Geographies of Comparison: Ireland / Africa (ACLA 2017, Utrecht, July 6-9, 2017) Ireland was, as Robert Young writes, England’s first and always exceptional colony. But it was far from the only one. Its unique colonial status has yielded productive scholarship…
IASIL2017 NTU-Singapore 24-28 July, 2017
Ireland’s Writers in the 21st Century
Keynote Speakers
Professor Derek Attridge ● Professor Margaret Kelleher ● Professor Gerry Smyth
Guest Writers
Marina Carr ● Julian Gough ● Belinda McKeon ● Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Second Call for Papers (Closing: March 15, 2017)
The political, economic, cultural, and artistic histories of Ireland are deeply intertwined with its rich tradition of writing in Irish and English, with generations of writers greatly contributing to broader literary categories like the realist novel, European modernism, postmodernism, colonial, and postcolonial literature. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Edna O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, John Banville, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Anne Enright, and many more, have left indelible marks on the development of literature worldwide while, more recently, Irish musicians and film-makers have greatly influenced some of the major international movements in popular culture.
Cultural and critical analyses of many kinds, in turn, have greatly benefited, and derived distinctive focus, from engagements with Irish creative artists, and the culture(s) that they have come to represent. It is difficult to conceive of contemporary modernist studies without consideration of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Bowen, while all the major critics of postmodernism place the works of Sterne, Beckett (again), and Flann O’Brien as key central figures in their critical frames. Women’s writing in the British Isles owes an immense debt to writers like Iris Murdoch, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, and Marina Carr, while postcolonial studies, as an international discipline in itself, frequently includes consideration of all of the above. Similarly, the history of poetry in English has been greatly enhanced by a vast number of major Irish poets. More recently, Irish writers have been constituent parts of reconfigured historically-orientated modernist studies, transnational studies, cultural studies, theatre studies, and many philosophical and ideological perspectives on transformations and continuities in Irish and European cultural formations. Similarly, digital humanities have intersected with Irish studies in very meaningful ways, as have ecocritical approaches, urban studies, queer studies, and embodiment studies.
IASIL 2017 invites papers that seek to engage with any of the following areas in an effort to offer expression to the ways that Irish writers and culture continue to inform both traditional and new debates in literary and cultural scholarship:
- Considerations or reconsiderations of any Irish writer, text, or bodies of work
- Comparative work between any writers, in English and/or Irish
- Reconsiderations of Irish writing and: modernism; postcolonialism; postmodernism; the realist novel; women’s writing; theatre studies
- Complicated stories: history and Irish writing
- Contemporary critical modes of analysis and Irish studies: digital humanities; narrative theory; aesthetics; queer theory; gender; medical humanities; ecocriticism and/or sustainability studies; interdisciplinary studies and cross disciplinary formations; transnational literatures; embodiment studies; ageing studies; animal studies; the new gothic
- Games and narrative, graphic fiction, literature and the internet
- Regional Ireland and/or urban spaces
- Contemporary writing in Irish and/or contemporary translations of Gaelic writing
- Celtic-Tiger/Post-Celtic Tiger literature, film, music, cultural expressions
- Irish writing and the new diaspora
- Irish writing and the visual arts
- Key developments in literary genres: theatre; poetry; fiction; film; graphic fiction; travel writing; creative non-fiction; autobiography
- Critical Re-assessments: Seamus Heaney, Aidan Higgins, Dermot Healy, Leland Bardwell, Brian Friel
In keeping with IASIL’s general practice, papers are also invited in other areas of Irish literary studies.
Abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers to be delivered in the English or the Irish language should be emailed to IASIL2017@ntu.edu.sg by March 15, 2017
Conference Website: http://www.hss.ntu.edu.sg/programmes/english/IASIL2017/home.html
Fees for postgraduate research students presenting papers have been waived by the conference organisers.
Organising Committee: Neil Murphy, Daniel Jernigan, Richard Barlow, Michelle Wang, Guinevere Barlow (Irish Language), Derek Hand (External), Keith Hopper (External)
The tension between realism and experimentation has marked the development of modern Irish literature, being intrinsic to the work of a number of major Irish writers. Often regarded as a father-figure of all experimental writing, James Joyce was attacked by as different commentators as Lukács and Pound for the scope and radicalness of experiment, particularly in Finnegans Wake. However, Joyce himself considered his work to be firmly set in the realist tradition. At a time when he was yet to publish his first collection of lyrics, W. B. Yeats was encouraged by his father to write realist prose, which may eventually have contributed to his abhorrence of realism in favour of ever more daring experimentation in verse writing. Nonetheless, Yeats’s poetry is packed full of amazingly realist portrayals of the world about him. J. M. Synge may have worked in a realist mode but his implementation of vernacular Aran speech paved the way for the linguistic experimentation of the following generations of Irish (also English-language) playwrights.
2017 SSNCI conference – Irish College, Leuven, Belgium, 29-30 June
