, Madge, Kate Doogan, and Aunt Lizzy and the different types of discriminations they encounter merit an advanced study. Reading Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come from an intersectional approach, this paper discusses why women such as Madge deserve more thoughtful regard, as Private Gar reminds us at the end of the play.

 

 

Prof. Maureen S. G. Hawkins (University of Lethbridge). The Sense of No Ending in The Hostage and The Island.

 

Comedy ends happily and tragedy sadly, but Euripidean tragicomedy does not end, thus denying the audience catharsis and metatheatrically extending the play’s world into theirs, making them players who must “complete” the play in their own lives if they want the satisfactions of conventional theatre. 

 

One way in which Euripidean tragicomedy can refuse to end is to offer closure and then undercut it, as in the Irish Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958) and the South African Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1973).

 

In the former, Teresa’s curtain speech over Leslie’s body encourages sympathetic cathartic grief in the audience. But his resurrection song reminds the audience that he and the rest of the cast are characters; they cannot truly die, any more than they can learn the lessons the play teaches and change and thus save their lives. However, we are human beings; we can die–and, Leslie warns, we will die if we do not learn and change: the Bells of Hell will, indeed, “Go ting-a-ling-a-ling” for us, even though they will never do so for him.

 

In The Island, John and Winston, prisoners on Robben Island, run, shackled togethe,r to their cell, where they practise the trial scene from Sophocles’ Antigone for a prison show.  Winston, sentenced to life, is to play Antigone, but resents playing a woman and rejects their cause when he finds that John is to be released.  However, in a stirring speech at the end, Winston re-embraces his ideals, transcends the divisive, reactive “hypermasculine” misogyny induced by Western patriarchy’s colonial/racial/gender paradigm; and embraces the “feminine” model of honour and morality embodied by Antigone, despite its consequences.

 

Yet, just as his speech offers the audience cathartic release, the two men “come together . . . as in the beginning,” bringing the play full circle, undermining the audience’s catharsis. Though Winston has passed through his dark night of the soul, as long as apartheid continues, there can be no end to his “living death” on Robben Island, and, like John, we remain shackled to him, whether we wish to run with him or not.  As long as we can leave the theatre, free men and women, while John and his cellmate remain imprisoned, we have no right to catharsis.

 

 

Clodagh Heffernan (University College Cork). “Be Someone”: Working-Class Life and Organic Intellectualism in Irish Rap.

 

This paper seeks to outline some of the reasons why Irish rap lyrics should be taken seriously as an emerging form of working-class Irish poetry. This will be achieved through engaging in close literary and musical analysis of “Be Someone”, a track by MC Redzer (Kieron Ryan) of the Dublin-based Class A’z hip hop collective. Antonio Gramsci’s model of the subaltern “organic intellectual” provides a practical theoretical framework through which the issue of Irish rap’s artistic legitimation can be explored, and I argue that working-class Irish rappers are creative organic intellectuals who demonstrate “active participation in practical life, as constructor[s], organizer[s], ‘permanent persuader[s]’ and not just [as] simple orator[s]” (Gramsci 9). As such, this paper will provide an appraisal of “Be Someone” by assessing it through both Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals and contemporary Hip Hop Studies scholarship. This will involve discussions of prevalent themes in Irish rap which are evident in this track, including challenges to the idea that Irish rap constitutes “gimmickry”, how Irish rappers address what Gramsci would call “traditional intellectuals”, as well as homosociality and working-class collectivity. Lyrically, “Be Someone” takes the form of an autobiographical narrative poem. Through the use of first-person narration, the lyrics chronicle the life events of the working-class poetic subject as he reflects upon the particular set of circumstances that ultimately led him to pursue rapping. Again looking to Gramsci, I posit that the effect of the linear storytelling style in “Be Someone” is to “give [the working class] homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci 5). As Kate Crehan explains, “intellectuals in the [prison] notebooks play a crucial role in the transformation of a class’s lived experience into coherent, shared narratives that explain and make sense of the world as viewed from the vantage point of that class” (33). In Redzer’s case, “Be Someone” explores some of the causes behind the common social problems that occur in deprived urban areas, and he does so through compassionately narrating the life of a young person who might be regarded as being complicit in these problems.

 

 

Molly Hennigan (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA). Contextualizing Personal Narratives of Incarceration: Hanna Greally’s Bird’s Nest Soup.

 

In her foreword to the 2008 edition of Hanna Greally’s Bird’s Nest Soup (BNS), an account of almost twenty years in St. Loman’s psychiatric hospital, Dr. Eilís Ward posed a question which, with the passage of time, deserves revision. Speaking of the underlying personal narrative of lived experience in Greally’s book, she writes:

 

“A question remains, however, as to how we can make sense of what is a very idiosyncratic, highly personalised narrative written in a style which is out of favour today.” (viii)

 

The trajectory of female Irish writing has since plunged headlong into the idiosyncratic and highly personalised narrative. While Ward’s introduction marks her own serious engagement with Greally’s work, BNS’ very form may be more broadly acknowledged as a cultural marker today. In light of this we can re-read Greally’s work with the attentive eyes we have been laying on the highly-personal Irish female narrative in more recent years. We have become attuned to this narrative, endeared to it for its very idiosyncrasy. The same appetite for personal narrative can now be taken back to Greally’s work. My paper aims to unpack Greally’s narrative of incarceration in order to contextualise its position in a lineage of Irish writing that highlights the intersectional violence of state-sponsored institutionalisation, leading to the specific cruelties we witness in the Direct Provision system today. The nation-state committed to denying the fact that institutional abuse is woven into its fabric poses a danger that hinges on the vulnerability of the asylum seeker. That the Irish government has chosen to implicate asylum seekers in the long history of Irish institutional abuse by re-establishing patterns of trauma we have seen only too recently poses a direct threat to the lives of asylum seekers in Ireland. It is important to recognise the full extent of this multi-layered institutional abuse. Literature and scholarship in recent years has done a lot to uncover the brutalities of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools. My research aims to illuminate, in similar ways, the role of the psychiatric institution in this multi-faceted shame-industrial complex.

 

 

Dr Ian Hickey (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick). Foucault, Direct Provision and Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life.

Using Michel Foucault’s idea of panopticism from Discipline and Punish as a lens, this paper will look at the intersections of power and punishment in Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life. Okorie’s text addresses the experiences of people who live in direct provision in Ireland, often focusing on the banality and cruelness of that system. The institutionalisation of people in Ireland is not unfamiliar if we consider the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes in terms of women’s experiences in the twentieth century. Direct provision is a similar system that, I would argue, aims at disciplining, controlling and punishing refugees. Dominc Hewson’s research on direct provision points towards this element of discipline and punishment when he states that ‘some centres require signatures; others use electronic systems to record attendance. Some managers monitor attendance closely, others are lax, allowing residents to sign and swipe in on behalf of another. Any resident deemed absent without adequate cause may have their allowance stopped and bed ‘re-allocated’ rendering them homeless’ (Hewson 2020, 6). This observation of residents alongside the recording of all events and movements is suggestive of panopticism that forces conformity and induces ‘in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault 2020, 201).

 

 

Dr Moonyoung Hong (University of Hong Kong). “Sexual Styles” of Wilde, Joyce and Enright: Desire and Irish Theatre-Fiction.

 

This paper examines three Irish novels—Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Anne Enright’s Actress (2020)—and their engagement with sexual politics and practice of ‘novelizing’ theatre. In their works, theatre repeatedly serves as the ontological and practical locus of desire. Theatre’s collaborative, performative and decadent features were at once a source of acute tension and a creative catalyst for novelists. While critics have noted the ‘theatricality’ and the sexual politics of the respective writers’ novels, none of them acknowledged the works as pertaining to the genre of ‘theatre-fiction’, a new coinage put forth by Graham Wolfe (2019). By applying ‘theatre-fiction’ as a frame of analysis, the essay not only traces the genealogy of Irish theatre-fiction, but also investigates how this generic consciousness can enrich and explain the meaningful overlaps, transmutations, and differences within and across the various forms.

 

If Wilde’s successful playwriting career shows his confidence in synthesizing and ‘novelizing’ core aspects of theatre, such as mimesis, tragedy/comedy, incorporation of witty dialogues, and male fantasy embodied in the actress-muse (Sibyl Vane, whose suicide epitomizes the dramatic irony), and incorporates homoerotic themes in covert ways, Joyce writes his longest chapter ‘Circe’ against a background of personal failure in theatre (his sole play Exiles was rejected by the Abbey) and the emergence of cinema. Joyce was strongly influenced by Ibsen and the theatrical scene of his time, having witnessed the famous Playboy riot. Enright’s Actress was written in tandem with the #MeToo movement in Irish Theatre and explores the issue of women’s sexual exploitation in the theatre-world. It critiques the violation of female bodies and artistic prowess. The mother-daughter/theatre-novel parallel becomes a thematic and formal consideration. When asked about her mother’s ‘sexual style’, Norah, the protagonist-novelist, like Enright, refuses to give an answer.

 

 

Dr. Barry Houlihan (NUI Galway). Bronze Sabrinas and Caribbean Céilís – The Pike Theatre and Staging Intercultural Ireland.

 

From the early 1950s, there is noticeable shift towards corporal expression and representation which challenges dramatic norms within Irish drama.  On stages such as the Pike Theatre, post-colonial elements of formal and received expression and communication of identity were challenged through a range of multi-faceted performance styles. This was evident in particular within the physical presence of the actor, the embodied memory of colonial/post-colonial identity of cast members and performance reception. The Ireland of the mid-1950s portrayed at the Pike Theatre by directors Carolyn Swift and Alan Simpson was one of complex societal flux, blending European and American dramaturgical influences with innovative performance styles. It also reflected an Irish society that was changing in terms of its demographic composition and internationalisation afforded by cultural influences of imported popular culture growing intercultural tourism and exchange.

 

This paper presents a detailed study of the late-night ‘Follies’ at the Pike Theatre, in particular “Irish Coffee” and “Follies in the Sun”. It examines their intercultural commentary and critique upon modern Ireland and in staging ‘Caribbean and Calypso Ceílís’, blending traditional Irish music, culture and artists with performers from the Caribbean, many of whom reflect the cultural impacts of the ‘Windrush Generation’ of Great Britain into Ireland. The staging of these works, as well as their reception in the Irish media, foreground the presentation and consideration of the racialized and captive immigrant body on stage, indicating a significant engagement with and expansion on Bernadette Sweeney’s examination of the concept of the performer’s body as ‘Irish’ or otherwise commodified and imported as human capital within the Pike Follies productions. (Sweeney, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, 2008).

 

These recovered performances and their archival memory reveal a neglected record of Irish theatrical and national memory, as well as a transnational and intercultural identity in performance. This paper draws on the recently published monograph: Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951-1977.

 

 

Dearbhaile Houston (Trinity College Dublin). The University in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing: Nicole Flattery’s “Abortion, A Love Story.”

 

The university has long been a space of not only knowledge attainment but various forms of socialisation, particularly regarding its female students. Perhaps particularly within the Irish context, the history of women’s admittance into university spaces is imbued with numerous discourses regarding women’s behaviour and ‘place’ in society. This paper will consider Nicole Flattery’s short story, “Abortion, A Love Story”, from her 2019 collection Show Them A Good Time, in connection with the contemporary Irish university as a spatialised network of gender roles, social mobility, and notions of meritocracy. Awareness of overarching social structures are articulated through images of university buildings in this work, gesturing to the semantic intersection of architectural and ideological ‘structures’. In Flattery’s story, the university is in one sense a space that appears to enable its female students to ‘rise above’ their originating social circumstances in accordance with a set of neoliberal values. Yet, it is also portrayed as an overwhelmingly circumscribing space—on architectural and ideological levels—particularly for young women. The students, Lucy and Natasha, of an unnamed university at the centre of Flattery’s story are subject to the institution’s focus on the professionalisation of body and mind. Their sexual relationship with a university lecturer and their staging of an experimental play, the titular “Abortion, A Love Story”, in the college theatre illustrates the tension between anxieties regarding bodily and economic productivity and the strategies the students use to prevail within or subvert this system. While attending to the cultural specificities of the Irish university in this exploration of Flattery’s story, this paper will also draw parallels with research outside the confines of Irish Studies, in particular Mary Eagleton’s work on the trope of ‘clever girls’ in contemporary British campus novels, to explore potential connections to a wider coalition of contemporary women’s writing. 

 

 

Dr Ellen Howley (Dublin City University). “Snared in a mode of seeing”: Refracting the Past and Present through the Sea in Caitríona O’Reilly’s The Sea Cabinet (2006).

 

In the conclusion to his landmark study of the centrality of the coast and sea to Irish literature, Seatangled, Nicholas Allen gestures towards “a much broader conversation, which seeks to read the sea and the shore as ‘watery places’ in which to read intermingled traces of the past, present and future” (285). Caitríona O’Reilly’s 2006 poetry collection, The Sea Cabinet, is a work that engages wholeheartedly in this conversation, turning to the sea to rethink not only the poet’s present moment but also the remnants of both Irish and global histories.

 

This paper examines poems from O’Reilly’s collection from the perspective of the Blue Humanities, which Steven Mentz characterises as an “ocean-infused way to reframe our shared cultural history” (xviii). The cultural history O’Reilly explores in The Sea Cabinet is wide-ranging and the sea not only forms part of this history but also allows O’Reilly to refract established narratives, reforming them through imaginative connections. Stating at the opening of “Electrical Storm”, “And like everything it began with the sea”, the poet turns to historical moments such as the polio epidemic and coastal invasion with a view from watery spaces. Likewise, her contemporary moment is also rendered through an oceanic lens in “Shortcut to Northwind” when a computer virus prompts an imagined sea journey. The central “The Sea-Cabinet” is further attentive to the ways in which maritime history has codified non-white communities and mystified sea-creatures.

 

In applying a Blue Humanities lens to the collection, this paper contributes to the conversation Allen outlines, arguing that the human interactions with coastal environments depicted in A Sea Cabinet seek to challenge, destabilise, and reimagine the past and present. O’Reilly presents a sea-based culture that prompts the individual to examine their place in the world. 

 

 

 

Katherine M. Huber (University of Oregon). Representing Afro-Irish Self-Determination: Filmic and literary strategies in Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley’s Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life.

 

Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley’s 2008 documentary film Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie’s 2018 short-story collection This Hostel Life raise questions about Ireland’s postcolonial position on the economic and geographic periphery of Europe amid the added complexity of emerging racial formations. These texts critically depict the racial and cultural barriers that produce a voyeuristic bifurcation between an implied white Irish citizen and a racialized noncitizen. Seaview invokes this voyeuristic bifurcation to critique the segregation and isolation of asylum seekers detained in Direct Provision (DP) centres from the rest of Irish society. Yet moments of ambiguity in filmic strategies of who is looking and who is seen emphasize ongoing colonial and neocolonial histories that continue to impact identity formations in Ireland. The possibilities and limitations of representing Afro-Irish subjects arises as a site of contestation in Okorie’s 2018 collection of three stories This Hostel Life. The second short story, “Under the Awning,” is a frame narrative that reclaims the liminal elements of second-person narration to assert emerging forms of Afro-Irish self-determination. This story exposes layers of racialization as it also indicates multiple possible voices materializing across multiple possible Irelands. In the seemingly disparate genres and media of documentary film and the short story, Seaview and This Hostel Life structurally challenge Irish racial formations that conform to a default colonial white norm. Reading these texts together exposes connections between postcolonial national identity and colonial racial formations that postcolonial nations willingly or unwillingly inherit through globalized economies and internationally integrated immigration reforms. By critically challenging racializing contexts and narratives during and after the Celtic Tiger, Seaview and This Hostel Life expand the representational possibilities for Afro-Irish identities in twenty-first century Irish literature and film.

 

 

Mgr. Klára Hutková (Charles University). Female flânerie in Maeve Brennan’s “Talk of the Town” Columns.

 

This conference paper explores the question of female flânerie in Maeve Brennan’s short contributions published in the 1950s and 1960s in The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column. The writing of this Irish-American woman can be read as an answer to the question whether there ever ‘could be such a figure—a female flâneur in a man’s world.’ Inventing the persona of The Long-Winded Lady, Brennan explores and challenges the traditional relationship between the one who sees and the one who is seen: the flâneur and the passante. Trying to step into the flâneur’s shoes and transition from the passante into the flâneuse, the Lady voices her experience as an arduous task that produces ambiguous results. The persona’s breaching of gender norms induces feelings of shame, marking the position of the flâneuse as insecure, while also creating a strong connection between her and those that she observes.

 

At the same time, the persona’s style and sophistication, which allow her to command more respect as narrator and a woman in public urban space, alienate her from the poor and less fortunate that she encounters in the streets. As the daughter of the Irish Ambassador to the United States, Brennan was on the one hand privileged and benefited from her social connections, while her gender, on the other hand, made her an outsider in the city, among the staff of The New Yorker magazine, and within the literary canon itself. Since the Lady’s flânerie is stifled and complicated in multiple ways, she is forced to experiment with creative solutions, her ambiguous outsider-insider status adding a unique perspective to the corpus of literature gathered within the category of flânerie.

 

 

Joanna Jarząb-Napierała. Transnationalism in Irish literature - the case of Sean O'Faoláin's The Nest of the Simple Folk.

 

The paper examines Seán O'Faoláin's cosmopolitan approach towards literature, which is well-illustrated in his first novel The Nest of the Simple Folk (1933) as a response to Ivan Turgenev's Дворянское гнездо (A Nest of the Gentry) (1859). The dialogue, which O'Faoláin undertakes with the Russian role model is not a singular instance, but rather fits a wider phenomenon observable among Irish prose writers of the first decades of the twentieth century. Thus, the aim of the analysis is to use the example The Nest of the Simple Folk to illustrate O'Faoláin's, as well as his contemporaries, transnational views on Irish literature and culture. As a artist, he not only contributed to the realm of Irish literature by producing a number of short stories, novels or biographies, but also was actively commenting on current cultural issues and promoting other writers via editorials in the Bell. His cosmopolitan views, so openly expressed in this influential periodical, made him an outcast in Ireland. Thus, O'Faoláin, similarly to his literary predecessor George Moore as well as literary follower Frank O'Connor, share an analogous fate of Irish writers, who promoted cosmopolitanism in literature, thus were rejected by nationalists, who after the emergence of the Irish Free State began to rule the country. Interestingly enough, all of them found some of their literary works banned in Ireland for 'indecency'. Yet the question arises, whether it was the sole reason for those in power to use censorship as a tool of oppression against those writers, who represented a contrary approach towards Irish culture to the one promoted by the state.

 

 

Neha Kamrani (University College Dublin). BODY AND MEMORY: A Comparative Study of Adult Disclosures of Rape and Child Sexual Abuse in Deirdre Kinahan’s Rathmines Road and Dina Mehta’s Getting Away with Murder.

 

(This paper is a part of a larger IRC funded transnational research on the representations of sexual violence in Irish and Indian Contemporary Theatre.)

The paper proposes to study retrospective disclosures of rape and their narrativization on stage through Deirdre Kinahan’s Rathmines Road (2018) and Dina Mehta’s Getting Away with Murder (1990). Both the plays deal with adult disclosures of rape and child sexual abuse (CSA), manifestations of trauma on body and mind, hallucinations and the lack of emotional and legal support for the survivors. The paper will analyze the long-term effects of rape on survivors’ physical and mental wellbeing while documenting instances of post-traumatic stress for both protagonists. Along with a discussion on historical trauma and the challenges of translating “memory into language”, the paper will highlight the interconnections between sexual violence and other forms of socio-structural violence in Indian and Irish society. Finally, it will demonstrate how speaking about rape is even more difficult after a prolonged silence, and that the multiple barriers against survivors being believed and supported are only increased by the temporal gap between the rape (the event) and the final disclosure. The two plays also exhibit the difficulty of reconstructing a rape narrative in historical or delayed disclosures and the importance of voicing rather than visualising the violence on stage. This paper will discuss these challenges, and finally, consider them in the context of Ramona Alaggia's ecological analysis of sexual violence and the barriers that survivors face in their attempts at disclosure. In this, the paper follows an intersectional approach and analyses Kinahan’s and Mehta’s theatre by taking recourse to post-colonial theory and current psychological debates around PTSD in survivors of sexual violence.

 

 

Dr Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil). Physical Disability in Irish Theatre: Translation and Performance in Brazil.

 

Physical disability is a recurrent theme, and a long-established tool, in Irish theatre. Characters with disabilities – and their insertion in and exclusion from society – populate modern and contemporary Irish plays.  A catalogue of cases would include plays of the Revival, with supernatural healing wells, such as Synge’s The Well of the Saints; O’Casey’s war play The Silver Tassie; mid-century Beckett; Martin McDonagh’s late twentieth-century The Cripple of Inishmaan; twenty-first-century works providing fresh perspectives on the issue of disability, such as Deirdre Kinahan’s Knocknashee; Stacey Gregg’s Override, in which technology interacts with human bodily im/perfection; and plays featuring actors with disabilities, such as Rosaleen McDonagh’s Rings – to cite just a few. How disability is explored, performed and creatively reimagined by Irish drama and theatre productions has recently been re-illuminated by critical disability studies, and re-envisaged by contemporary theatre practices. As expressed by Emma Creedon, in “Disability, Identity, and Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama” (IUR50.1, p. 64), representation of disability in the ldrama of the Revival and of the twentieth century “has traditionally relied on limited narrative representational frameworks of bodily interpretation”, with characters “often identified by their disability alone” – such as Blind Man, Lame Beggar, or Cripple Billy. In the contemporary period, there are still “few examples in Ireland, and indeed internationally, of theatres sourcing actors with disabilities to play these roles, or of ability-blind casting” (Creedon, p. 64), and little sourcing of staff with disabilities, or foregrounding of the work of playwrights with disabilities.  This paper maps modern and contemporary Irish plays selected for a cycle of staged readings to be organized by Cia Ludens in Brazil in 2022-23, and comments on the aims and challenges of the cycle, focusing particularly on Rosaleen McDonagh’s Rings (2010) as a case study. The paper reflects research developed in association with UCD Humanities Institute. 

 

 

Thomas Korthals (University of Applied Sciences Hamm-Lippstadt, Germany). “I love the desert […]. But I also love its opposite: Ireland” - the Irish Journal of Ralph Giordano.

 

Heinrich Böll's "Irish Journal" is probably one of the most widely read German books about Ireland ever written. Still, Böll was not the only German travelling there and turning his journey into a book.

Ralph Giordano, a German writer of Jewish decent and survivor of the holocaust, visits Ireland in the 1990s, and observes the emerging Celtic Tiger, thus taking the reader today back to the ‘golden era’ of the Irish economic boom.

On Giordano’s island the blessings of modern life slowly reach even the most remote parts of the country, a country which is still inhabited by very much the same people who Böll wrote about thirty years before. However, the brave new Ireland also has a darker, more political side in the North. Here Giordano's perspective has an authority that derives from a wisdom gained during his life.

In the paper I will present Giordano's odyssey around Ireland that is more than a mere travel book. Next to being a very distinct view of Ireland, it shows how diaries depend much more on their authors and their biographies than most other literary forms. This travelogue helps Giordano to try and come to terms with his own life, past, and fears through the medium of Ireland. To put this book into perspective, glances at Böll's "Irish Journal" will be taken to show the influence the earlier book has had on the later one.

 

 

Professor Peter Kuch (University of Otago, New Zealand). Bloom’s dilemmas: Ulysses as a modern/postmodern “novel of adultery.”

 

Throughout 16 June 1904 ‘sly boots’ Bloom encounters various situations that require recognition, acknowledgement, and response—whether action, inaction, denial or strategic delay. This paper will examine a selection of the most significant of those situations in terms of their moral, ethical, and legal implications and what they potentially disclose about Ulysses as a modern/postmodern work that rewrites the influential but controversial Nineteenth Century “novel of adultery.”

 

 

Professor Pawan Kumar (University of Delhi, India). Reverberations of the Indian Independence Movement in Ireland: Creative and Political Responses of W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne to the Colonial Occupation of India.

 

A Vibrant cultural and political affinity existed between India and Ireland in the early twentieth century. The Irish resistance against the imperial forces and the heroes of the movement were a sources of inspiration for many Indian revolutionaries, especially the ones in Bengal, as Subhash Chandra Bose wrote in a letter dated December 21, 1935, to Mrs. Woods. This paper will shed new light on the creative and political responses of W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne respectively against the colonial occupation of India. Many critics and scholars have discussed, at length, Yeats, India and the East from a literary perspective, but Yeats’ take on the social and political situation of the imperial subjugation of India has found little mention in the studies of Irish-India history. Yeats desired for the revival of ancient Indian culture like the Celtic revival, and also encouraged the Indians he met to use Indian languages and dialects. In a letter written to his wife George on March 31, 1935, Yeats mentions a conversation with Gopalrao Shrimant Gaekward (Maharaja of Baroda)—in the presence of Purohit Swami—whom he advised and persuaded to use vernacular language to impart education in his kingdom. Moreover, Yeats also incorporated Indian philosophical symbols and elements in his own creative oeuvre. On the other hand, it is a well-documented fact that the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne played a decisive and significant role in supporting Indian revolutionaries like Bhikaji Rustom Cama (Madam Cama), V. J. Patel, Har Dayal, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, to name a few, who were engaged in organising themselves against the British empire in India. A member of the Irish-Indian Independence League, she remained an ardent supporter of the Indian movement for independence from British dominion.

 

The aim of this paper is to critically analyse the contributions of Yeats and Gonne towards the Indian Independence movement: Maud Gonne’s support was more political in nature, whereas Yeats’ interest and support towards the Indian Independence movement, though antiimperialistic, was more creative and cultural, in that Yeats encouraged Indians and Indian writers to give up the language of their colonizers and the linguistic and cultural subordination that it led to. The paper also attempts to project the friendship of Yeats and Gonne in a new light, which is evident in their common support of the Indian cause, and their epistolary exchanges about India and Indian freedom fighters.

 

 

Jenny Kwok (University of Hong Kong). The Irishness of Anglo-Irish Writers: Some Preliminary Findings of a Digital Humanities Project.

 

The recent interest in recharging the traditional historic-cultural approach to Irish literary studies is arguably concurrent with world literature's recently expanding definition. With world literature becoming increasingly focused on the study of globalism where transnational and cross-cultural studies take centre stage of the discourse, it becomes increasingly plausible and necessary for Irish literature to be recognized by and included in the world literary canon as well as the discussion. 

 

Nevertheless, before we start engaging in transnational discourse by identifying the cultural influence of Irishness in other countries, one will inevitably need to ask the question: what defines ‘Irishness’? This question/problem is particularly pronounced when we consider the group of Anglo-Irish writers – Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and C.S. Lewis, to name a few – whose works are absorbed by the British literary canon and the authors miscategorized as English, sometimes even by the Irish. 

 

In this presentation, I would like to present some preliminary findings from my digital humanities project that will help us identify the ‘Irishness’ of these writers, be it lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, or thematic. By applying big data analysis skills with Python, a high-level programming language, some linguistics features common to the writers with ambiguous nationality will be visualised in a dispersion plot. This model will significantly benefit other national literatures that are working towards identifying its distinctive literary features. I will also be sharing the methodology and some challenges and difficulties I encountered when designing the model, and propose solutions to these obstacles.

 

 

Michał Lachman (University of Lodz). David Ireland’s Ulster American – Decomposing Irish Identity.

 

David Ireland’s 2018 play addressing the fallout of the Brexit referendum paints a grotesque but unnerving picture of Irish identity whose narrative has disintegrated in the face of the coming disaster. Ulster American dramatizes how an American actor, a British director and a Northern Irish playwright struggle to agree on basic elements of their historical background. They attempt to narrate their cultural and political views, seeking acceptance and understanding from one another, yet inevitably fail in getting the message across. The production, which they are going to rehearse the following day, forces them to reconsider what they have so far seen as solid values and concepts building their political and cultural heritage. Ending in perhaps too hysterical a finale, Ireland’s play reveals a fundamental decomposition of national narratives.

 

The paper suggests that the historic event of Brexit, which Fintan O’Toole calls a “heroic failure” (Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain, 2018), is primary a narrative venture. Its power of affecting people’s imagination lies in telling the story of independence and identity in entirely new ways. David Ireland’s play concerns the topics of what it means to be British, how to define the Northern Irish identity, and how much of it can be understood by American or European audiences whose cultural capital is primarily moulded by popcultural clichés and politicized fake news. Destabilizing the cultural and political narrative, which the Brexit campaign inevitably succeeded in, leads to unearthing forces of influence, domination and colonialism which were kept under cover as along as the issues of identity and belonging were temporarily settled in the post-Good-Friday-Agreement Ireland. The article analyses how individual characters in Ireland’s play speak from within a number of systems of power, how they unwittingly replicate political propaganda and cultural clichés, revealing the devastation of the Brexit-related politics of identity.

 

 

Nathalie Lamprecht (Charles University, Prague). Writing “me” into history: Irish women’s life writing and representations of Irishness.

 

Before Ireland gained independence, life writing was useful to the nationalist movement, establishing an Irish identity separate from Great Britain. Yet, it soon became clear that the version of Irishness it perpetuated – mostly white, catholic, middle class and heterosexual – excluded various significant groups and autobiography slowly began to amend this shortcoming. In recent decades, life writing has once again come to highlight contested identities. In the introduction to her collection of autobiographical essays Unsettled, Rosaleen McDonagh writes: “these pieces embody a diverse experience of what it is to be Irish. […] We may not be formally recognised in Irish history, but we are here.” What these words emphasise, is the importance of representation. McDonagh, a member of the Traveller community, speaks here of writing herself into the history and into the literature of Ireland, both of which have historically suppressed women’s stories, especially those of women of colour or women with disabilities.

 

Leaning on earlier writing on Irish autobiography by, for instance, Claire Lynch and Liam

Harte, this paper examines two very different texts written by two very different Irish women. While in her essays, Rosaleen McDonagh works through her past in institutions, writing about her experience as an insider/outsider in both the traveller community and the settled world as well as her life as a disabled person; in Anseo, Úna-Minh Kavanagh combines her love for the Irish language with an insightful discussion of racism, identity and what it means to be Irish in a multi-ethnic world. If “to tell the story of the self is to write the narrative of Ireland,” by writing their own histories, these two women change the landscape of what it means to be Irish. They address questions of racism, identity and feminism, ultimately changing the ways ‘Irishness’ in today’s global world can be accessed. 

 

 

José Lanters (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). “Who Wouldn’t Be a Tinker?” Donagh MacDonagh’s God’s Gentry at the Gate Theatre.

 

In his ballad opera God’s Gentry, produced to popular acclaim in 1951 at the Dublin Gate Theatre, under the direction of Hilton Edwards, Donagh MacDonagh set out to satirize totalitarian regimes and the welfare state by making the “class” of the tinkers the rulers of Ireland for a year, led by Marks (“Marx”) Mongan and aided by the old Irish god Balor of the Evil Eye. Written in verse and interspersed with popular folk tunes to which MacDonagh wrote new lyrics, the play imagines the tinkers’ outlook on life as the antithesis of capitalism, law and order, and Christian family values. Nora, the “gombeen” shopkeeper’s daughter, is seduced by the free and merry ways of Marks and his people, but when the nation is declared bankrupt and the pagan, socialist “tinker’s republic” collapses, her jilting of Marks and her return to her father’s shop signal a more general reversal of the nation to bourgeois values. My paper will consider the implications of the way in which Travelling people are simultaneously represented in the text and on the stage in two different dimensions: as metaphorical stand-ins for politicians governing Ireland and nations beyond its borders, and as an actual Irish minority perceived as an unregulated and transgressive entity—a “nation within a nation”—by the settled population. In addition to discussing MacDonagh’s text, I will consider how the life of the Travellers was imagined aesthetically in what MacDonagh referred to as the “grand” settings and costumes designed for the Gate production by Micheál mac Liammóir, who also played the part of Marks.

 

 

James Little (Charles University, Prague). Paula Meehan’s Pubs: From Pub Counter to Counter-Public Sphere.

 

This paper contends that Paula Meehan uses the Irish pub as a means of creating a feminist ‘counter-public sphere’ in her poetry (Felski 1989). Developing Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (1991) – an arena where private individuals bracket social differences in order to discuss matters of public concern – and subjecting its universalist aspirations to critique, Rita Felski’s concept of the ‘counter-public sphere’ describes social movements emerging in the 1970s and 1980s whose ‘emancipatory project no longer appeals to an idea of universality but is directed toward an affirmation of specificity in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, and so on’ (1989, 166). As other scholars have shown, Meehan’s poetry can be fruitfully examined in relation to such movements, particularly second-wave feminism (see Brain 1996; Mahoney 1999; González-Arias 2009; Auge 2013), but the pub as locus of the Irish public sphere has thus far received little critical attention.

 

Starting with the depiction of the interior of a public house in ‘Tempus Fugit’ (1984), the paper goes on to examine Dublin’s Rosebowl Bar as a site of exclusion in ‘Buying Winkles’ (1991). The third section focuses on the domestic sphere: I analyse the pub as an important agent in the instances of addiction and abuse that permeate Meehan’s oeuvre, focussing in particular on the account of domestic violence in ‘Thunder in the House’ (2000). All three poems are examined in light of the gendered dynamics of Irish public space.

 

Meehan’s depictions of the Irish pub stand as important counter-narratives to the frequently backslapping descriptions of the public house in Irish culture. Furthermore, the pub is important to her development as a poet. In tracking a movement away from the pub counter across her career, we can identify Meehan carving out a counter-public sphere in her poetry.

 

 

Alba de Juan Lopez (University of Oviedo). Animals as Architects of Reality: The Itineraries of Illness in Leanne O’Sullivan’s A Quarter of an Hour.

 

Leanne O’Sullivan fourth collection of poetry, A Quarter of an Hour(2018), opens the door to the journey from illness to recovery, depicting illness from the perspective of the carer-wife and the complex processes of understanding someone else’s pain. O’Sullivan’s collection of poems does not only explore her husband’s brain infection and consequent recovery but also the relationship between the individual and the natural world. Using images of animals and natural landscapes, O’Sullivan challenges traditional conceptions of illness and recovery by breaking the traditional boundaries between myth/reality and body/nature, granting these animals and spaces with the gift of agency in her journey towards coming to terms with her husband’s illness.

 

Far from perpetuating reductionist and symbolic visions of animals, O’Sullivan transforms the creatures her husband saw during his recovery —- foxes, rabbits, birds—- into the active creators of his new illness-reality. By turning these creatures into active subjects, she subverts traditional roles and dismantles the long-established hierarchy between human and non-human species, a matter that has been widely addressed from recent scientific to humanist perspectives by scholars such as Roland Borgards, Margo Demello or Donna Haraway, among others. Ultimately, it is thanks to this built horizontality within the relationships between the human and the non-human characters that she is granted with a deeper understanding of her husband’s own experience of sickness. O’Sullivan manages to bridge the communicative gap between patient and companion by advocating for a deeper introspection on what it means to experience someone else’s suffering from the outside while pondering, at the same time, about the consequences of environmental degradation.

 

 

Professor Claire Lynch (Brunel University). ‘But what if it was one of ours?’ The trouble with daughters in contemporary Irish fiction.

 

Claire Keenan’s masterful novel, Small Things Like These (2021), begins with an excerpt from ‘The Proclamation of the Irish Republic’. Keegan’s selection of words from 1916, ending on the frequently quoted resolution to cherish ‘all of the children of the nation equally’, acts a preface to the novel, and a damning reminder of the failure of this aim.

In the novel, protagonist Bill Furlong, grows increasingly aware of the fine line which separates his own cherished daughters, five well cared for girls with good manners, hobbies, and modest hopes for Christmas presents, and the girls locked away in the town’s Magdalen laundry. Furlong’s childhood, marked by illegitimacy, awards him a sense of destiny, a quiet lifetime of restraint, leading towards the moment when, in some small way, he will come to the defence of other people’s daughters.

 

Throughout Small Things Like These, daughters are shown not only as implicitly inferior, but also as signifying a sense of risk or threat. As the Mother Superior reminds Furlong, daughters place a family on a hair trigger to shame, the risk of moral failing inevitable if not constantly guarded against.

 

In other recent Irish writing, daughter’s mean a softer burden on the family, their assumed vulnerability a thing to be guarded, to be cherished. In Lucy Caldwell’s prize winning short story ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ the presence of an infant daughter on her lap is a reminder of the mother’s limitations. Here the daughter shackles the mother to her duties, in a scenario which might otherwise promise adventure, travel, and sexual expression.

This paper will explore a selection of contemporary Irish texts through the trouble they have with daughters, the exiling and reclaiming of them, and the daughter as a site of limitation and risk.

 

 

Dr Patricia A. Lynch (University of Limerick). Dialect: Hiberno-English and Jamaican English in an extended family: Donal Ryan’s novel Strange Flowers (2020).

 

In his novels Tipperary-born Donal Ryan has made very effective use of the dialect of the locality.  In Strange Flowers he uses it extensively in both the speech of the people and also their reported speech.  Later in the novel the Irish Gladney family form a union through their daughter with her Jamaican-London husband and his family.  Ryan extends the novel to encompass the dialect of Alexander’s family in a way that unites two different sections of society and accepts the truth of both social and class groups. 

 

 

Dr Emer Lyons (University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ). The Straight Fellow: Code-Switching in Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow.

 

Ireland is an island rich in location specific colloquialisms, in dialectical differences. A queer methodology draws energy from between the disciplines and difference, from within and without institutional settings and formal language. Behan situates The Quare Fellow in a prison, in and around the language of the rural working-class, a highly politicised language. Behan had previously written in Irish and code-switched to English in order to reach a larger audience. ‘Quare’ is a word synonymous with Ireland, as Noreen Giffney writes,

[. . .] the word quare, which means odd, strange or eccentric, perfectly captures the difference in the way we practise Queer Theory in Ireland from the hegemonic bloc and thus, it is not easily subsumable under some globalizing framework (2007, 276).

Behan writes against the English colonisation of Ireland and the deemed threat of Irish language re-emergence. He writes a manifesto against language extinction and urbanisation. Behan makes rural institutionalised thinking about language extinction as an ecological issue. He makes central the intrinsic connection to the land that emerges from Celtic indigenous knowledge through speaking Irish and living rurally.

 

Behan has in some instances been considered a post-colonial writer. In my reread of The Quare Fellow, I will build on the scholarship of Richard Rankin Russell to think of Behan as anticolonial. I aim to hone in on the quare characters of the novels, their interactions with the other prisoners/characters to ask what makes a fellow quare? Is it language? Behaviour? Affectation?  What role does code-switching between English and Irish play in quare demarcations? What impact does Brendan Behan’s position as a straight man have on these demarcations? While The Quare Fellow fits the parameters of anecdotal as a fictional piece of theatre, I want to strengthen the importance of the text as foundational to contemporary quare theory.

 

 

Alexandria Machado (Bridgewater State University). Negotiating Identity: Class Anxiety and Sexual Desire in Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

In “Negotiating Identity: Class Anxiety and Sexual Desire in Sally Rooney’s Normal People,” I will explore the structuring principles that class plays in terms of Marianne and Connell’s relationship to one another and their social roles. By incorporating a Marxist dialectical framework, we can better understand Marianne and Connell as burgeoning individuals growing up in post-crash Ireland. Rooney seems to be very interested in the ways in which her characters change one another; I will use Marx’s philosophy that truth is attached to change, in turn linked to time as the structure of Normal People is broken up into sections that are linear time indicators. I will explore different craft choices of Rooney’s, as well as character traits of Marianne and Connell, to support the notion of anxiety as it is linked to work and labor. As my thesis will be centered around class, I will also use that to view Marianne and Connell’s intimate dynamic and sexual desires. The violence that Marianne experiences within her domestic interior is also situated against the private intimacy she shares with Connell. Marianne seems to negotiate her identity in a form of transactional sexual interactions with various characters in the novel. Although this paper will be specifically focusing on how Marianne and Connell’s class positions have shaped them, it will also follow that evolution into their sex life. This paper is concerned with the intersection of class and intimacy as it relates to gender roles and trauma.

 

 

Clara Mallon (NUI Galway) and Salomé Paul (Trinity College Dublin). Tracing Gendered and Classed Others on Irish Stages.

 

This paper is based on an edited collection examining authorship and representation of working-class women in Irish theatre. Framing this presentation is the exclusion of working-class women in the narrative of the nation both historically and presently. While dominant historical accounts invisibilize the intersection of gendered and classed inequalities, Irish theatre has developed a strong working-class aesthetic since its inception. This is epitomized in the canonical work of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey that has been argued as problematically fetishizing gendered and classed others. While the canon of Irish theatre is predominantly authored by white middle-class men, the 1990s and beyond have witnessed a significant flux in theatre written and created by women. Indeed, more contemporary modes of theatre and performance, both community and mainstream, challenge historical legacies of realism. The work of Louise Lowe, Veronica Dyas, Grace Dyas, Paula Meehan, and Fiona Whelan experiments with form, narration and representation in radical ways that interrogate the status quo and arguably make theatre a more inclusive space. Despite this, the specificity of working-class female playwrights and theatre-makers have received scant critical attention and acknowledgement reflecting the general silencing of class politics in Ireland more broadly. This paper aims to counter this neglect and bring to the fore an intersectional analysis of the representation and contribution of working-class women to modern and contemporary Irish theatre, proving that there are working-class women in Irish theatre and that their very important and unique body of work deserves celebration and recognition.

 

 

Luke Malone (Dundalk Institute of Technology). Feminising the Archetype: Women in Cartoon Saloon’s Irish Folklore Trilogy.

 

Between 2009 and 2020, Kilkenny-based animation studio Cartoon Saloon produced a trilogy of films inspired by Irish mythology and folklore, bringing centuries-old stories into the modern era. From The Secret of Kells (2009), a mythicised retelling of how the Book of Kells was created, to Song of the Sea (2014), an interpretation of the selkie myth, and Wolfwalkers (2020), a fantastical exploration of Ireland’s colonial past, the “folklore trilogy” reworks old material to create something new. From the beginning, women and girls play a prominent part in the trilogy, starting with the forest spirit Aisling, and their importance is only reinforced as the trilogy develops. The significance of female archetypes in Irish mythology, like the Great Mother or the hag, is reflected in Cartoon Saloon’s work, resulting in a series of complex female characters.

 

Archetype theory, the study of characters that hold universal and symbolic meaning, will be central to this paper’s analysis of the folklore trilogy and its female protagonists. Using Joseph Campbell’s writings on character types, and then expanding into newer theorists and critiques of Campbell’s work, four characters will be compared to their mythological counterparts: Aisling as the Great Mother, Macha as the Crone, and Robyn and Mebh as Heroines. The paper critically considers the extent to which Cartoon Saloon remains faithful to these mythological archetypes with some reference to other examples from Irish and international cinema. Inspired by myths in which men typically dominated and women would play passive or antagonistic roles, this paper argues that the trilogy reinvents these archetypes to create engaging female characters for the modern era. While it remains faithful in some ways to antiquated character types, it will be proposed that, overall, the trilogy is a good example of how mythology can be successfully reworked while also giving female characters a stronger presence on screen.

 

 

Alfred Markey (University of León, Spain). Medicine and the Humanities: Intersectional Strategies for Ireland.

 

In line with the recent evolution of Irish studies towards new forms of interdisciplinary scholarship, and in conscious dialogue with the theme of this conference, expressed by means of the concept of intersectionality and described by Patricia Hill Collins as part of a move to “build participatory, democratic interpretive communities across differences of experience, expertise, and resources”, in this paper I will focus on a number of texts from medical practitioners in Ireland who are influenced by the humanities and by literature and literary studies.

 

I will examine publications by Jim Lucey, consultant psychiatrist at St Patrick’s University Hospital, Dublin, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, and Shane O’Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin, and Director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, specifically The Life Well Lived, In My Room: The Recovery Journey as Encountered by a Psychiatrist and A Whole New Plan for Living: Achieving Balance and Wellness in a Changing World by the former and In Praise Of Walking: The New Science of How We Walk and Why It’s Good for Us by the latter.

These will be considered in relation to scholarly work from the field of Narrative Medicine and most particularly in relation to the New or Critical Medical Humanities, as well as in relation to studies on mental health, trauma and identity in an Irish context undertaken by scholars from the humanities. An examination of the potential of figures, such as Lucey and O’Mara, who engage with both medical and humanities discourse, to influence the public space and to enable a healthy, participative and democratic Ireland will be the primary focus of the paper.

 

 

Ciara McAllister (Queen’s University Belfast). 'Your Very Presence is Sacrilege': Gender, Class and the Politics of Place in Brian Friel’s ‘Freedom of the City.’

 

Brian Friel’s 1973 play, Freedom of the City, was produced in the aftermath of the 1972 Bloody Sunday atrocity in Derry and the British government’s subsequent tribunal that culminated in the Widgery Report (1972). Widgery’s investigation laid blame on the thirteen civilians killed and excused the actions of the British Army, causing mass outrage; it was not until 2010 that the victims’ names were cleared. While the context of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the scathing commentary upon it is an indisputable force in Freedom, Friel claimed that “[t]his is a play which is about poverty” (quoted in Boland 58). Likewise, Michael Parker has argued that, “[t]o see The Freedom of the City solely as a product of a historical moment, is to ignore its concern with broader issues of authority – political, judicial, spiritual, moral and domestic – and to miss its articulation of a wider, deeper need for ‘redress[‘]” (48).  Friel quite literally puts the poverty of the working-class citizens of Derry centre-stage in a play that subverts and challenges both official discourse and the accessibility of public space. Fifty years since Bloody Sunday, and in the context of “Intersectional Irelands”, in this paper I want to examine the representation of authority and resistance and suggest that these are tied not only to class but also to gender in the play. Through the lenses of aesthetics, taste and carnivalization, this paper will examine how Friel’s protagonists adapt and resist the hegemonic power encoded in Derry’s Guildhall, and how we can read in this the intersections of gender, class and colonialism.

 

 

Dr Michael McAteer (Pázmány University, Budapest). Moore’s Irish Melodies in Hungarian Verse: Sándor Petőfi’s Translation of ‘Oh! Blame not the Bard!’

 

As late as 1990, Seamus Deane described Thomas Moore as, in terms of popularity at least, Ireland’s national poet. Moore acquired an international reputation through his Irish Melodies of the early nineteenth century, one that scholarship has explored extensively in recent times, most notably through the work of Una Hunt. This paper contributes to this ongoing understanding of Moore by scrutinizing a Hungarian translation of ‘Oh! Blame not the Bard’. The author of this translation was Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet and a leading literary figure among the group of political radicals who, in response to the Viennese Uprising of March 1848, initiated the actions that led to the Hungarian of Revolution of 1848-49. Petőfi acquired iconic status in Hungary after losing his life at the Battle of Segesvár (present-day Romania) in July 1849.

 

The paper looks at Petőfi’s accomplishment in capturing the dactylic structure of Moore’s original verse and matching in Hungarian its extensive use of assonance and alliteration. My purpose is to illustrate how faithful Petőfi’s translation is to the poetic qualities of ‘Oh! Blame not the Bard!’ even though Petőfi does not replicate Moore’s end-line rhyme scheme. My thesis is that the skill of Petőfi’s translation, combined with the historical importance of Petőfi in cultural and political terms, is significant to the critical reception of Moore’s verse. In particular, it may give critics pause to reconsider the scorn with which Stephen Dedalus regards the statue of Thomas Moore soon before taking flight from Ireland at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A flight that would take Dedalus to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of the twentieth century, not a million miles away from the Budapest in which Petőfi gained his fame in the 1840s.

 

 

Karen Anne McCarthy (University of Johannesburg). ‘The Incest Plot’ in John Banville’s Ancient Light.

 

Ancient Light (2012), the third and (to date) final book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave series by John Banville is a text in which characters who died in the previous books are recycled and brought back as roles in a film, played by characters whose characterisation itself blurs with the roles they are playing. Banville’s established preoccupation with returning to the past and retracing old ground takes on an intriguingly excessive dimension in this novel. Ancient Light presents a heightened version of what Neil Murphy has elsewhere referred to as an “interlocked intertextual Banvillean world” (2018: 86). This paper will examine the book using Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s ideas around ‘the incest plot’. She calls this structure a “model of tautological self-enclosure – the embrace of self-sameness, repetition, even redundancy, over change” (2020: 150). My claim is that the novel’s very infrastructure is one of “tautological self-enclosure”. The features of “self-sameness, repetition [and] redundancy” are inescapable in this novel, and the “change” conventionally offered by third books in trilogies is simply not to be encountered in Banville’s relentlessly self-referential third instalment. In her discussion of incest as form, Hershinow contends that “highlighting form is the only way to see the ways that incest exceeds its literal manifestations” (156). She further suggests that incest “is a way for the novel to explore the minimal amount of difference required for narrative to continue to function as such, to experiment with narrative minimalism” (ibid.). The plot structure, as well as a more literal interpretation of ‘incest’ will be mined, given that the narrator’s desire for his dead daughter Cass is the primary animating force behind the narrative.

 

 

Ailbhe McDaid (University College Cork). Beyond the ‘missionary approach’: new voices in Irish poetry.

 

As a tradition affiliated to what Eavan Boland calls ‘the old communal obligations’ of the lyric poem, Irish poetry has historically centered the concept of the poet as a representative voice in a conservative mode. Just as recent demographic shifts in Ireland demand the reconfiguration of existing constructs of national identity, recent literary innovation further destablises the problematic premise of universality underpinning the lyric tradition. This paper explores the ways in which Black Irish poets, poets of colour and multiply-affiliated poets negotiate the twin poles of hostility and hospitality underpinning homogenous Irish literary culture.  With reference to anthology publications and equality initiatives, this paper considers how literary culture prescribes space for new voices before turning to the aesthetic, formal and thematic strategies of self-determination showcased in works by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Felispeaks and Dagogo Hart.

 

 

Lucy McDiarmid (Montclair State University). Sectionality: Pieces of Countries in Political Poems by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Paula Cunningham, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

 

If sectioning a country reveals, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, ‘the alignment of map and power,’ poems about sectionality comment on forms of domination.   Contemporary women poets dramatize and critique that alignment in tropes that imagine human activity intervening in the two-dimensional lines a map imposes on a country. Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s ‘Hard Border’ imagines the Irish border as a site that attracts folklore, ‘urban legends’ in which tricksters on both sides compete to deceive one another: the boy who smuggles bicycles, the border guard who makes the hidden butter melt, the fisherman with ‘two conflicting colours’ on his boat. In Paula Cunningham’s ‘Mothers Pride’ [sic], father at breakfast turns a piece of toast into the map of Ireland: ‘A final flourish…/ was the border / which my frowning mother / quickly buttered over.’ Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Somewhere Called Goose Bay’ has a more global vision of ‘how countries are nibbled out of continents, / their edges footholds to scramble ashore, / how they bite a coastline…’  Waiting for breakfast, the speaker envisions colonial power as consumption.  When the man at the door of the refectory invites her to dine --  “Eat it up. You’ve surely paid for it” –  his words have an imperialist ring. This paper will consider the surreal wit that expresses a dissident view by partitioning bread, melting butter, and politicizing breakfast.   
 

 

Anthony P. McIntyre (University College Dublin). Voicing 2nd Generation Diasporic Irishness in Popular Culture: Peter Kay and Steve Coogan.

 

Actors and comedic performers Peter Kay and Steve Coogan are both second-generation Irish, hailing from Greater Manchester, home to well-established Irish communities. In their work in stand-up comedy and television performance, they frequently utilise Irish accents to animate a range of invented characters and narrate anecdotes. This performative skill both grants prestige in terms of professional accomplishment (with a convincing Irish accent notoriously difficult to master) and highlights some of the fracture points in shared histories of the UK and Ireland. Coogan’s performance as Martin Brennan, a Sligo farmer and lookalike of his popular character Alan Partridge, for instance, went viral due to his rendition of republican folk song “Get Out You Black and Tans” on UK national television. This prompted the song to re-enter the music charts at a time of political sensitivity when the Irish government was controversially considering a ceremony in Dublin Castle that would have seen the notorious grouping of former British soldiers commemorated alongside other members of the RIC. 

 

Taking as its subject matter two of the most popular and influential contemporary comedic performers in the UK, this paper seeks to untangle some of the complexities of Irish diasporic identity through a focus on voice, accent, and performativity. As sociologist Bronwyn Walter (2008) has posited, language, and, in particular, pronunciation index national anxieties in relation to diasporic subjects. Pronunciation can undermine claims to Irish diasporic affiliation both within Britain (where an English accent seemingly erases any continuation of Irish ethnic difference) and in Ireland (where a lack of an authentic Irish accent can for some constitute a threat to national purity). This paper draws from media studies, sociology, and theories of diaspora to suggest that popular culture serves as an arena wherein such reductive responses to the complexity of diasporic identity are contested.

 

 

Dr Scott McKendry (Trinity College Dublin). Form and ‘Troubled’ Performativity in the Poetry of Padraic Fiacc and Gail McConnell 

 

The proposed paper will look at the politics of lyrical experimentalism in the work of Belfast poets Padraic Fiacc (1924–2019) and Gail McConnell (1980–). Despite their several generations apart, there are aspects to these two poets’ work which correspond and collide on several fronts. Both address the 1966–1998 Conflict by employing violent imagery (a mode less common in northern poetry than one might suppose); both have been defined as Queer poets, most recently by Paul Maddern in his introduction to Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (2021); both are invested in Western Christian theology; and both have been set apart by critics from the majority of their contemporaries and defined ‘Modernist’ and ‘Postmodernist’ respectively. 

 

Tellingly, these descriptors are still useful in Ireland but would be more or less meaningless in many other Anglophone settings, amid the pages of, say, POETRY (Chicago) in Fiacc’s time or Poetry London today. Looking at various intersectionalities at play in the work of Fiacc and McConnell, the proposed paper will ask to what extent the concepts ‘traditional-formalist’ and ‘experimental’ are critically valuable in analyses of poetry written amid and against the North’s history of social conservatism. It will ask, for instance, why critics have been blind to the ALLCAPS camp in Fiacc’s hyperbolic ‘Troubled’ Belfast and slow to recognise McConnell’s lyrical nihilism as a reaction to the heteronormativity of the Heaney Generation as well as the Conflict. Because the ‘Troubles’ and the question of form has been a significant, quite often central, topic of discussion for Irish poetry scholars, the parallels between the work of Padraic Fiacc and Gail McConnell warrant immediate investigation.

 

 

Dr Lauren McNamara (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick). What I (Don’t) Know About Autism and How Ireland Treats Difference.

 

What I (Don’t) Know About Autism by Jody O’Neill is a play that explores among other areas Ireland’s relationship with autism by examining how people with autism have been treated both socially and in relation to the healthcare system.  The play which is written by an autistic writer and featured many autistic actors during its national tour acts as both a platform for autistic voices to be heard and an educational tool for non-autistic audience members.

 

This paper will incorporate both postcolonial studies and disability studies to reflect on the above-mentioned play and investigate its representation of the Irish state’s relationship with otherness. By incorporating the work of postcolonial theorist Edward Said and disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thompson it will examine themes of otherness, exoticism, and a focus on fear of those perceived as having lower intelligence levels by a state trying to prove itself on a global level. Using the work of Garland-Thompson in her paper ‘The Politics of Staring’ (2002) this presentation will discuss how Autism was perceived and how this perception created a sense of control. Said’s work in Orientalism (1978) will be used to further this conversation by arguing that this perception was used as a method of not only defining those with autism but also used to help re-define Irishness itself. Overall, this paper will analyze how autistic people have been treated in Irish society through the lens of the aforementioned play and what this has meant for the development of Irish identity and for the lives of autistic people.

 

Prof Gerardine Meaney (convenor), Lauren Cassidy, Karen Wade, Briony Wickes (University College of Dublin). Gender, Class and Migration: Cultural Analytics and Intersectional Analysis of the British Library Nineteenth Century Corpus.

In the nineteenth century industrialisation, urbanisation, recurrent warfare and cycles of boom and bust created conditions which were often attributed to migrants or minorities rather than local or structural factors: ‘But work grew scarce, while bread grew dear,/ And wages lessened, too;/For Irish hordes were bidders here,/Our half-paid work to do.’(Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn Law Rhymes, 1833-5). Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel, North and South, uses the epigram above to a chapter introducing the vexed issue of immigrants to its depiction of the state of England. Fanny Thornton’s interpretation in the novel of the situation of employers, workers and migrants highlights the tensions in this period between free movement, free trade and free assembly: ‘my brother has imported hands from Ireland, and it has irritated the Milton people [striking labourers] excessively—as if he hadn’t a right to get labour where he could; and the stupid wretches here wouldn't work for him; and now they've frightened these poor Irish starvelings so with their threats. ’Analysis of British cultural history has strongly focussed on the relationship between the empire and its colonies in the representation of migration in this period. This panel uses a different lens though it fully engages with imperial and postcolonial approaches to Victorian fiction. Integrating cultural analytics techniques within an intersectional framework, the panel will present initial findings from the VICTEUR project, European Migrants in the British Imagination, focussing on the Victorian period. The panel will demonstrates how application of machine learning techniques to the British Library 19th Century Corpus via the project’s CURATR Interface opens up new perspectives and new texts for analysis; the catalogues, role and influence Mudies Circulating Library; the intersecting roles of gender and nationality in the representation of migrants in Victorian fiction. The panel will focus on Irish writing and representation, but these will be set in the context of the other case studies within the project, Italian and Eastern European Jewish migrants.

 

Dr. Michelle Miles (Kennesaw State University). “Where the flaps don’t meet the knots undone”: Gail McConnell and the Erotics of Elegy.

 

In her seminal work, Eros the Bittersweet (1998), Anne Carson defines “the erotic”— glukupikron—as an ancient Greek expression of the living desire for what is gone. “Who ever,” she writes, “desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it” (11). Carson’s Antigonik (2012), a vivid, contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, is a text replete, both verbally and visually, with gaps and erasures, with things not said but rather sensed and suffered. Her verse is dense, clotted, visceral, and her “voice-right,” to coin a phrase of Seamus Heaney’s regarding the task and obligations of the translator, arises from the fashion in which she literally performs Antigone’s grief, a textual iteration that despite (or perhaps, due to) its sharp, personal notes, remains true to the original in its searing portrait of ache and of absence, a dramatic canvas where, as her chorus indubitably proclaims, “death stays dark.”

 

Belfast poet Gail McConnell’s stunning debut collection, The Sun Is Open (2021), may be fruitfully read in light of Carson’s articulation of glukupikron. Collage-like, the volume is an intimate tribute not only to a beloved father lost to sectarian violence, but to a daughter-grown-poet dedicated to his (and her) remembrance and reconstruction. This essay will explore McConnell’s emerging voice in both The Sun is Open and the chapbook, Fourteen (2018), which preceded it. In particular, the paper will address the acutely intimate fashion in which McConnell’s poems invite the reader to reconsider the role of Eros in elegy in light of the legacy of post-Troubles Northern Irish lyric. Personal conversations with the poet will feature in the discussion, alongside a close reading of her poetry.

 

 

Elliot Mills (Trinity College Dublin). Writing the Environment: Mastery and the Imagination in At Swim-Two-Birds.

 

The image of writers imagining new conditions of existence into reality before their world is engulfed in flames might make one think, if in somewhat extreme terms, of the position of ecocritical practitioners today. Nessa Cronin for instance emphasises the role of imagination in her suggestion that ecocriticism should ‘create worlds of alternative possibilities in which we might re-think and begin to re-envisage the future’. The image, however, also comes from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), in which a set of hitherto powerless characters write their own alternative conclusion before the manuscript in which they exist is placed on the fire. The exploration of how groups respond to existential crisis is one which, this paper suggests, was as relevant to the times in which the novel was written as it is now.

Published on the eve of the Second World War, At Swim’s depiction of authorship reflects the fascist reformulations of the state in the Enabling Act of 1933 and the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, and to a lesser extent the resolutely nationalist and in some respects regressive Bunreacht na hÉireann of 1937, which was drafted in the same year that At Swim was being written. At Swim, however comically, speaks to this context by showing the environment of the novel to be a battleground for mastery revolving around oppressive writing and destructive book burning. This note strikes just as clearly in the actions of the rebellious characters as it does in those of the dictatorial Dermot Trellis, who is tortured by the gang of rebel characters after a kangaroo court hearing. Where Patricia Hill Collins puts forward her understanding of intersectionality as part of a move to ‘build participatory, democratic, interpretive communities’, At Swim shows how the human imagination, even when set off towards laudable aims, can be redirected by impulses either to control or to escape from the world and its complications.

 

This paper explores the ironies and contradictions which result from these impulses. In terms of mastery and control, the rebellious characters set out to kill Dermot Trellis without realising that they cannot exist without their author, without, in other words, appreciating their relationship to their environment. Second, like writers of the Anthropocene who might imagine a new planet whilst living within the same struggling one, the characters write their own empowering story whilst never fully grasping that, no matter how much agency and freedom this act appears to give them, it does not remove them from their vulnerable position within the confines of Trellis’s manuscript. This paper will tease out how such ironies speak to certain tensions found within ecocriticism and its relationship to the climate crisis today. In so doing, the paper will wrestle with an essential provocation from Timothy Clark which ought to be a pillar of self-scrutiny for all ecocriticism: ‘how far is much environmental criticism vulnerable to delusions that the sphere of cultural representations has more centrality and power than it in fact has?’

 

 

Dr Edward Molloy (University College Cork). Historicism and Discourses of Right in Nineteenth Century Irish Nationalism.

 

Irish history, and especially nationalist versions of it, is embedded within a wide array of contested and affiliative narratives. Such contestations and affiliations are rooted within differential modes of the production of national identity; amongst these the writing of history (not confined to historiography, but also personal narratives, historical fiction, oblique political commentaries) plays a central role. This paper will scrutinise the shifts in the relationship between Irish nationalism and the (polymorphous) writing of history throughout the nineteenth century from a postcolonial perspective. It will be argued that a clear break can be discerned between the liberal criticisms levelled at British rule in Ireland that characterised much post-Union writing (e.g. in nationalist periodicals such as the Comet), and the historiographical performativity of Young Ireland, especially from John Mitchel, through various republican memoirs and historical fiction into the twentieth century. My contention is that while earlier iterations of nationalist criticism are cloaked in a thin garb of history, that history is one in which nothing changes, and the dynamism of history proper is largely absent. This can be seen in Moore’s Captain Rock, where history is fundamentally static and historical events find their direct analogue in the present thus overwriting the idea of history as change by a fundamentally liberal discourse of right (with its focus on tithes, judicial impartiality, etc.). This is contrasted with the performative history writing of Young Ireland, with its explicitly proselytising intentions and the insertion of living individuals into its narratives (Mitchel’s, ‘The general history of a nation may fitly preface the personal memoranda of a solitary captive’). It is Young Ireland’s mode of history writing that becomes dominant, and the ideological content of Irish nationalism uneasily incorporates liberal discourses of right while moving towards a particularistic historicism that can be traced through to partition and beyond.

 

 

Marisol Morales-Ladrón (University of Alcalá). Embodying Nora Barnacle, inhabiting her life: Nuala O’Connor’s biographical novel Nora.

 

No doubt, the contribution of Irish historical biographical fiction to the visibilisation of women keeps blossoming. In the last two decades, female writers such as Emma Donoghue, Mary Morrissy, Evelyn Conlon, Martina Devlin or Nuala O’Connor, to name a few, have challenged received positions of women throughout history and have articulated their silences in novels that speak volumes and that have reshaped traditional margins into new central spaces of female subjectivity. With two previous biographical novels in her account, Miss Emily (2015) and Becoming Belle (2018), O’Connor’s most recent novel Nora (2021) goes a step further and places a woman, the so-called “satellite” of James Joyce, to the forefront, granting her a voice of her own and an authenticity that had been absent in previous biographies of these two iconic figures. Arguing, with Patricia Waugh, that reality and history are both provisional, “no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures”, the present proposal will attempt to approach the genre of bio-fiction from the politics and ethics of memory, with a view to probe its potential to render the female self with a certain authenticity and fill the missing bits of a male-dominated history.

 

 

Justine Nakase (Portland State University, USA). “Recognize My Face”: Phil Lynott, Denise Chaila, and Black Irish Musical Identities.

 

On November 15, 1972, Philip Lynott took the stage of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester with his rock band Thin Lizzy. As his mother recounts in her memoir My Boy: “They were greeted by a chorus of abuse, with louts shouting slogans like ‘Get off the stage, black arse’ and ‘Get back to Africa’ [...] Philip, meanwhile, was pleading with the audience in his broad Irish accent, ‘Ah, come on, give us a chance.’”Lynott would go on to perform his break-out single “Whiskey in the Jar,” a song that draws on both Irish and African American musical traditions as a rock-and-roll cover of a traditional Irish ballad. Almost fifty years later, Zambian-Irish rapper Denise Chaila’s single “Chaila” was shortlisted for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize Song of the Year. When fans on Twitter criticized RTÉ for failing to tag her in the announcement, Chaila clarified that she had requested not to be linked due to the amount of racist abuse she receives online, much of which accuses her of cultural appropriation and rejects her claims to an Irish identity. In “Chaila” itself she raps, “if you'll look at me/And see a 'Trocáire kid'/Flow on lough like Derg”--a challenge grounded in a very specific Irish lens.

This paper contends that these performances–both Lynott and Chaila’s public performances of identity and their musical production–can be read as instances of intersectional Irishness. Drawing on critical race and intercultural performance theories, I argue that in these encounters Lynott and Chaila are hailed in Fanonian fashion as Black, but hail back in the distinct tones of their Irish background. Through an analysis of Lynott and Chaila’s music as well as their public and critical reception, this paper will explore how racially exclusionary lines of Irish identity are drawn and defended, and how Black Irish performers challenge these lines through an articulation of intersectional and hyphenated Irishness in their artistic production.

 

 

Dr Tapasya Narang (Dublin City University). Play and Irony in Derek Mahon’s Works.

 

Vivian Mercier, in his 1962 study The Irish Comic Tradition, identifies continuities in the proverbial satires and parodies of early Irish traditions (dating back to the ninth century) and Anglo-Irish writing by Jonathan Swift and later James Joyce. Mercier explains that the ‘traditional obligation to comment, often satirically, on current events’ has been inherited by modern Anglo-Irish writers from bards who were ‘journalists of Gaelic society’. He also identifies the influences of Gaelic poetry and Swift in the works of twentieth-century authors like Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke (208). In Joyce and Beckett’s writings, Adrienne Janus identifies laughter as ‘a vocalised bodily response to limit conditions’; the limit conditions identified by Janus include Ireland’s political unrest and provincialism, the authors’ relationship with the English language and, most significantly, ‘liminal occasions fundamental to human existence as such, namely birth and death’ (174). The paper argues that Derek Mahon’s work draws from the humoristic tendency within Irish literary traditions, identified by Mercier and Janus.

 

In Lives, The Snow Party and Courtyards in Delft, Mahon obliquely represents and often caricatures the conservative stances and ideologies that caused strife in Ireland. The poets prioritises self-reflexivity. In Mahon’s own words, he refuses to ‘trade self-knowledge for/ a prelapsarian metaphor’ and ‘love-play of the ironic consciousness for/ a prescriptive innocence?’ I shall assess how the poet employs elements of play—‘rhythmical or symmetrical arrangements of language, the hitting of the mark by rhyme or assonance, the deliberate disguising of the sense, the artificial and artful construction of phrases’ (Huizinga)—to engage the readers in his critique of social injustices prevalent in Ireland and beyond. It understands how the poet employs irony in intellectually stimulating ways and allows his readers to identify regressive tendencies, such as narcissism and lack of empathy, that perpetuate conflicts within societies. (299 words)

 

 

Prof. Yulia Pushkarevskaya Naughton (Qatar University). Cultural ‘Intruders’ in Contemporary Irish and European Narratives of Exile.

 

Focusing on the Lacanian idea of the ‘split self’ and the idea of the ‘states of being' from Claire Hemmings's theory of affect, this paper will discuss conflicting cultural identities in eclectic readings from contemporary Irish and other European narratives. Taking the late Jean Luc Nancy's autobiographical essay "The Intruder" as inspiration, the paper will trace separation, longing, and strangeness in recent exilic texts, in which characters are simultaneously torn and uplifted by the complexities of their cultural, class, and gender identities. I argue that alienation and strangeness emerge in these narratives as ‘states of being’ and self-perpetuated 'affects' that paradoxically become a source of identity. In Lacan, the split subject is defined by a sense of separation, lack, and longing – thus the displaced subject can never feel complete. In Nancy’s logic of strangeness, however, the subject must cultivate its own strangeness or ‘intrusiveness’. “There must be something of the intrus in the stranger; otherwise, the stranger would lose its strangeness”, he writes, suggesting that integration and sublimation of difference would be a loss to the subject. The culturally displaced subject, I argue, experiences its strangeness not as a lamentable condition, but as a mode of identity. It becomes a ‘state of being’ intrinsic to the experience of exile and migration. While cultural crossings can be initially destabilising, they can also become a form of empowerment and, following Nancy’s trail of thought, an end in itself.

 

While the paper's primary focus in on recently published Irish texts, such as Colm Tóibín's novel Brooklyn (2009) and Edna O’Brien’s short story “Paradise” (2019), it will also reference other European narratives, such as Andrey Kurkov's postmillennial novels and Jose Saramago's recently published early novel Skylight (2011), in an effort to position contemporary Irish narratives of exile within a broader, European context.

 

 

Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro (University of Limerick). Black Irish Culture.

 

This paper engages with the transformative period of Celtic Tiger (1994-2007) which paved way for a national conversation on the topics of race, identity, and ethnicity that shapes Contemporary Ireland and frames the question of ‘What does it mean to be Irish’. The question of what it means to be Irish is traced back to the implementation of Direct Provision (2001), the 2004 Referendum, and the re-emergence of the political movement the Black Lives Matter movement (2020). The influx of migration during the Celtic Tiger period meant that Irish identity became fluid and multi-ethnic thus challenging the default identity of Irishness. The evolving nature of Irish identity exposes the need to move away from viewing Irishness under the microscopic lens of whiteness and move towards the need to understand the lived realities of those with a hybrid identity whose presence contributes to Ireland being viewed as a multicultural and diverse nation.

 

There is a strong presence of Afro-Irish culture in contemporary Ireland. Their presence calls for a need to engage in the topic of citizenship, nationality, and race to create a more comprehensive understanding of what the future of Ireland ought to look like. In my presentation, I will highlight the lived realities of the Afro-Irish community and the series of challenges that they face such as racism and resistance to being viewed as Irish. By exploring these lived realities, the paper will reinforce the need to understand how Contemporary Ireland is at a cultural crossroads and a more positive representation of multi-ethnic cultures, heritages, and hybrid identities reflect this new Ireland.

 

 

An Dr Laoise Ní Cheallaigh (Coláiste Mhuire gan Smál)(Mary Immaculate College, Limerick). Lámh Láidir na hIdirchultúrthachta: Gnéithe den idirchultúrthacht iarchoilíneach in úrscéal Joe Steve Uí Neachtain.

 

Le blianta beaga anuas tá borradh faoin smaointeachas idirchultúrtha i gcás na Gaeilge agus an chultúir Ghaelaigh i gcoitinne.  Tá criticeoirí na Gaeilge ag forbairt teoiricí a fhreastalaíonn ar chás uathúil na Gaeilge, ar nós teoiric an chumaisc chultúrtha a d’fhorbair An tOllamh Máirín Nic Eoin ina mórshaothar ceannródaíoch, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. 

 

Scríbhneoir Gaeltachta ab ea Joe Steve Ó Neachtain agus an tionchar sin soiléir ina shaothar cruthaitheach. Chaith sé os cionn tríocha bliain i mbun na scríbhneoireachta cruthaithí, agus gan mórán anailíse critice déanta fós ar shaothar na mblianta úd. Cé go bhfuil anailís idirchultúrtha déanta ar shaothar scríbhneoirí eile, d’fhéadfaí a áiteamh go bhfuil faillí fós á déanamh ag lucht critice i scríbhneoireacht Joe Steve Uí Neachtain i gcoitinne, agus go háirithe maidir le gné na hidirchultúrthachta ina shaothar. 

 

Sa pháipéar seo tabharfar faoi léamh ar leith a sholáthar ar lárnacht na hidirchultúrthachta iarchoilíní san úrscéal Lámh Láidir (2005) le Joe Steve Ó Neachtain. Úrscéal is ea é a ínsítear thar thréimhse bhreis is leathchéad bliana ó ‘dheireadh gann, gortach na gceathrachaidí’ anuas go dtí casadh na mílaoise, tréimhse ríthábhachtach i scéal an díchoilínithe Éireannaigh. Soláthrófar léargas ar chastacht cheist na hidirchultúrthachta a eascraíonn as próiseas an choilíneachais agus ar thábhacht na teanga dúchasaí i bpróiseas an díchoilíneachais. Speictream is ea an idirchultúrthacht agus a rian le sonrú i gcarachtair an úrscéil de réir mar a théann siad i ngleic le tionchair éagsúla chultúrtha orthu agus de réir mar a athraíonn cúinsí a saoil féin.  Is é cuspóir an pháipéir seo ná léargas a thabhairt ar ghnéithe faoi leith d’fhéinaitheantas na gcarachtar agus ar speictream sin na hidirchultúrthachta i gcarachtracht bheacht Uí Neachtain san úrscéal Lámh Láidir.

 

 

Dr. Síle Ní Choincheannain (Coláiste Mhuire gan Smál). Beirt bhan eisceachtúla: Lucinda Sly agus Goody Glover.

 

Sa chaint seo, díreofar ar dhrochchás na mban i gcomhthéacs na n-úrscéalta stairiúla Lucinda Sly (Ó Sé, 2008) agus An Bhean Feasa (Titley, 2014). Tráchtfar ar na slite a chaitheadh go dona le príomhcharachtair na n-úrscéalta seo, Lucinda Sly agus Goody Glover, de dheasca cúinsí polaitiúla, cúinsí cultúrtha agus go mór mór de dheasca na bhfear. Éiríonn le Ó Sé agus le Titley, trí mheán an úrscéil stairiúil, saol crua na mban seo a chur ar ár súile de deasca na cúinsí sin agus is ag feidhmiú, fé mar a deir Nic Eoin, ‘mar thaca le struchtúir shóisialta phatrarcacha a bhí siad [na mná] agus iad ag soiléiriú is ag sainmhíniú an ionaid a bhí leagtha amach do mhná sa chóras socheacnamaíoch trí chéile’ (1998: xx). Léiriú atá sna hinsintí seo ar chás na mban i dtraidisiún na Gaeilge agus cás na mban san úrscéal stairiúil leis. ‘Doras feasa ar Éirinn’ é an t-úrscéal stairiúil dar le Titley (1991: 319) agus tá an litríocht chruthaitheach ríthábhachtach mar fhoinse staire. Tá an tuairim céanna ag Ó Conghaile nuair a deir sé:

Má tá muid chun pictiúr iomlán a aimsiú agus an stair – go háirithe an stair shóisialta – a thuiscint chomh fada agus is féidir tá sé riachtanach foinse mar an litríocht chruthaitheach a áireamh i measc na bhfoinsí eile – nó is boichte go mór ár dtuiscint ar an stair dá héagmais. (1988:417)

Is cuid den stair í an easpa stádais a bhí ag mná. Tuigtear, gur sin mar a bhí, san aimsir chaite, go raibh cos ar bolg ar mhná, agus tuigimid go bhfuil na carachtair ban in úrscéalta stairiúla na Gaeilge, fé mar a deir de Groot, ‘constrained by history to act in particular ways’ (2010: 158). Níos spéisiúla fós, b’fhéidir, ná go bhfuil an crocadh i ndán don bheirt bhan seo, Lucinda Sly agus Goody Glover. Tá súil agam go gcuirfidh an chaint seo go mór lenár dtuiscint ar chás na mban i bprós na Nua-Ghaeilge. Tá céim mhór fós le tabhairt i gcritic na Gaeilge chun dul i ngleic leis seo, cinnte.

 

 

An Dr Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh) (NUI Galway). An Ré Antrapaicéineach agus Tírdhreach an Choilíneachais in Na Móinteacha le Pól Ó Muirí/Anthropocene and Colonial Landscape in ‘Na Móinteacha’ by Pól Ó Muirí.

 

Pól Ó Muirí is a prolific novelist, biographer, short story writer, journalist, and poet in both the English and Irish languages. As a writer living in the North of Ireland, Ó Muirí’s poetry often explores the legacy of colonialism upon the landscape, topography, and culture of that part of the world, as seen in his collections Faoi Scáil na Ríona (1991), Dinnseanchas (1992), and Ginealach Ultach (1993), to mention but a few works.

Among his poetry collections is the notable work, Na Móinteacha, published in 2003 by the Lagan Press. This collection contains many short poems which explore, with uncomfortable honesty, the reality of interactions between human and nature, such as ‘Gráinneog’, ‘Sionnach’, ‘Corr Réisc’, and ‘‘Disappeared.’’ Of particular note is the title poem of the collection, ‘Na Móinteacha’, a longer work which describes the narrator’s journey on foot away from the ‘fuaimeanna daonna / human sounds’ of modernity and into ‘Na Móinteacha / Moorlands’ themselves.

 

This poem, which opens with a stark epigraph giving an account of Sir Arthur Chichester’s ‘scorched earth’ policy during the Nine Years’ War in Ireland, describes the material and ongoing effects of two types of ‘colonization’: the colonization of Ireland over centuries of English (and later, British) rule, and the colonization and pollution of natural landscape by human activities. This paper will perform a close reading of the poem and will detail the narrator’s attempt to escape from ‘píochán tráchta is traenach / the hoarseness of traffic and train’. However, as Sam Solnick has argued, in the Anthropocene, a ‘non-implicated space’ in which one can escape from the realities of human influence does not exist. Perhaps in the case of a writer of a minoritized language in the North, a landscape free from the material reminders of colonization is similarly desirable, yet impossible. This paper will explore how ‘Na Móinteacha’ precludes the possibility of escape from both the realities of colonialism and human effects on the earth in the Anthropocene.

 

 

Danielle O’Sullivan. The Representation of Unhealthy Relationships in Contemporary Irish Fiction.

 

This paper investigates the representation of unhealthy relationships in contemporary Irish fiction. It looks at examples of unhealthy relationships in novels published within the last five years, specifically Normal People (2018) by Sally Rooney, Exciting Times (2020) by Naoise Dolan, and The Lesser Bohemians (2016) by Eimear McBride. These unhealthy relationships are discussed using trauma theory, determining the impact of childhood trauma on these adult romantic relationships. It analyses these texts using research by Cathy Caruth, Gerardine Meaney, Judith Butler, and Renée Spencer, among others. It also criticises the use of Freud’s Oedipus complex in contemporary psychology. Freud’s views of hysteria in women and children’s sexuality have been scrutinised and discredited, especially with the recent rise of the #MeToo movement. It looks at different types of adult relationships in these novels, providing a new insight into Irish gender and sexualities. Each relationship discussed has different sexualities, different levels of seriousness, and contains various levels of physicality in the relationships, such as the presence of BDSM. Using Freud’s theory of repetition, and how people tend to repeat behaviours of abuse throughout their lives in an effort of keeping something familiar in their lives. In doing this, I hope to shed some light on types of relationships that are not often discussed honestly but that are very present in contemporary Irish society, while also attempting to update previous ideas of women’s sexuality and desires as a result of Freud’s theories.

 

 

Seán Ó Cinnéide (Maynooth University). ‘Mere words are useless’: Francis Stuart, statelessness, and the rhetoric of nationalism.

 

Francis Stuart’s political commitments have been the subject of contention among critics and scholars since the conclusion of the Second World War, during which he had relocated to Berlin to take up a lecturing post and subsequently broadcast pro-German propaganda to Ireland with the Irland-Redaktion service. Steeped in ethno-nationalist ideology, the broadcasts are an ugly document of his doctrinaire nationalism: from the promotion of race myths advancing notions of Celtic ‘nobility’ to the desire to beget political hegemony (and maintain ethnic homogeneity) by authoritarian means. Stuart, a militant republican who participated in the Civil War with the anti-Treaty forces, was not alone among Irish nationalists in possessing fascist or proto-fascist commitments; from Patrick Pearse’s enthusiasm for blood-and-soil theories of racial purity and nationhood to the Blueshirts’ adoption of many of the liturgical elements of German and Italian fascisms, republicans had long flirted with aspects of the chauvinistic politics that by 1939 had delivered the continent to crisis.

 

In the years immediately following the war’s end, after a period of internment and displacement in Germany during which an attempt to return to Ireland was denied, Stuart worked on a trilogy of novels that fictionalised his postwar experiences. In A Pillar of Cloud (1948), Redemption (1949), and The Flowering Cross (1950), Stuart attempts to reckon with the ethical significance of the war, and with the meaning of his commitments in its wake. In A Pillar of Cloud and The Flowering Cross especially, Stuart’s representations of the condition of statelessness evoke the sense of contingency and disorder pervasive in European culture following the conflict. In this paper, I will study Stuart’s engagement with postwar ethical discourse, in particular ideas about statelessness and personhood, in relation to the influence of conservative currents within Irish cultural nationalism – and examine the ways in which Stuart’s crisis of commitment is reflected at the level of form in his postwar work.

 

 

Dr Britta Olinder (University of Gothenburg, Sweden). Sinéad Morrissey: Traveller in History and Geography.

 

Presenting the titles of her first two collections, There was Fire in Vancouver (1996) and Between Here and There (2002) – with its section on Japan – Morrissey declares her transnational Irishness. This is combined with a transhistorical viewpoint in “The State of the Prisons” from her third collection of the same title (2005), but also beginning with “Flight”, a surprisingly broad social picture of mid-17^th century society and including the nine-page “China” as well as “The Gobi from the Air”.  In Through the Square Window (2009) Morrissey reaches to “Shadows in Siberia According to Kapuscinski” (57) possibly indicating an allegorical interpretation of the world similar to that of the Polish-Belarussian writer´s. Parallax (2013) with its initial Oxford English Dictionary definition, pointing to different ways of seeing things depending on the angle of vision, presents to begin with the poem “1801”, a formidable rewriting of - or imagining - a short piece of Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary. In On Balance (2017) the poem “Whitelessness” (51-56) leaves six specialists, geologist, photographer, geographer, artist, marine biologist and archeologist to draw the historical line back to the stone age and to far-off Greenland. Throughout her work Morrissey thus moves across time and place with astonishing agility. “The State of the Prisons” will serve as an illustration of this, worth focusing on.

 

 

Dr Stephen O’Neill (Trinity College Dublin). ‘what a bloody environment for a man of imagination’: Irish writing and the Special Powers Act (1922).

 

Writing in the 1974 volume of the New Review, Conor Cruise O’Brien claimed that there was ‘an unhealthy intersection, in a particular island, of a certain form of literature and a certain form of politics’. Although removed from the ‘certain’ and ‘particular’ contexts of its original airing, this idea was separately developed by O’Brien himself and Edna Longley into a more general understanding of ‘literature’ being tainted by ‘politics’. ‘Poetry and politics, like church and state, should be separated’, as Longley’s 1985 Crane Bag article ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’ began. This censorious notion has, of course, been influential as it has been summoned in appeals to a literary ideal. But O’Brien’s health warning about these intersections also came at a time when he was actively engaged in censorship as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, directed towards ‘a certain form of politics’ to borrow his own words.

 

This paper will consider an underappreciated aspect of censorship in Irish writing: the Special Powers Act of 1922, which provided a frequently used mechanism for the northern state to suppress criticism and dissent until 1973. It will look at representations of the minority in the six counties after its implementation, including the fiction of Michael McLaverty and, in particular, Joseph Tomelty’s play The End House (1944), a direct attack on the Act performed originally at the Abbey (which has still never been performed in the north of Ireland). As Wallace, a character in the play, laments: ‘what a bloody environment for a man of imagination’. Rethinking the relationship of Irish writing with censorship and drawing upon the recent work of Prathama Banerjee about defining the political, this paper will examine what impact the Special Powers Act had on the imagination of Irish writers.

 

 

Ellen Orchard (Trinity College Dublin). ‘head of curls’: Austin Clarke and Paula Meehan’s Elegies for Children.

 

This paper reads two elegies for children by two poets from North Dublin: Austin Clarke and Paula Meehan. Despite geographical similarity, these poets differ in gender and social class and write from two very different Irelands; Clarke was born in 1896 into a lower middle-class family and Meehan in 1955 to working class parents. While class readings can be reductive, they are useful when comparing the intentions of these poets, both openly critical of the Catholic Church and the harmful repercussions of its ideologies for women and children. For example, Clarke’s ‘The Pill’, published in 1967, is concerned with women’s reproductive rights, narrating the death of a ‘young girl’ in childbirth. Published nearly fifty years later, ‘The Boy from the Gloucester Diamond’ appears in Meehan’s Geomantic (2016), described as a ‘private commemorative act’ for children of inner-city Dublin who have lost their lives due to drug abuse (Randolph 2016). These stark depictions of children let down by their State differ from the dominant representation of the child in poetry, often understood in the Romantic sense, as a symbol of innocence and purity. Both poets reject conceptions of childhood as a blissful, utopian point of no-return or even, as a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism. Instead, they are noted for their attention to, as Kit Fryatt writes of Clarke, ‘ordinary people’, such as Ireland’s women, children and urban poor (2020). This paper is interested in the poetic portrayal of ‘ordinary people’ and asks: what are the ethical repercussions of writing about a marginalized community that is not your own? What can these poems teach us about the failures of the State in protecting its most vulnerable? And how can these portrayals of neglected children help us ‘to make / sense of the state of the State we’re in?’ (Meehan 2016)

 

 

Sean Aldrich O’Rourke (University of Limerick). Reality Creation and its Victims in J.S. Le Fanu’s Late Fiction.

 

Much recent Gothic criticism has rightly focused on the ambiguity of the monstrous other in Gothic fiction, illustrating a quite fraught relationship between societies that conceive of themselves as modern and progressive, and the forces that are deemed other who might interrupt such conceptions. In the fiction of Irish Gothicist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, it is an often-oppressive process of reality creation that not only designates certain people and groups as other but also assigns them to the category of the unreal. This reality-creation process is a complex social dynamic at the heart of Le Fanu’s late fiction by which his fictional communities form their collective vision of what is materially real and socially acceptable or unreal and unacceptable. Jewish characters, nonconforming women, and others who do not conform to the social and material reality configured within a community are thus often characterised as unreal through that process. However, this unreality gives them a certain power, demonstrating their ability to challenge such communally created visions of reality.

By weaving such figures into this dynamic of reality creation, Le Fanu creates more than just an ambiguous relationship between the reader and those deemed unreal. He also provides the grounds to critique the hegemonic reality that excludes them, forcing the reader to consider visions of socio-political and material reality beyond reigning ones. Focussing especially on works like “The Bird of Passage” and The Tenants of Malory, I aim to demonstrate both how such figures are labelled unreal within this reality-creation process and how Le Fanu’s depiction of such figures provides a critique of oppressive communities both within and without Le Fanu’s time, illustrating the exclusionary ways in which communities create their realities and the power of imagining better visions of reality.

 

 

Victor Pacheco (Universidade de São Paulo & University of Limerick). Shy Abjection: A Reading of Emma Donogue’s Short Story “The Welcome.”

 

This presentation aims to analyze the construction of the character JJ in Emma Donoghue’s short story “The Welcome” (2006). The story portrays Luce’s sexual awakening for JJ, the new resident of the women-only cooperative living The Welcome. JJ’s shyness and supposed indifference to Luce’s attempt at romantic approach and friendship turns out to be a reaction to JJ’s process of transsexuality. If, as the Argentine critic Ricardo Piglia (2000) argues, every short story narrates two stories, the first is a frustrated love story, and the second represents JJ’s abjection. From being fundamental to the theory of subjectivity (Kristeva 1988, McAfee 2004) to a signifying practice to the body and sexuality (Butler 1999), abjection was vastly discussed by psychoanalysis and queer theory, and recently Darieck Scott (2010) gave a racial account, linking abjection, race, violence, and representation. By intersecting race, gender, and sexual identities, the short story fails to represent JJ as a complete subject because the narration (and narrator) articulates stereotypical images around blackness and transsexuality, casting at once blackness and transsexuality as abjection. Thus the centralization of Luce’s desire and the representation of JJ as an abject character exemplifies the impossibility of intimacy for the black queer body within the homonormative parameters of gender, sexuality, and race.

 

 

Wit Pietrzak. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand”: States of exception and promise of forgiveness in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon.

 

The presentation focuses on Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020) with a view to analysing the condition of the state of exception, as it is evoked in the novel, and means whereby literature can serve to challenge it. Centred around Israel’s occupation of Palestine and winding around various events and facts related (sometimes rather vaguely) to it, the novel tells the story of Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian whose daughter was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli who in turn lost his daughter in a suicidal attack. As the two become allies in preaching forgiveness as the sole path to ending the conflict, Apeirogon utilises a discontinuous mode of narration to show that as a nexus for all other such permanent states of exception, the Israel-Palestine conflict represents a crisis that can only be solved through a radical gesture of severance, a gesture that in the novel assumes the form of what Giorgio Agamben terms deactivation. In effect, Apeirogon addresses the rising hydra of division that plagues not only the Middle East but the Western democracies as well. Attending to the formal experiments in the novel and Agamben’s critique of the abuses of power in the name of sovereignty, the presentation will show that Apeirogon issues a timely call for us all to steer away from the monstrous future in which we once again end up being “but weasels fighting in hole.”

 

 

Ondřej Pilný (Charles University, Prague). Irish Fiction in Czech: A Case Study.

 

This paper surveys the publication and reception history of Irish fiction in the Czech Lands from the 1980s, a period still marked by communist censorship, through the unconstrained 1990s and up to the present day, by which time the book market has predictably come to be defined by commercial concerns. The Czech environment is presented as a case study of a rich tradition of reading in what is a relatively small European language, contextualising the story of how Irish fiction has been received with the Anglophone world. It will become apparent that Irish fiction has had a reasonably successful publication history in Czech but the pattern of what has been translated has been somewhat erratic, being influenced by the sporadic nature of the contact with Ireland first, and later by the constraints of the market. The seminal role of Ireland Literature Exchange/Literature Ireland in financially supporting translations of Irish writing will be highlighted, as well as the vital role of translators, or indeed successful film adaptations and Netflix series. The paper intends to present some hard data from the last decade or so culled from Czech publishers and analyse the likely reasons for the success – or indeed failure – of a range of works celebrated in the English-speaking world. In its closing section, the paper wishes to present a set of observations about the changing local and global patterns of readership, particularly in regard to translation.

 

 

Dr Aurora Piñeiro (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico). Reading the map of motherhood: the language of cartography in Anne Enright’s Actress.

 

Some recurrent themes in Anne Enright’s writings are identity (usually explored from an intersectional perspective), memory (both individual and collective) and motherhood (with an emphasis on mother-daughter relationships). Her latest novel, Actress (2020) is narrated by Norah, a 58-year-old writer who decides to write a book on her mother, Katherine O´Dell, a former Irish theatre legend. As the novel develops, readers learn that Norah is not only in a search for her mother’s past, but also wishes to find answers in relation to her father’s identity, and that she is even trying to unravel the mystery of love, be it filial or romantic. One of the interesting aspects in the depiction of Norah’s varied and braided searches is her decision to use a cartographic lexicon to explore motherhood and identity via images of travelling, borderline crossings and seascapes.

 

The aim of this paper is to analyse the novel Actress by Anne Enright from the perspective of a twofold notion of literary mapping. Firstly, the narrator’s role as a cartographer and how her choice of a lexicon imbued with the language of landscape articulates the representation of an individual identity, that of Katherine O’Dell; of a collective notion on identity, as O’Dell’s Irishness is portrayed as a construct; and of a geography of affects related to motherhood, as this task is undertaken by O’Dell’s daughter, who faces the material and emotional difficulties of constructing a maternal figure as well as an identity of her own. Secondly, the literary mapping will be considered from the perspective of a reader or critic who is familiar with more than one text by Enright and thus may exact a map as a representation that enables an additional reading of a set of texts by the Irish author. In this case, the short story “Night Swim” (2020) and the creative non-fiction book Making Babies (2004) will be used to show how the language of cartography is an authorial strategy present in several works by Enright, who deals with the theme of motherhood in terms of fluidity, with an imagery related to waterscapes and, in the end, a positive or conciliatory attitude, that does not eliminate ambiguities or uncertainties.

 

 

Dr Jack Quin (University of Birmingham). Eva Gore-Booth and Sculptural Form

 

The poet, activist and lifelong suffragist, Eva Gore-Booth, composed a series of poems on the art of sculpture, responding to works by Rodin, mythic statues and the practices of sculpting more broadly. This paper explores the fascination with classical and modern sculpture in Gore-Booth’s poetry and contextualises the wider engagement with the art form in early twentieth century Irish literature. In contrast to W.B. Yeats’s sculpture poems of the same period, the perspective of the female statues in Gore-Booth’s “La Pensée” and “Form” are granted agency and a voice. Her poems frequently allude to a female model yet the speaker dematerializes the obdurate marble, granite, or serpentine to convey the thoughts or dreams of the model of freedom from the constraints of matter.

As this paper will show, sculpture is rendered as a curiously fluid medium, which is metaphoric and metamorphic in the hands of the poet. For Gore-Booth, sculptural bodies trouble the confines of academic art criticism and even ideas of desire and identity by setting up transgressive myths wherein classical statues are non-static, seemingly organic and tactile forms. This poetics of sculpture will be connected to the foremost sculptors of the Celtic Revival – including Oliver Sheppard who admired Gore-Booth’s work – and the realpolitik of Dublin monuments in the lead up to, and immediate aftermath of, Irish independence.

 

 

Dr Emma Radley (University College Dublin). Ecological Dead Zones: The Forest in Contemporary Irish Gothic and Horror Film.

 

In her recent book examining a newly emerging ecocritical turn in Gothic Studies, Elizabeth Parker comments that “the reason that the forest is frightening is because it is bound to primeval antiquity. When within its midst, we have no sense of time: we have no evidence of human evolution, or indication, even, that we are ‘post-Enlightenment’ at all” (50). This paper seeks to examine the visual iconography of the “deep dark woods” as the uncanny setting of a startlingly high number of Irish gothic and horror films released in the last decade, while Ireland grappled with the effects of its bankrupted encounter with neoliberalism after the collapse of the Tiger in 2007. Often in these films, the forest is the site of a traumatic confrontation with faeries, druids, banshees, and changelings, frequently staging that familiar gothic encounter between the urban sceptic and an archaic and irrepressible Irish folklore. In some ways, this ‘return’ to a rural, pre-modern space which is haunted by historical trauma and violence is a replaying of that insistent dichotomy in Irish cultural representation between tradition and modernity. However, these films must also be read within an ecocritical framework that interrogates the economic exploitation of the ecological sphere inherent in neoliberalism: the forest here exists in an uncanny temporal duality, representing both ‘old Ireland’ and ‘new Ireland’. Central to this reading will be the Sitka Spruce, which makes up the majority of the (appositely named) plantation forests in which these films are set. This type of forestry practice, supported and subsidized by government schemes, is controversial in Ireland: the Sitka Spruce is not a native tree, and is chosen for its quick growth and adaptability, thus allowing for a commercial as well as ecological function. However, its height and density, and the particular way it is planted – in vast swathes of uniform rows – creates forests that are dark, silent, and lacking in natural dappled light, inhibiting natural biodiversity, becoming, according to critics, ‘ecological dead zones’. Focusing on films such as The Hallow (Hardy, 2015), Without Name (Finnegan, 2016), and The Hole in the Ground (Cronin, 2019), this paper will examine the intersections between neoliberalism, ecocriticism, and the contemporary Irish gothic.

 

 

Prof. Katharina Rennhak (University of Wuppertal). Intersectionality and Narrative Structures of Trust in Austerity Fiction.

 

In 21^st-century Europe, in general, and Ireland, in particular, a series of economic, social and political crises have eroded social and political structures of trust. My argument builds on the hypothesis that in a crisis-ridden ‘post-risk society’ (Hartmann 2020) contemporary narrative fiction provides one of the few cultural spaces for intersubjective renegotiations of trust. As I will demonstrate, contemporary fiction represents Ireland as a ‘society-in-need-of-trust’ (“Vertrauensbedarfsgesellschaft”), as theorized by Martin Hartman. Focusing on the representation of intersections of gender, class and age in selected Irish novels, I seek to demonstrate how the narrative semantics of character, plot and space as well as the politics of narrative perspective contribute to renegotiating social structures of trust.

 

More specifically, I will show, how several Irish novels, such as Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, and Caoilínn Hughes’ The Wild Laughter use arrangements of (often eroded, deserted, ghosted, or occupied) family homes as a narrative tool to represent social networks that struggle with the erosion of traditional structures of trust and strive to establish new ones. Arguing that these novels do not only represent intersecting identities and reconstruct existing power structures, but seek to imagine new alignments of trust, I will focus on Anne Enright’s the Forgotten Waltz and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart. A more detailed analysis of these two novels’ aesthetics will move beyond the initial examination of narrative space and evaluate the intersectional politics of trust laid out in Enright’s and Ryan’s innovative adaptations of traditional genre conventions, in general, and their handling of narrative perspective, in particular.

 

 

Dr Julie-Ann Robson (University of Sydney, Australia). Robson, ‘To reveal art and conceal the artist’ – Oscar Wilde in the archives.

 

When we think of Oscar Wilde we think of paradoxes, contradictions and complexity – of an original thinker who, from the time of his first publication, Poems, was beset with charges of plagiarism. While the sources for Wilde’s writing might seem obvious and have often been cited – Maturin, Swinburne, Huysmans, Pater, and Maeterlinck to name but a few – I would argue that Wilde spent just as much time in the archives locating more obscure source material with which to work. In this paper I will explore three such sources uncovered in my research, and examine the ways in which Wilde incorporated ideas from other writers in his art – artists whose ideas he successfully concealed.

 

 

Dr Ketlyn Mara Rosa (Trinity College Dublin). The body, senses and violence: Bloody Sunday and chaos in Derry

 

The issue of the Troubles in Northern Ireland has been massively present in films that represent the contemporary political situation of the country, often expressing contexts of oppression and systems of power through the portrayal of corporeal violence. One of the most distressing episodes of the conflict, Bloody Sunday, has become known as a civil rights march transformed into a modern-day battlefield in Derry on 30 January 1972. The movie adaptation Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass 2002) depicts the events of the day with a focus on the unglorified use of violence and power abuse by the British government and military. This paper proposes to analyze how the film conveys images of violence to the bodies of the participants and illuminates potential significances related to identity and memory, foregrounding the sensorial perception of the characters as a major catalyst of experiences and meanings. This analysis takes into consideration the colonial ramifications of the event incorporated in the oppressive behavior of the British forces that underlie the divisions between the Catholic and Protestant sides. The film acknowledges the hovering imperialistic atmosphere in the portrayal of a stifling British military presence through the forced suppression of the bodies of the marchers. Adapted from Don Mullan’s 1997 book entitled Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, that attempts to recover the silenced voices of the massacre’s survivors, the film strives to problematize the conflict by contextualizing the violence within political agendas and demonstrating that the bodies of the participants impact the memory-making process of the massacre. The tumultuous context is portrayed in a way that appeals to the senses, in a deep engagement with the body and the immersive effects of violence. The representation of the violated body and its sensorial spectrum adds to the notion of conflict cinema as an intimate portrayal of trauma and urban warfare.

  

 

Aileen Ruane (University of Limerick). Translating Felispeaks in Quebec: intersectionality in translation through collaboration.

 

The translation of Irish plays in Quebec has proven to be a successful demonstration of the cultural complicity and historical relationship that exist between the two nations, generally avoiding many of the clichés and stereotypes that have marked their dissemination across the Irish diaspora. However, despite the large number of translated Irish plays being produced for the stage in Quebec, the plays in question often come exclusively from a corpus written during and directly following the Celtic Tiger period. With notable exceptions, the plays frequently therefore reflect an ethnically homogenous, masculine perspective of Ireland, even in the hands of women translators. Addressing the process by which dramatic works are selected and translated will potentially encourage a shift in this translation paradigm. Feminist translation in particular encourages facilitating the inclusion of marginalized and racialized voices by emphasizing relationality, where differences across social categories and structures dialogue throughout the process. This paper will present the results of a case study in which the principles of intersectional feminism are brought to bear across the whole translation process, beginning with the choice of voices that disrupt the notion of translation as a neutral process. The work of Nigerian-Irish poet, artist, and activist Felispeaks (Felicia Olusanya) has had a massive impact on the canon of contemporary Irish performing arts, voicing the intersecting social categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Pairing Felicia’s work with an ideologically attentive translator like Arianne Des Rochers, who recognizes the importance of rethinking the ethical responsibilities of the translator by decentering strategies and approaches, is an opportunity to reveal intersectionality in practice. A feminist ethics and politics of translation dictate the necessity of adopting an activism-driven model of translation practice wherein decolonizing is tantamount to a revelation of who and what are already present. This paper thus proposes to synthesize the results of a feminist ethics and politics of translation, embodied through collaboration and relationality, which can then favor systemic change. As such, it will be a first, necessary step in diversifying the corpus of Irish performing arts translated in the Francophone world.

 

 

Mark Ryan (University of Limerick). A multi-modal discourse analysis of queer identities in targeted LGBTQI+ media: 'Gay Community News' as a reflection of a queer, Irish, diasporic formation.

 

The dominant narrative of early activism of LGBTQI+ communities in Ireland focuses primarily on the, “battle to decriminalise sexual activity between males” (McDonagh 2017:65). This narrative was predominantly an urban one (Ferriter 2010) and often excluded the activities of provincial agents. McDonagh (2017:68) asserts that, “by focusing on the role of a few pioneering politicians, historians exclude all those gay and lesbian individuals who were active agents in their own liberation.” Indeed, it can be argued that the non-legal activities and goals of gay and lesbian activists in Irish society in this period were largely responsible for, “the sea [of] change in public attitudes that characterises the last decade[s] of Irish history” (McDonagh 2017:68). Though milestones such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of same-sex marriage have come to symbolise a social revolution, it is my view that by positioning these legislative changes as markers of progress, we obscure the slower paced social changes originating from the more quotidian activities of these activists from the late 70s onwards which facilitated these legal advances. Among these endeavours is included a concerted effort to establish a gay and lesbian (or what we may now call queer) press. It can be argued that this foray into publishing created and advanced a dialogue around (homo)sexuality which ultimately led to a re-evaluation by Irish society of its relationship with its LGBTQI+ communities.

 

The present study has two primary aims. The first is to pay attention to the current state of the queer press in the Irish context by conducting a multi-modal investigation of the representation of queer people (relative to mainstream media), in order to define what ‘progress’ for the LGBTQI+ community looks like according to those who claim to speak for it. Gay Community News (GCN) was chosen as the data source for this study as it is still in print today as the longest continuous queer periodical in Ireland as well as the oldest surviving free LGBTQI+ magazine in Europe. Gopinath (2010) pushes us to reimagine diverse communities as diasporic formations, and imagine alternative forms of affiliation and collectivity through her notion of “impossible normativities”. As such, the current study aims to ascertain to what extent a queer press can be read as a reflection of a queer, Irish, diasporic formation, where divergences of different sexual diasporic histories and experiences are traced.

 

 

Cody Sanders (University College Dublin). ‘Sirens’ in Ulysses: A Fugue or Sonata.

 

James Joyce’s Ulysses has had a countless number of books and articles written attempting to explain the various methods used to construct the 18 episodes of the book. Each episode has a distinct style and method of storytelling that subverts the traditional format of how novels and narratives can function, but this essay will focus exclusively on the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses. Told entirely through different forms of musical sensations and interjections of sound, the episode is a whirlwind of winding and complex song references, noises, interruptions, singing, and musical notations, but how does Joyce use musical forms within ‘Sirens’ to create textual polyphony and in what ways does reading the episode differ when read as either a fugue or sonata? This question has implications regarding the space-time structure Joyce has created within ‘Sirens.’ If the episode is read as a fugue it would allow for simultaneous development of themes, leitmotifs and actions of characters. A fugue would also allow multiple lines of text to occur simultaneously within the story. Whereas if the episode is read as a sonata then all the actions in the story must occur one after another in a sequential, or linear, method, thus eliminating textual polyphony. It is not as important which form Joyce wrote the episode as, but these two different readings of ‘Sirens’ have implications on the temporality of the episode itself.

 

 

Jonathan Sanford (University of Texas, USA). New Connections: Zora Neale Hurston on James Joyce.

 

In The Signifying Monkey, noted academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes that Black American authors often Signify upon texts by white authors. Black Signification can be motivated or unmotivated, and it is achieved in many different stylistic choices, such as parody, double-voicing, and chiasmus. For this discussion, I argue that an overlooked exemplification of this practice is in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. More specifically, I claim that Their Eyes is an unmotivated pastiche of James Joyce’s epic Ulysses. Ulysses was first published in the US in 1934; Their Eyes was published in 1937. Thus, the timing between the two works, as well as both novels’ spotlight on their primary characters’ travels through their homelands, could reasonably suggest a response from Hurston about Joyce. Further evidence for this claim includes both novels’ experimentation with vernacular language, form, and gender politics.

 

My primary texts for this study, besides the two stated novels, include Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey and Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination. Through Gates’ (post-)structuralist approach, I hope to reveal not only that Hurston’s work is a response to Joyce, but also establish a connection between the two authors that has long been overlooked. Certainly, Hurston’s exploration of sexual desire and gender expression, albeit in less frank of a way as Joyce’s, served to acknowledge and describe protagonist Janie’s innermost life in a manner that would otherwise have been ignored. Similarly, Joyce’s Molly might have suffered the same fate were it not for his attention.

 

Iria Seijas-Pérez (Universidade de Vigo). Growing up Queer and Muslim in Ireland: The Young Adult Fiction of Adiba.

 

During the Celtic Tiger years, the immigrant population of Ireland saw a significant increase. Today, this migrant population continues to grow and is now conformed by a wide variety of communities from different regions, cultures and religions. Though the large majority of the Irish population remains white and from a Catholic background, diverse ethnic groups and religious faiths are continually growing. As multiculturalism and diversity can still be seen as recent phenomena in Ireland, it is significant, thus, to consider the different perspectives and experiences of these new generations that find themselves growing up between two or more cultures, often contesting one or all of them at the same time. In recent years, the popularity of young adult literature has also experienced an increase. This literary genre aims to offer young readers texts where they can recognise themselves and that attend to their concerns, possibilities that might be unavailable for them in adult and children’s literatures. Current Irish young adult narratives have increased the variety of their representations, as they now begin to portray characters that are often marginalized and to deal with experiences deemed controversial, as well as they describe different kinds of youth lifestyles set in contemporary Ireland. Through this paper, I will focus on Adiba Jaigirdar’s two young adult fiction novels, The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, in order to explore those issues that queer South Asians and Muslims may encounter in a newly multicultural country still dominated by a white and Catholic population, as well as I will examine the significance of representing diversity in literature aimed at young readers.

 

 

Elisa Shaholli (University of Connecticut, USA). Politics, Plays, and Power: Alina Serban and Rosaleen McDonagh’s Use of Embodied Experience as Empowerment for Roma and Traveller Women

 

“I grew up in this country, but I've never been able to recognise myself in the stories.”

 

“I always resented when I read history books that my people were never mentioned.” 

 

These two quotations, the former from Romanian-born Roma playwright Alina Serban– the first Roma to stage her work in Romania’s Bucharest theater– and the latter from Rosaleen McDonagh, Irish Traveller playwright and activist, highlight the embodied experience of Roma and Traveller communities in Romania and Ireland, countries where although these women belong to indigenous communities, they face erasure in politics, history, literature, and national culture. 

 

Through critically analyzing Serban’s play “I Declare at My Own Risk” and McDonagh’s “The Baby Doll Project,” I examine the dichotomies and parallels between both women’s experiences as Roma in Romania and Traveller in Ireland. I emphasize the importance of fashion as a cultural and political artifact for Roma and Traveller women, one which McDonagh claims and intensifies to reject the Settled Irish taste which views it as ‘vulgar,’ while Serban views as a double-edged sword– simultaneously emblematic of her background but mere stereotype to outsiders. I also explore the semiotics of both artists’ plays, focusing on the signs of the campsite bathroom, school playground, and child services building and their significations to poverty, Settled society’s lack of care, and the pressure to assimilate to Settled identities and the subsequent effects on the indigenous self.

I argue that both playwrights exemplify Mary Burke’s interpretation that it’s “the woman's voice that is emerging most vociferously from the contemporary culture” on educating on Roma and Traveller self-representation. Through interspersing their own personal life-stories in their art, Serban and McDonagh utilize their identities as Roma and Traveller women to empower and shatter stereotypes of the “passive and downtrodden ‘Gypsy’” without a voice.

 

 

Danny Shanahan (University of Cambridge). Spectres of the Gulag: Soviet Bloc dissident poetics and Seamus Heaney’s representation of political imprisonment.

 

An enormous amount of scholarship has been written on Seamus Heaney’s relationship to Soviet dissident poetry: particularly on the influence of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died on his way to a labour camp during the Stalinist purges, and exiled Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. However, due to the linguistic specialisations of the field, what has gone unexamined is the ways Heaney uses these poets in dialogue with each other. I will use Heaney’s interviews, as well as notes uncovered in the newly opened Heaney-Cooke archive at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to trace the ways the Irish poet uses Herbert and Mandelstam as a dialectic of poetic responses to political imprisonment. Forming part of his reaction to internment and the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, Heaney uses Mandelstam’s symbolic rebellion and contrasts it with Herbert’s hard materialism to question the place of poetry and art more broadly in an era of imprisonment without trial. Looking at his poem “Sandstone Keepsake”, I will discuss the ways Heaney summons the spectres of Mandelstam and Herbert to weigh the value of poetic dissent when measured against political imprisonment. Through this transnational approach to carcerality, we can trace the ways Heaney breaks out of the old paradigms and dilemmas that plagued Northern politics during the Troubles. Remapping his familiar personal and political angst onto the spectre of the gulag, my paper will focus on the multipolar dialogue he creates in his approach to carcerality, moving beyond the one-to-one influence model of previous studies.  

 

 

Prof. Dhananjay Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University). Colonialism, Violence and the Poetic Responsibility: The Politico-Aesthetic Third Space in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry.

 

Seamus Heaney signed his early poems as “Incertus.” Seamus Deane, his Derry schoolmate and fellow writer, describes this authorial detour as an act of ‘an uncertain and a shy soul fretting and all that [i].”  In his acceptance speech, on being conferred the David Cohen Prize for lifetime excellence in writing in 2009, Heaney describes this deliberate withdrawal of personality as an act of ‘somebody not sure, uncertain.’ ‘It’s always important to be reassured, [ii]’ he added. Read in contrast with Deane’s assessment of authorial eschewal, Heaney understood his uncertainty not as being ‘a shy soul fretting,’ but a deliberate emptying of his name and all its associations to be ‘reassured,’ before he returned to giving his name to his poems.

This indefinite self, however, far from betraying a confused attitude to the political catastrophe in Northern Ireland, presents an epistemic ethics of a poet’s responsibility in violent history. My paper aims to argue that for Heaney, in the context of the poems in North (1975), Field Work (1979) and Station Island (1984), the poet assumes a politico-aesthetic responsibility in zones of conflict involving ideologies, histories and communities. The poet inhabits a third space- the middle path- as a conscious political choice and a deliberate aesthetic attitude. This space in the middle, the third space, is not between polarizing spaces but rather goes through them, but it is inaccessible to forms of polarities- of identities and ethnicities. It is an epistemic inhabitation in this space that dislocates ontological certainty, and creates a fluid poetic ethics inaccessible to rhetoric and logic.

 

 

Orsolya Szűcs (PPCU, Budapest). “How extravagantly attached we are to the things we own, as if they were the insides of our own bodies”: Writing the Human in Contemporary Irish Women Writing.

 

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2013) termed our age as being in “the crisis of trust” characterized by fragmentation, atomization, and the loss of belief in the functioning of human communities and political institutions. It can be stated that in the past few years, there has been a noticeable presence of women novelists in contemporary Irish fiction. They challenge local traditions and imbue new ethical, philosophical visions in innovative styles and language.

The following paper will look at some of the important questions that these writers construct, specifically looking at the human presence in our Anthropocene Era. It will also explore the transnational issues and innovative stylistic narrative techniques that these works apply. The two writers in focus are Sara Baume and her novel entitled A Line Made By Walking and Anne Enright’s  The Green Road. Both works operate with protagonists in a crisis, involved in a quest of finding themselves and their place in the material world. On this path they bring into discussion the changing dynamics of local and universal traditions and imply an urgency of eco-awareness. The analysis will look at the narrative structures and the way they posit and portray the human body in challenging literary, biological and ethical contexts.

Seamus Heaney and Senryu: An Anecdote on a Transnational Meeting

 

 

Dr Fuyuji Tanigawa (Konan Women’s University, Japan). Seamus Heaney and Senryu: An Anecdote on a Transnational Meeting.

 

I have a book titled the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse. It comes from the late poet’s bookshelf, and has several pencil marks by him. In the Introduction written by Anthony Thwaite and Geoffrey Bownas, the translators, there are marks on nature as “the chief inspirer”, a literary genre senryu, Japanese “language and prosody” and the Japanese "adjectives", &c. In addition, there are a few notes about tanka poems that are longer than haiku.

 

However, as far as the selected works are concerned, he circles several works only in the section of senryu beside a few exceptions. The fact is interesting. One of the senryu he circles is -

 

A horse farts:

Four or five suffer

On the ferry-boat.

          (The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, 133)

 

Senryu has the same form as haiku, but cuts realistic aspects out of a life freely from seasonal words peculiar to haiku. I don't know why Heaney paid attention to such trivial depictions, but the Japanese poem that W. B. Yeats imitated belonged to a similar low school of haiku.

 

Heaney's artistic achievements are grand and enormous, almost mythical, but his lightness in reacting to a petty tragedy or comedy may be one of what he sought in the last stage.

 

By the way, the fart of a horse is a Chinese proverb, meaning flattery. The above senryu might have described the situation where people are forced to hear someone paying compliments to a "greater" man in a narrow space which they can't escape from.

 

 

Dr Anna Teekell (Christopher Newport University, USA). Irish Border Travelogues: Walking the Intersection.

 

While criticism of Northern Irish literature has long been obsessed with borders as a concept – what Maud Ellmann calls the ‘metastatic’ nature of the Irish Border ­– surprisingly little attention has been paid to representations of the physical spaces of the border itself. A 310-mile-long intersection, defined, as Peter Leary says, by its ‘combination of restrictions and permeability’, the Irish Border has been explored as a historical and political problem, voiced by a popular Twitter account, and provided, especially in the Brexit era, fertile ground for discussion. But it’s also, as the @BorderIrish Twitter’s profile picture of grass points out, actual ground, a series of landscapes and mediated ecologies. Mirielle Rosello and Stephen Wolfe argue in Border Aesthetics (2018) that ‘border aesthetics reflects and creates friction and change’. And it reflects these changes on physical spaces. Using methods from the interdisciplinary field of Border Studies, often dominated by geography and political science, and attentive to ecological perspectives, this paper will reflect on how creative nonfiction about the border, in the form of travelogues, can shape our understanding of the Irish Border as a physical space with both human and environmental consequences. Why walk the border? Colm Tóibín in Bad Blood (1987/1994), Will Ferguson in Beyond Belfast: A 560 Mile Journey Across Northern Ireland On Sore Feet (2009), and most recently Garrett Carr in The Rule of the Land (2017), attend to the physical spaces of the border as they navigate it by foot (and also by kayak, in Carr’s case). As Carr says of the Border Interpretive Centre, the purpose of his travelogue is to prove that the border is ‘not just a symbol, it [is] also a patch of earth, a living place where things happened’. As embodied narratives and environmental chronicles, travelogues help us see, as Carr puts it, ‘how the land and its people have reacted to the border, and the ways in which the line is made manifest’.

 

 

Melania Terrazas (University of La Rioja, Spain). Class, Gender and Sexual Oppression: Intersectionality in Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men.

 

Irish writer Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men (2018) is an incredibly unusual novel. It is the first in a trilogy on migration and separation within and from the island of Ireland seen through multiple narrators across three generations, all of them members of two interconnected families. This discussion focuses on two resilient female storytellers, Mary and Maeve, whose experiences of trauma and social exclusion engage with Ireland’s culture and the oppression of Irish women. Although Mary is separated by force from her parents in Co. Kerry at the age of nine, as a child she brings up her brothers and sisters in Meath. Mary does not have the family and community support to reject an ideology that defines her as inferior because she speaks Irish and is poor, yet she has drive and agency, which help her to build up her own family and community support as the story goes on. In doing so, she manages to reject this ideology and passes her knowledge on to her siblings through storytelling. The novel represents an anti-Bildungsroman for Maeve, however, because she has to leave Mary when she is only eleven in order to earn a living in a shop owned by the Boyles in Trim. Maeve is again deprived of the family and community support she needs. She makes a gradual descent into mental illness, broken by a society whose dynamics of power are defined by gender and class under a patriarchal system of thought upheld by Catholic institutions and their representatives.

 

Following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s research on intersectionality (1989), this presentation explores how power, privilege, and oppression intersect with social categories like class, gender, and sexuality in Martin’s The Cruelty Men. Crenshaw’s assumptions on intersectionality will help us to explore how and to what effect Martin uses the methods and devices Crenshaw describes in her research to link the issues of class, gender, and sexuality to the oppression of Irish women from a feminist perspective. This discussion aims to illuminate what Martin does in her novel in intersectional terms, and show how her novel uncovers new understandings of the Irish human condition.

 

 

Dr Daniela Theinová (Charles University, Prague). Masculinities in Transition: Alan Gillis and Padraig Regan in and out of Belfast.

 

Commenting on his open conceptions of nature poem and ecology, Alan Gillis claims that he is “drawn specifically to where the urban and pastoral are in proximity”. As they attend to the transactions on the “boundary / of what is solid and what flows” in life, nature, and language, Gillis’s poems and travelling personae challenge various established identities and dichotomies, including those between the local and the global, the human and the non-human, the present and the past, the material and the virtual, the masculine and the other. The same could be said about Padraig Regan whose aestheticized images of plants and liminal green spaces within cities provide a code for the inclusion of themes related to queerness, “true nature”, and alterity. Starting with a comparative reading of Gillis’s “Ulster Way” and Regan’s “Ireland”, this paper explores how these poets’ engagement with transitory experiences and the physicality of words enables them to create their own “frontier territories” (Johnston). Their highly structured images of natural detail and semi-natural landscapes – construed as either conspicuously Northern-Irish and/or decidedly transnational – are presented as heterotopic “counter-sites”, found between “observation and invention” (Gillis), signification and non-sense. As such, they correspond not only with Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as “real places outside all places” but also Rancière’s definition of “[t]he ‘fictions’ of art and politics [as] heterotopias rather than utopias”.

 

 

Professor Naoko Toraiwa (Meiji University, Tokyo). “If it’s life that controls the geological machinery of the planet’ – Sinead Morrissey’s poems from a perspective of posthuman ecocriticism.

 

Form, style, appearance, surface—elements in constant change on every occasion of writing, creation, reading, and observation—are the primary concerns in Morrissey’s poems. Morrissey’s emphasis on form can be attributed to what she calls a non-Christian, quasi-religious interest. In her critical reading of ‘Murano’ by the American poet Mark Doty, Morrissey recognises their shared interest in cycling/recycling materials before introducing them into the visible world as forms. Morrissey writes:

 

Through the poem a kind of life-and-death cycle is established via which the body breaks open as the result of death, escaping the tethers of material existence and turning radiant, a ‘set of atmospheres,’ and then is distilled back into a concrete set of elements —‘salts and essences’—which in turn become materials for making glass.

 

Morrissey regards Doty’s ‘Murano’ as an embodiment of the parallel between poetic form and human body and appreciates his role of the artist/ poet in giving shape, or body, to experience. As she writes, ‘In several of my own poems . . . I imagine birth and death as overlaid. . .’, Morrissey might be seen as a Neo-Materialist, if we intend to sort her into contemporary schools of thought. She is seeking a repositioning of the human among nonhuman actions, focusing on interactions between matters inside and outside of bodies from a non-anthropocentric, posthuman perspective which involves environmental ethics. Therefore, her form-conscious style is an attempt to make networks with the environments. I will discuss Sinead Morrissey’s poetry from a perspective of posthuman-ecocriticism.

 

 

Kristina Varade (Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York). Narrating Resilience, Nurturing Respect: Contemporary Irish Traveller Writing.

 

Travellers and nomadic culture are usually represented in fictions created by settled people, confining Travellers within a vicious cycle of heteronormative, colonial, and abled perspectives. This paper seeks a more comprehensive and inclusive representation of Traveller narrative that moves away from prescribed, and usually inaccurate, notions of Traveller heritage and folklore, instead focusing on the contemporary oral and written narratives of Travellers themselves. In Why the Moon Travels, author Oein DeBhairduin writes, “The vast majority of what the settled community believe they know about Travellers comes from other settled people and, in light of our history, this needs to be challenged” (viii). Known as the Mincéirí, the Pavee, or an lucht siúil, Ireland’s indigenous minority have a long history that has primarily been narrated by voices outside of their own communities. De Bhairduin’s Why the Moon Travels, along with Rosaleen McDonagh’s Traveller Feminist memoir Unsettled, instead emphasize the ecological and social impact of history and society from within the community, and both texts similarly work to reclaim the power of Travellers (and specifically Traveller women) by strategically using the documentary forms of historical narrative and personal narrative of real-life experience. Ecocritic Scott Slovic encourages us to, “encounter the world and literature together then report about the conjunctions, the intersecting patterns” (Slovic 2008, 28): DeBhairduin and McDonagh provide their readers with precisely these encounters between world and text, facilitated through seamless transitions from text to image, Gammon/Cant to English, oral to written narrative and individual to collective experience. It is past time that a more comprehensive view of Traveller narrative is critically examined in an expansive context, rather than in an exclusive or hegemonic one.

 

 

Dr Pilar Villar-Argáiz (University of Granada, Spain). In Search of a Nation and a Language: Revivalist Inclinations in the Poetry of Eavan Boland.

 

This paper explores how the literary movement of the Revival (one of the most intensively examined periods in Ireland’s literary history) still exerts remarkable influence in the work of contemporary poets in Ireland such as Eavan Boland, reflecting powerful patterns of transmission across Irish culture. Boland attacks fiercely in her work Romantic and nationalist poetry, denouncing how ideals of femininity have betrayed the reality of ‘ordinary’ women, obscuring their actual involvement in Ireland’s past. Mocking the pretensions of the Revivalists, Boland’s poetry suggests that nationalism needs to incorporate aspects which have long been neglected, such as the mundane, everyday life of unheroic figures. She also strongly refutes the idea of a national soul, constructed by a series of features which survive across time. In spite of her critical reassessment of such Revivalist practices, this paper examines the persistence of some Revivalist tropes and themes in the work of Eavan Boland, in particular: 1) her reliance on the resources of a bardic past in her revision of Ireland’s literary history; 2) her persistent nostalgia for a lost past, which replicates the “logic of elegy” of much Revivalist literature (Gregory Castle 2020: 212, 214); 3) her tendency to follow in some of her poems the procedure of what has been identified as the “well-made poem” (David Lloyd 2020: 45); and 4) the echoes sometimes heard in her work of a Romantic mode of lyric subjectivity. 

 

 

Professor Tom Walker (Trinity College Dublin). Colum’s Revivalist Poetics amid the Institutions of Modernism.

 

Padraic Colum’s poems feature in many canonical gatherings of Irish verse. His work is also given consideration in several of the standard overviews of Irish poetry. Yet his poetry has provoked little analysis. In attracting little analysis, his work does not differ from much poetry associated with the Irish Literary Revival. With the obvious exceptions of that by W.B. Yeats and more latterly Austin Clarke, poetry associated with Irish revivalism – from that of Katherine Tynan and AE (George Russell) to Ella Young and F.R. Higgins – has been largely a subject of literary history rather than textual exegesis. That poetic history, from Samuel Beckett’s polemical ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934) onwards, has often been written in notably polarized terms. Poets have been labelled as modernist and experimental versus romantic and traditional, according to not only their use of form and language but also their politics and ideology. This has been aligned too with differentiating between poetry that is international and cosmopolitan in outlook and that which is national and parochial. Colum complicates such binaries. In significant respects, he is a traditionalist and a nationalist, whose work remains resistant to the reading strategies associated modernist poetry. Yet he is also a significant presence in the transatlantic institutions of modernism – a major focus of the new modernist studies of recent decades – through his contributions to significant modernist periodicals, such as Poetry and The Dial. Indeed, in several of these contributions he explicitly places Irish revivalist poetics in relation to more familiar currents in modernist poetics, such as Imagism. He also a figure of relevance to the recent emerging story of the relationship between world literature, transatlantic modernism and Irish writing, such as through his engagement with Hawaiian poetry. This paper will, therefore, seek to reconsider Colum’s poetry and its poetics in view of his prominent place within the transnational institutions of modernism.

 

 

Holly May Walker-Dunseith (University College Cork). The Healer in the Tower: Biddy Early and Discourses of Healing in the Work of W. B. Yeats.

 

Biddy Early (1798-1874) was a folk healer who practised in the area around Coole Park and Ballylee in County Galway, a locale later made famous by W. B. Yeats. The poet, who strongly associated this area with his own recoveries to health, learned on one of his first visits to the area of her practice of gathering healing plants (most likely moss) from the boards of the mill next to the tower he would later christen Thoor Ballylee. A practitioner in words rather than medicine, Yeats rebuilt Thoor Ballylee with, among other things, the ‘old mill boards’ where Early gathered her ingredients. This article looks at the place of Early in Yeats’s imagination alongside wider discourses of healing in his work, faced as he was with national and international conflict, as well as tensions at the heart of the Irish Revival between Gaelic and English, the ancient and the new, the mystical and the scientific.

 

 

Dr Clare Wallace (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic). Ecologies of struggle: Dissensual speech in recent Irish theatre.

 

This paper considers ecologies of agonistic encounter in Irish theatre. It will treat three recent theatrical works: This Beautiful Village / This Beautiful Virtual Village by Lisa Tierney-Keogh (2019, 2020), Home: Part One collectively created at the Abbey Theatre (2021) and The Saviour by Deirdre Kinahan (2021) as striking examples of the diverse ways current Irish theatre performs dissensual speech. Each of these performances orbits questions of ethical impasse, intolerance, and inaction, tracing multiple lines of intersectional inequalities. In using the word ecology here, I aim to highlight these works as embedded in and speaking to the socio-political environment of contemporary Ireland, while at the same time acknowledging the ways their reach was extended by their availability in online formats. My discussion will draw on Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus as “a division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given” alongside reflections on agonism in performance from Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki’s 2017 edited volume, Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy. In a twenty-first century moment marked by the emancipatory promises of the exposure of past wrongs and openness to social transformation, these works, I will argue, suggest the complex contours not only of Irish public discourse, but also of the role of theatre as a space of critically meaningful agonism.

 

 

Loic Wright (University College Dublin). Rural and Urban Masculinities, the Failed Bildungsroman, and the Nation in Mary Lavin’s The House in Clewe Street (1945).

 

Mary Lavin’s Bildungsroman, The House in Clewe Street, is a curious anomaly in mid-twentieth century Irish fiction; despite its explicit treatment of sexuality, pre-marital sex, and abortion, it was never banned. The narrative driving force of the novel follows Gabriel Galloway and his escape to Dublin with his romantic partner, Onny, from the narrow-minded, provincial Catholicism in his native town of Castlerampart. Gabriel promises freedom and independence to Onny, and envisions his escape as one that will develop his maturity and bolster his masculinity. During this move to Dublin, however, Gabriel experiences a culture shock in the shift in social, and masculine expectations between small-town rural Ireland, and the bohemian capital city. Due to the conflicts between Gabriel’s rural conservative masculinity and the bohemian masculinity in Dublin, Gabriel becomes increasingly excluded from the city’s liberal, laissez-faire, nonconformist social circles. Ultimately, the move results in the breakdown of Gabriel’s relationship with Onny, his friendship with his village peer Sylvester, and leaves him with the choice of returning to his aunts in Castlerampart in disgrace and defeat or starting anew in Dublin alone.

 

In this paper, I consider the culture shock of competing rural and urban masculinities and interrogate Lavin’s depiction of the move from a small town to the capital, a popular trope in the traditional Bildungsroman format. However, I argue that Lavin complicates this trope and problematises the Bildungsroman form to raise wider questions and issues about Irish society after independence. By interrogating Gabriel’s attempts to achieve independence from his aunts by moving to Dublin, I investigate how Lavin’s reconfigured Bildungsroman parallels the chasm between Ireland’s early rhetoric on national independence and the culture of restrictive conservatism that followed independence.

 

 

Dr Yi-ling Yang (National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan). Intersectional Space: Silenced Border in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man and Claire McGowan’s The Silent Dead

 

As a land criss-crossed by political, religious, and ethnic borders, Northern Ireland unsettlingly sits at the intersection of power, discourse, and communal relationships. Against the sectarian divide, silence becomes the invisible but audible boundary between Protestant and Catholic communities. It often serves as a way to avoid confrontation or to avert suspicion of betrayal. This paper proposes to investigate the depiction of silenced border in McNamee’s Resurrection Man and McGowan’s The Silent Dead. In the former, I aim to show how the cityscape of Belfast is intersected by violence, power of control, and communal silence. Adopting Slavoj Žižek’s notions of objective and subjective violence, the first part explains how the space of Belfast is imposed with objective violence that designates one’s communal identity through naming and how Victor Kelly, whose quasi-Catholic surname does not accord with his Protestant affiliation, subverts this order with the subjective violence of serial killings. Appalled by Victor’s atrocities, the public fall into reticence, which then reshapes the psychoscape of the city. The silenced border persists into the post-Agreement period. McGowan’s The Silent Dead portrays silence on the geographical and temporal border, unravelling the psychological limbo of Troubles-related victims and the societal impasse after the Agreement. Beginning with the excavation on the border between the North and the South in 2012, the novel follows Inspector Devlin’s dig into remnants of the past. Overshadowed by the vision of peace and prosperity promised by the Agreement, victims during the ‘70s have lain unnoticed, waiting for recognition and justice. Birte Heidemann’s idea of “negative liminality” helps to explain the liminal impasse of post-Agreement Northern Ireland, where the suppressed memories of the conflictual past intersect with the future-oriented socio-economic discourse. The two works combined show Northern Ireland as intersectional space perturbed by violence, discursive contestation, and communal tension through the Troubles and into the post-Agreement period.

 

 

Dr Iva Yates (University of Limerick). “New-World Democracy”: Expansionism in Folklore Collecting – The Cases of Ireland and Puerto Rico.

 

W. Y. Evans-Wentz was an American anthropologist who claims to be “partly Celtic… by blood and perhaps largely so by temperament” (xx) spent time in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, the Isle of Man, and Cornwall between 1907 and 1909. The resulting study was published as The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, where he attests that he was able to enter Irish households to collect folklore due to his “American birth” and his “education under the free ideals of a new-world democracy” (xx). Evans-Wentz further implies that informants were more willing to talk to him as they perceived him to be a forward-thinking scholar who embodied the ideals of his native country, the implication being that he was a neutral collector.

On the other hand, Charles M. Skinner was an American writer who is most well-known for being the first to collect the folklore of the United States in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896). Skinner’s Myths and Legends of our New Possessions and Protectorates (1900) sets out to let American citizens in the continental United States learn about the culture of their offshore territories. Yet the inhabitants of these seemingly exotic places, which include the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (then renamed Porto Rico), are presented as objects to be gawked at. The language is unashamedly biased toward the superiority of its writer over the subjects discussed.

 

This paper questions the seemingly opposed nature of the work of Evans-Wentz and Skinner

under a postcolonial lens. It studies their claims of objectivity, the language used to describe the subject they are researching, and examines the repercussions of their work in contemporary Ireland and Puerto Rico.

 

 

Helena Young (University College Dublin). Intersectional Ireland in Brokentalkers.

 

This paper will consider the important social and political activist role that postdramatic theatre plays in contemporary Irish society which is further reinforced by addressing issues of intersectionality.

 

Theatre companies such as Brokentalkers and others including THEATREclub, Pan Pan, The Performance Corporation, THISISPOPBABY and ANU Productions are using innovative dramaturgical strategies to heighten awareness of the marginalised within our midst. Performance as activism can be fuelled by injustice and inequality resulting in drama holding a mirror up to society.  The impact of a particular contemporary, non- linear, non-narrative and abstract style of play as implemented by the Brokentalkers duo, Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan will be examined in the way it addresses intersectionality.  Two plays in particular will be discussed, Silver Stars which was first performed in 2008, just fourteen years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality and The Examination first performed as recently as late 2019. Multiple award winning Silver Stars primarily deals with homosexuality and the issues that arose in a society that had only relatively recently decriminalised it but ageism is also investigated. The Examination, another award winning performance, predominantly concerns prisoner’s habitational rights but also touches on issues of class.  In fact, all the work undertaken by this particular fearless theatre company is pertaining to those who do not feel included within Irish society.  Cannon and Keegan draw on Augusto Boal’s theories of theatre to tell the toughest of stories. It is the techniques that are used, by all disciplines involved, as collaboration is key, that make this type of theatre, personally and societally relevant. While the experience of attending a performance of this type is often an enjoyable one, phenomenologically, it should also provoke much thought. It is in this way that postdramatic strategies may help to break down the master narratives of society such as religion in order to facilitate the development of micronarratives of oppressed groups such as women, LGBT, disabled and racial minorities. The type of audience involvement that is omnipresent in postdramatic theatre is now being more widely encouraged even in more traditional forms. While Boal’s theatre utilised the stage and involvement of what he termed spect-actors to effect change in society, postdramatic theatre questions moral and political inequality by drawing the audience into an experiential learning experience that is not arrested on leaving the performance.

 

Justine Zapin (University College Dublin). ‘In the Wasteland’ or Galway Bay, 3000 A.D.: Space, Place, and Identity in Bernard Shaw’s Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman.

 

Written between 1918-1920, Back to Methuselah, Bernard Shaw’s “Metabiological Pentateuch” is a reflection on Europe after the Great War. In the fourth play, Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Shaw turns his focus to his homeland. The last of his “Irish” plays, Tragedy raises the same concerns over colonialism, nationalism, and identity explored in John Bull’s Other Island and O’Flaherty V.C: A Recruiting Pamphlet but does so from beyond the bounds of the dramaturgical form for which he was known. In Tragedy, Shaw’s turn away from Realism challenges the audience’s conception of Ireland as a place and the future of the Irish State.

 

In this proto-Absurdist theatrical experiment, Shaw looks forward to an Ireland in which age is the only social category of distinction. Shaw imagines an evolved race of “longlivers” who thrive in their remote enclave on Galway Bay. The rugged landscape and temperate climate enrich their quality of life and the quality of their thought. Concerns over nationality, class, and gender are irrelevant in their society, though to the non-evolved “shortlivers” outside of Ireland these markers of identity are still of paramount importance. This future Ireland becomes the place in which the lasting effects of power, privilege, and oppression are evaluated. Drawing on theories of space from Yi-Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, Anne Ubersfeld, and of Shaun Richards and Chris Morash, this paper argues how Shaw’s distinctly Irish scenic space provides useful commentary on his contemporary views on Ireland’s political logjam and of the future of humanity itself.