List of Speakers

Note: Due to a large response to the call for papers, the conference has been extended and some panels will run on the morning of Sunday, 21st October 2007.

Backus, Margot (NUI Galway), ‘"The Cracked Lookingglass of a Servant”: Scandal as Cultural Strategy in Ulysses.”
Baines, Jennika (University College Dublin), ‘A Rock and a Hard Place: Sweeny’s Role as Sisyphus and Job in At Swim-Two-Birds’
Baines, Robert (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Seeing through the Mask: Valery Larbaud’s ‘James Joyce’ and the Problem of Irish Modernism’
Borgonovo, John (University College Cork), ‘Dawn, Nation, and Destiny: Irish Cinema and the War of Independence’
Brown, Karen E. (University College Dublin), ‘Thomas MacGreevy and Irish Modernism: Between Word and Image’
Coleman, Steve (NUI Maynooth), ‘Modernism and Vernacular Culture: Maude, Ó Cadhain, Ó Conaire, Ó Riada’
Kathy, D'Arcy (UCC), 'Experiment in Error: Irish Women Poets Engaging with Modernism in the 1930s, 40s and 50s'
Dobbins, Gregory (University of California, Davis), ‘Work-time, Leisure-time, Story-time and Irish Time’
Evans, Eibhlín (University College Dublin), '"A lacuna in the palimpsest": A Reading of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two Birds'
Fifield, Peter (University of York), ‘ “Art has nothing to do with clarity”: Samuel Beckett and the Language of Visual Aesthetics’
Fluet, Lisa (Boston College),‘James Joyce, Scholarship Boys and British Cultural Studies’
Hughes, Eamonn (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘Flann O’Brien, Modernism and Popular Culture’
Keatinge, Benjamin (SEE University, Macedonia), ‘Coffey, Devlin, MacGreevy and the Poetry of Prayer’
Kennedy, Róisín (National Gallery of Ireland), ‘The White Stag Group – Experimentalism or Mere Chaos?’
Keown, Edwina (Trinity College Dublin), 'Shannon Airport, 1950s modernity and a late modernist romance of the West in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1955)'
Kiberd, Declan (University College Dublin), ‘Ulysses, the Bible and Messianic Time’
Kennedy, Seán (St. Mary’s University), ‘Ireland/ Europe… Beckett/ Beckett’
Markey, Anne (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Modernism, Maunsel and the Irish Short Story’
McAteer, Michael (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘German Expressionism and Irish Drama: Yeats, O’Casey and McGuinness’
McCarrick, Jaki (NUI Maynooth), 'The Great Hunger, an apocalypse of Irish modernism and surrealism'
McCarthy, Bernadette (University College Cork), 'Painting Stories, Telling Pictures: W.B.Yeats and Word Image Ideologies'
McDonnell, Jenny (Trinity College Dublin), ‘ “The Brassy Little Shopgirl”: Frank O’Connor and the Legacy of Katherine Mansfield’
Moss, Rhiannon, (Queen Mary, University of London), 'Thomas MacGreevy, Catholicism and Modernism in 1930s Ireland'
Nash, John (Durham University), 'Irish Modernism? The reception of Joyce in Ireland, 1915-1930'
O’Brien, Eugene (MIC Limerick), ‘“He Had Read Her out a Ghost Story”: Hauntological Identifications between James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and Claire Keegan’s ‘The Parting Gift’’
O’Connell, Sandra (Trinity College Dublin), ‘The Full Tide of Surrealism: European Surrealism and Irish Poetry’
O’Connor, Eimear (University College Dublin), 'Modernity and Realism: Sean Keating and The Playboy of the Western World'
O’Dea, Dathalinn (Boston College), ‘Staging the Nation: W.B.Yeats and Theatre as the Third Space’
Ó Donghaile, Deaglán (NUI Maynooth), ‘Liam O’Flaherty and the Irish Revolutionary Bohemia’
Pietrzak, Wit (University of Lodz), ‘Predefining Modernism: W.B.Yeats and Symbolic Ontology’
Pilkington, Lionel (NUI Galway), 'Modernity and Moving Statues: Ireland 1985'
Reynolds, Paige (College of the Holy Cross), ‘Colleen Modernism: Media and Materiality in Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing’
Rowley, Ellen (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Dublin Architecture 1945- 1960: The Case of Catholic Church Design…'
Ryan, Caitríona (Swansea University), ‘The Poetics of Tom MacIntyre’
Sanchez, Shillana (Arizona State University), ‘Of Mimicry and Mockery: Flann O'Brien Relates the Nation'
Shanahan, Jim (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Frank Mathew’s The Wood of the Brambles (1896): A Forgotten Irish Modernist Novel?’
Sisson, Elaine (IADT), ‘Look Behind You!: Experimental Theatre and Design in Ireland 1918-1932’
Slote, Sam (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Garryowen and the Bloody Mangy Mongrel of Irish Modernism’
Tynan, Maeve (MIC Limerick), ‘ “Let us not speak”: Language and the Diminishing Self for Beckett’s Women’
Waters, John (NYC), 'Theorizing Irish Counter-Modernism: Realism, Genre, and Progressive temporality in Irish fiction, 1920-1923'
Whittredge, Julia (University College Cork), ‘Modern, Modernising, Modernism: Revisiting the Poetry of the Irish Literary Revival’
Wilson, James Matthew (East Carolina University), ‘“Ireland’s Eliot?”: Late Modernism, Mysticism and the Marketplace in Denis Devlin’s The Heavenly Foreigner’
Ziel, Stanley Van Der (University College Dublin), '"...in the shape of a story": A Reading of John McGahern's The Leavetaking'

The deadline for submissions has now passed. We are currently reviewing all the proposals received and a list of accepted papers will be posted shortly.

Irish Modernism Conference

Irish Modernism
Trinity College Dublin, 19-20 October 2007

Plenary Speakers: Prof. Jean Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania; Dr Joe Cleary, NUI Maynooth; Dr Alex Davis, University College Cork

This conference invites reconsideration of modernism and its legacy
in Ireland. It is exploratory in nature, its aim being to broaden
current debates about the literature of early twentieth-century Ireland and the culture of the post-independence years.

While the organisers invite papers on the leading figures of Irish
modernism, they particularly welcome a re-examination of these writers’ work in relation to their contemporaries in Ireland. Papers are also invited on lesser-known Irish modernists, on writers who reacted against the cultural impact of modernism and on Irish modernism in various cultural forms (art, music, film, photography, theatre or dance). In the past, modernist studies often assumed the incompatibility of modernism and Ireland, juxtaposing an enlightened internationalism with an insular, conservative and repressive nationalist culture. But this is not an image which does service to either side – while denuding Irish modernists of the culture which informs their work, it also caricatures Ireland’s complex cultural dynamics and posits a utopian image of modernism itself. By addressing modernism in early twentieth-century Ireland, this conference will explore new perspectives on the literature of this period that reflect a growing body of work on the contradictory and contested nature of modernism itself.

Suggested topics include:

- The second generation: Beckett, O’Brien, Bowen, Devlin, and others
- Modernism and the Literary Revival
- Internationalism and cultural nationalism
- The emigrant and the exile
- Modernism and Irish-language literature
- Xenophobia and the anti-jazz campaigns
- The reception of modernism in Ireland
- The Irish Exhibition of Living Art
- Modernism and the Irish theatre
- Irish modernist journals and publishing ventures
- The Irish short story
- Irish cinema
- Censorship and modernism
- Populism and elitism

Papers will be of 20 minutes duration and panel proposals are welcomed. Please submit abstracts of 250 words by 15 June 2007 to Carol Taaffe or Edwina Keown at: ctaaffe@tcd.ie, edwinakeown@gmail.com