Past Seminars: 2018-19

 

29 November ’18 – ‘Beckettian (Christmas) Encounters’

For our Beckettian Christmas event, we were delighted to welcome Irish Research Council Scholar and PhD. candidate Daniel Curran, who hails from Maynooth University and works in the fields of Irish literature, Modernism, and philosophy. He previously held the John and Pat Hume Scholarship. Daniel’s thesis is entitled ‘Reporting Death in Joyce and Beckett’ and is being completed under the supervision of Prof. Emer Nolan.
He has presented at numerous international conferences and was a guest editor on the Spring 2018 (4.1) issue of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. Daniel has forthcoming publications on Flann O’Brien in Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour (Cork University Press) and on Thomas MacGreevy in a collection of essays on marginal Irish Modernisms. In addition to his academic work, Daniel is also a writer and editor at the website 90maat.com.

Our second speaker, Matthew, Fogarty, is a tutor at the School of English, Media, and Theatre Studies at Maynooth University. He submitted his PhD thesis in Octover, thanks to funding provided by the Irish Research Council. His dissertation, entitled “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Literary Works of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett,” explores the contrasting ways in which these Irish Modernists engage with Nietzsche’s philosophical vision. His latest article, entitled “‘Most foul, strange and unnatural’: Refractions of Modernity in Conor McPherson’s The Weir,” is available in the 2018 issue of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. And his book chapter, co-authored with colleagues from the Maynooth University Writing Centre, and entitled “‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’: Liminality in Undergraduate Writing,” is forthcoming in (Re)Considering What We Know, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle.

20 November ’18 – ‘Irish Language Modernisms’

Our third autumnal session opened to view the much understudied literary modernisms of Irish language writers in the twentieth century. We’re honoured to welcome two speakers from NUI Galway’s Centre for Irish Studies for the occasion: Eoin Byrne and Síobhra Aiken.

Hardiman and IRC scholar Eoin Byrne spoke about ‘Semantic Succour: The Languages of Irish Modernism’ in the context of the works of Samuel Beckett, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and Brian Ó Nualláin (Flann O’Brien), illuminating the late-modernist cultural production during Ireland’s postcolonial moment. A multilingual approach to this cultural moment, Eoin’s paper posited, not only strengthens the New Modernist Studies’ ‘vertical expansion’; it also helps in better sketching the blurred borders between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics more generally.

Our second speaker was IRC and Hardiman scholar Síobhra Aiken, who recently curated the exhibition Máirtín Ó Direáin: Fathach File/Reluctant Modernist, held in NUI Galway from March-July 2018, and currently on tour. Síobhra’s talk, entitled ‘“Ní file ach filíocht an bhean”: Towards a Gendered Reading of Irish Language Modernist Poetry’, put the gendered streak of Irish language modernist poetry centre stage. This was a most intriguing event, shining a light on many severely neglected dimensions of Irish modernism and its critical apprehension.

23 October ’18 – Lucia Joyce as Artist and Collaborator

For our second session of the semester, we were delighted to welcome NUIG alumna Siobhán Purcell and Genevieve Sartor (Trinity College Dublin).

The seminar sought to shine a light on Lucia Joyce as a collaborator and significantly understudied contributor to much of the compositional work her father James Joyce undertook in the 1930s, and which led to his probably most obscurantist work, Finnegans Wake.

Our two wonderful speakers were NUI Galway alumna Dr Siobhán Purcell and Genevieve Sartor (Trinity College Dublin), who submitted her PhD thesis last month. Siobhán kicked off the session with a talk that stresses the need to recontextualise Lucia’s letterings, or lettrines. Her presentation highlighted overlooked instances of Lucia Joyce’s contributions—instances which are not at all liminal and silent. Rather, once ‘illuminated’ within their textual context, they embody presence and performativity in that they elaborate dynamics of the written text while complicating any straightforward understanding of the most basic textual elements of print culture: semantics, lettering, typeface, and authorship. At once word and image, the lettrines work as additional contextual signifiers that elaborate the polyphonic nature of Finnegans Wake. In re-contextualising Lucia Joyce’s lettrines–focussing on Pomes Penyeach (1932), The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1936) and Storiella As She is Syung (1937)–Siobhán’s paper suggests that reading Lucia’s contributions to these published editions also troubles our collective cultural memorializing of both James and Lucia Joyce, while giving a glimpse of how to recover the obscured and concealed contributions of women and disabled artists to modernism’s legacy.

Genevieve’s talk, on the other hand, brought a third figure into the realm: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. From 1975 to 1976, Lacan delivered a seminar series on James Joyce that claimed that Joyce represents a new future for psychoanalysis. Lacan believed that Joyce could have been psychotic but was able to cure this possible condition by traversing the Oedipal framework through writing Finnegans Wake. Genevieve’s presentation contextualised Lacan’s convictions before suggesting the possibility of revising Lacan’s late work through an original and biographically-driven argument. While Lacan was presenting his seminar that praised Joyce for having overcome psychosis, the author’s allegedly schizophrenic daughter Lucia was living in Northampton as a resident of Saint Andrew’s, the sanitorium where she remained until her death in 1982. Lacan refrains from mentioning Lucia in any detail—nor did he make the effort to visit her. Similarly, there has been no scholarship on Lucia in relation to Lacan’s work on her father in either literary or Lacanian study. Through a selective look at pre-publication content in Finnegans Wake that shows how Joyce textually represented Lucia’s schizophrenia through time, this talk showed that a focus on her can shape new ways to productively advance Lacan’s work on Joyce and his claims on the future of the clinic.

For our first session of the Academic Year 2018/19, we were honoured to welcome two distinguished Yeatsians, Dr Adrian Paterson, lecturer in English at NUI Galway, and Dr Jack Quin, an IRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in the School of English and Department of Art History at Trinity College Dublin.

Adrian’s talk on ‘the sleeps’ of W.B. and George Yeats fleshed out one of the most curious modernist collaborative practices that sprang of the couples’ lifelong interest in what W.H. Auden dismissively calls the ‘mumbo jumbo of magic’. The Yeatses’ joint sleep experiments began in earnest in a railway carriage somewhere in Southern California. This renders their ‘sleeps’ a classic modernist collision of old and new, tradition and technology, science and psychology, which could have happened at no other time. Nonetheless the ‘sleeps’ represent a highly unusual collaboration, for they were, apparently, in communication with the dead: ‘My teachers did not seem to speak out of her sleep but as if from above it, as though it were a tide upon which they floated’. With several handwritings, combined entries, after-the-fact recollections of sleep conversations and visionary dreams recalled, the sleep records are more involved, second or third-hand renderings of vocal communications. The central problem is one of credit: how to credit the validity of these communications, and how to assign adequate credit to the collaborators? Concentrating on the mechanism of the sleeps, Adrian argued, helps us discover how the Yeatses’ collaborations engage with contemporary theories of mind and changing notions of time and perception and technology in a world feeling the intimate presence of the post-war dead, and finds that an interest in the sleeps’ own process contributes to a self-consciousness characteristic of modernism that found its way into poetry – which, like ‘All Souls’ Night’ or Yeats’s poem ‘Fragments’ does, considers how truth might come from ‘out of a medium’s mouth’.

Jack’s talk on ‘Poet-curators: Poetry in the Municipal Gallery (Revisited)’ unwrapped Yeats’s engagement with the visual arts within the context of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. The Gallery, established by Hugh Lane in Harcourt Street and later relocated to the stately Charlemont House, is steeped in history. Over the years its walls were populated by iconic portraits of great Irishmen and women, like Antonio Mancini’s Lady Gregory (1906), John Butler Yeats’s John Millington Synge (1905), and Orpen’s Nathaniel Hone (1905); alongside John Lavery’s various historical and allegorical depictions of Irish history, from St. Patrick’s Purgatory (1930) to a study of The Trial of Roger Casement (1916), and The Blessing of the Colours (1922). W.B. Yeats’s late, great gallery poem meditates on the same painted “images of thirty years” reconfiguring art history as Irish history: “come to this hallowed place / Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; / Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace”. Jack’s paper revisits the context of Dublin’s hallowed gallery from the 1930s to the 1960s, alongside the poetry and art writing of a succeeding generation of Irish and Northern Irish poets. Yeats’s writing on the visual arts confronted successive Irish poets from MacNeice and Brian Coffey, to Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. As Neil Corcoran has noted, these poets variously engaged with Yeats’s legacy through ekphrastic and gallery poems that may be competitive but also to certain degrees tributary, self-reflexive, or tutelary. For John Hewitt, the Northern Irish poet most deeply embedded in the machinations of the art gallery, Yeats’s legacy is negotiated in nuanced terms with submerged allusions to mutually admired artworks. By identifying the artworks in a number of ekphrastic poems and gallery poems, Jack’s paper illustrated some of the more profound dialogues with Yeats’s legacy and the art scene in modern Ireland.

For the final Session of ‘Works in Progress’ taking place in the Summer Semester of 2018, we were delighted to welcome Melinda Szűts, a second-year IRC-funded Postgraduate Scholar at the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance. Melinda spoke about the influence of early modern theatre spaces on the development of Irish stagecraft at the turn of the century, both in the context of the Elizabethan Revival and the Irish Literary Revival. Her paper discusses the changes W.B. Yeats’s new concept of space dramaturgy brought to performance practice and architecture in the Abbey and Peacock stages, and how these changes influenced the culture politics of the Irish national theatre.

For our second Session of the Summer Semester, we were delighted to be joined by Tiana M Fischer, whose talk explored the experience of modernity in the context of modern mysticism. The focus was on the interconnections between the Weltanschauungen of two notorious mystical modernists called WB, their Kabbalistic Thought, and esoteric works.

The Inaugural Session of ‘Works in Progress’ took place on 21 March 2018, featuring two fantastic speakers. Zsuzsi Balázs, our first speaker, took us into the modernist world of ‘Androgynous Spectacle and Fascism’.

Ida as Saint Sebastian

 Zsuzsi is a first-year PhD student and IRC-funded Postgraduate Scholar at the NUI Galway’s O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance. Her talk addressed the role and political significance of androgynous spectacle in 20th-century ultranationalist politics. The discussion included George L. Mosse’s ideas of the cult of respectability and the ideal of manliness and the male body with regard to Italian Fascism; the androgynous sensibilities in W.B. Yeats’s, Luigi Pirandello’s and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s theatre; and the cultural and political relevance of Ida Rubinstein’s performance in D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien.

Our second speaker was Gaby Fletcher, a second-year PhD student of the Discipline of English. Gaby, too, is an IRC -funded Postgraduate Scholar. Her research examines how Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton engage in a critique of idealised notions of women used by American social reform campaigners. Gaby’s talk, entitled ‘Protesting the New Woman: Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree‘, challenged overall dismissive readings of Wharton’s 1907 novel, which stress the text’s being  overburdened with too many contradictory subjects and characters. Such views are a huge underestimation of the book’s success, however. Taking this into account, Gaby argued that contradictions of action and character are actually purposeful: the novel embeds a self-referential focus of fiction within the narrative, to protest contemporary constructions and readings of woman that proliferated around discussions of the New Woman.