Irish Author Research Articles

"Like a Homing Bird to Its Nest": Irish Writers and Mid-Century U.S. Magazines

"Like a Homing Bird to Its Nest":Irish Writers and Mid-Century U.S. Magazines Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In March 1954 the Irish writer, cook, and radio personality Maura Laverty wrote to her U.S. agent Helen Strauss at the William Morris Agency. Explaining that she enjoyed personal connections with the editors of particular U.S. magazines, Laverty requested that she continue to send stories directly to those editors rather than through Strauss. In the letter Laverty uses a particularly suggestive turn-of-phrase: There are a few markets in America on which I have concentrated. Occasionally, I write something which I feel is tailored for them—and, sure enough, when I send it off, it wings straight to their pages like a homing bird to its nest. The editors concerned are my very good friends—Betty Finnin of "Woman's Day," Father Ralph Gorman of "The Sign," Anne Einselen of "the [Ladies' Home] Journal."1 Laverty's framing of a given story as "a homing bird" winging its way to a U.S. magazine nest raises provocative questions about how we conceive of Irish literature published beyond the borders of the nation-state. How are we to theorize work written by home-based Irish writers primarily for U.S. readers? How are we to understand the ways in which Irish writers exploited the commercial possibilities of their work in a U.S. marketplace? The history of mid-twentieth-century Irish literature might look very different indeed if reoriented around a "home" comprised of the pages of U.S. magazines. [End Page 311] This article focuses on Laverty's relationship with Woman's Day, a "store-distributed" monthly magazine sold exclusively at the A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) grocery stores in the United States. Alongside British and American writers such as Mary Norton, Rumer Godden, Shirley Jackson, and Dodie Smith, Laverty was one of the magazine's most prolific contributors of fiction in the mid-twentieth century, publishing nineteen stories and an autobiographical essay in its pages between 1949 and 1958. Other Irish writers who appeared in Woman's Day include Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, and Bryan Mahon.2 I read Laverty's Woman's Day stories in the context of changes in the art of homemaking occurring in the decades after World War II—particularly in relation to domestic purchasing and preparation of food. Social historians note how the rise of labor-saving appliances and convenience foods in the United States was accompanied by doubts that they "could really deliver on their promises of freedom."3 Laverty's stories of Irish village life, many of which link romance with food consumption, thus enabled Woman's Day readers to partake in a fantasy of "old-fashioned" homemaking. Yet as this Irish author skillfully negotiated the tensions that animated the postwar U.S. kitchen, her fiction neither eschewed convenience nor expressed disdain toward readers who took domestic shortcuts. In making the above argument, I draw attention to the truly heterogeneous U.S. venues in which mid-century Irish writers placed their work. The relationships that Frank O'Connor, Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin enjoyed with the New Yorker magazine—along with, to a lesser extent, Brian Friel, Benedict Kiely, and John McGahern—continue to attract scholarly attention.4 Heather Ingman notes that [End Page 312] "the number of Irish writers published with the magazine raises the question of the extent to which the editorial policies of the New Yorker affected the shape of the Irish short story during this period."5 The New Yorker, however, was just the tip of the iceberg, for an exponential growth in Irish writers' contributions to a wide variety of U.S. magazines occurred between 1940 and 1970. From the pulps (Argosy) to the so-called "smart" magazines (American Mercury, New Yorker, Esquire); from the famous weeklies (Collier's, Saturday Evening Post) to the national monthlies (Atlantic, Harper's); from high-end fashion (Vogue, Harper's Bazaar) to women's service magazines (Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping); from special-interest magazines (Holiday, Mademoiselle) to Catholic periodicals (The Sign, Ave Maria, The Critic, St. Jude), Irish writers were publishing...

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Cultural Hybridity, Discordant Relationships, and Critical Perspectives

Human rights and posthuman poetics in contemporary Irish poetry: technology, media, ecology

ABSTRACT This article examines a series of poems by contemporary Irish authors writing in English, and focuses on the role of media technology in considering post-human ethics and human rights issues in these poems. Human rights discourse has faced the challenge of addressing the broadening of the category of ‘human’ through post-human ethics and aesthetics. What is therefore needed is a consideration of how the sphere or concept of human rights can encompass what Rosi Braidotti describes as ‘post-human subjects of knowledge – embedded, embodied and yet flowing in a web of relations with human and non-human others’. This theoretical framework informs the article's discussion of selected poems, how these poems approach human rights conflicts and violations in a distinctively post-human context, and how different manifestations of media technology shape and reflect such discussions. Poetry, technology, and the post-human subject are understood as equally embedded in the material, cultural, and political assemblages within which human rights and post-human ethics also emerge.

Waterscapes and liminality: a stylistic analysis of Colum McCann’s spatialities of rebirth1

This paper focuses on the processes of rebirth the characters experience in extracts from four works (two novels, a novella and a short story) by Irish author Colum McCann. These characters are defined by a strong sense of displacement and betweenness but they go through deep transformations, through physical closeness with waterscapes – spatialities that are closely associated with water –, as well as through the game of mirrors between them that ensues. This article analyses how the latter stem from the connections between waterscapes and phenomena of suspension and liminality. It also aims to study how the writing of these mechanisms echoes them, by identifying the main stylistic characteristics that are specific to the author’s description of these phenomena and forms of spatiality. To this end, it uses analytic tools borrowed from narratology and cognitive stylistics such as the figure/ground opposition and phenomena of visual and linguistic salience.

Several Reflections of Dracula: A Case for (Re)Defining and De-centering (Re)Translation[eh1

Postcolonial approaches have brought new insights into translation studies. To date, translation has centered on Western thought and should be decentralized for better understanding. From this perspective, it can also be argued that retranslation requires a new definition. This new definition has been proposed by Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar and Özlem Berk Albachten (2019) in form of “mutability in retranslation,” which regards translation not in terms of dichotomies like East or West or as strictly involving word-for-word or sense-for-sense conversion to the target language; rather, it perceives translation as a cluster term. Through the concept of mutability of (re)translation, this article aims to analyze different Turkish (re)translations of the gothic classic Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, a well-known Irish author. The novel has been adapted into several films and translated into various languages worldwide. It has also been translated into the Turkish language. However, although there was a Turkish fictional character of a vampire that derived from Stoker’s imagery, a complete Turkish translation of Dracula had not existed until 2003, when Niran Elçi’s version of the classic was released. Until then, only concealed translations, pseudo-translations, adaptations, illustrations, and other forms of translation had existed in Turkish. This analysis questions these translational acts and attempts to re-define (re) translations of this work. My current findings indicate that although several (re)translations of Stoker’s Dracula to Turkish had existed in the past, a proper translation of the text was presented by Niran Elçi in 2003.

Human Rights, Posthuman Ethics, and the Material Aesthetics of Flight in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This article examines a series of poems by Irish authors, and focuses on their engagement with human rights violations and conflicts through the metaphors and imagery of flight and the aerial view. It argues that these poems address the need for a shift away from the perspective of a defined, distinct human subject, and towards a posthumanist framework which emphasizes relational, situated, and embodied ethics and aesthetics in an interconnected world. Since the introduction of modern aviation, Irish poets have frequently employed the imagery of flying to consider poetry's role in relation to conflict and crisis. Here, the adoption of visual and material metaphors of flight and aerial travel in human rights contexts is discussed, particularly in poems by Seamus Heaney, Peter Sirr and Justin Quinn. Through a reimagined poetics of flight, these poets question established dichotomies between proximity and distance, and material embodiment and disembodied abstraction.

What is the word

What than is music? – Music is language.’ Composer Anton Webern was quite outspoken in 1932 : 'A human being wants to express thoughts in this language, but not a thought that can be transferred into an idea, but only into another musical thought.’ Almost sixty years later composer Wolfgang Rihm isn’t sure whether music is a language but states in his speech 'Was ‘sagt’ Musik/ What does music ‘say’?:’ if music is saying something, than the first what is addressed to us is: speak! Music wants to make us speak. That’s what music says!’ That raises the question whether music can be referential or carry meaning just as language can. A question that has made many speak and filled libraries of studies. Cognitive psychologist Aniruddh D. Patel writes in 2008: ‘A natural place to turn for help in defining musical meaning is the work of music theorists and philosophers of aesthetics’. After summing up a dozen publications on the topic since Webern made his statement, Patel reports: ‘No consensus has emerged from these writings for a definition of musical meaning.’ There is a lot of evidence in linguistics that qualities attributed to musicality contribute to language being the carrier of meaning. So what about the other way around? Can language help to understand what is experienced as meaningful in music? Language itself is an indicator that qualities inherent to language are often given to music. In German the word Interpret is used for instrumentalists performing music. The Dutch language has the word zeggingskracht that attributes power to music. 'Zegging-’ stems from the verb zeggen (to say), ‘kracht’ means power. Zeggingskracht was one of the three criteria to assess the work of composers by the Fund for the Creation of Music (Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst ) in The Netherlands. When the power to speak is inhibited and people stammer or lose their speech suffering from aphasia, it has been said that “only music, can do the calling.” And it’s almost a cliché to say that music can express what can’t be given words. Music is not a language but often sounds like one. What do musicians that are ‘speaking’ that music have to say about meaning in music, singing, performing or creating what composer Louis Andriessen describes as ‘talkative’ music? Or the stammering that composer György Kurtág calls his mother language? How do musicians give words to those moments when their music does the talking? What is the word is the last text that Samuel Beckett completed at the end of his life when through a stroke he periodically suffered from the disability to finds words, commonly diagnosed as aphasia. The Irish author inspired many to explore the zeggingskracht of music. Precise as he was, Beckett left out a question mark in the title, both in the original French version of Comment dire and in his English translation. That the title of Samuel Beckett’s last text is not posing a question but may provide us with an answer, is the hypothesis of this research.

Invention sharing is the mother of developmental biology.

Invention sharing is the mother of developmental biology.

Irish-Australian Literature: Ghosts, Genealogy, Tradition

Opening with Christos Tsiolkas’s critique of multiculturalism, this essay considers the theory and practice of Irish-Australian literature in relation to questions of ethnicity and transnationalism. By comparing Irish-Australian to Irish-American literature and discussing ways in which theology becomes transposed into anthropology, it engages with problems of how to define such hybrid traditions and how they intersect (or conflict) with national narratives within a larger discursive domain. Australian authors such as Gerald Murnane, Thomas Keneally and Rosa Praed are compared to Irish authors based in London such as Oscar Wilde, with the essay arguing that Irish-Australian literature should be understood as an inherently relational rather than identitarian term. It also considers how Irish-Australian literature impacted upon racial politics across a global axis in the nineteenth century through John Boyle O’Reilly’s friendship with Frederick Douglass.

Register in Samuel Beckett’s Writings in English and French:

Abstract Samuel Beckett, the Irish author and playwright was born in 1906 in County Dublin, Ireland and died in 1989, in Paris, France. From 1929 to 1989, Beckett wrote letters through which his life is depicted. His letters were published in the form of four volumes entitled as follows: volume I: 1929-1940 (published in 2009), volume II: 1941-1956 (published in 2011), volume III: 1957-1965 (published in 2014), and lastly, volume IV: 1966-1989 (published in 2016). These letters were later translated in French by the publishing house of Gallimard between 2014 and 2018. Within a morpho-semantic framework of analysis, one may wonder to what extent there exists stylistic affinities between his letters and his famous tragicomedy entitled Waiting for Godot (published in 1952). In other terms, are there constant, and/or shared stylistic units? To what extent has the register been changed from his letters to his play? How may the vocabulary, punctuation, and grammar differ from the English version of Waiting for Godot to the French version? Do these stylistic changes from English to French affect the notions of 20th-century man in the society in France? By drawing on certain theories of theoreticians in linguistics and translation studies such as Brian T. Fitch, Anthony Uhlmann, and Saeid Rahipour, this research seeks to present a linguistic and translation analysis of Beckett’s register in his four volumes of letters and English, and French versions of his play Waiting for Godot. Hence, this study aims to investigate the extent to which the Irish writer’s register has been differentiated in the corpus under study by the passage of time to suit the stylistic norms of 20th century in France and England.

Back to Nature and Ireland: Morgan Llywelyn’s The Elementals

Abstract Written by the Irish author Morgan Llywelyn in 1993, The Elementals focuses on the four powerful elements of nature that are essential to life: namely Water, Fire, Earth and Air. Consisting of four parts divided in accordance to these elements, the novel connects four stories which raise universal ecological awareness and present the danger of a future collapse in nature. Depicting the adventures of Irish-origin characters and the striking realization of their deep connection to nature at the end of each part, the novel awakens the reader to their inner relation to other humans, animals, plants, rocks and all parts of nature. Of Irish origins herself, through her novel Llywelyn displays the agency of nonhuman bodies in relation to human bodies, or in other words, Irish-origin human bodies, and the innate connection of all humans to the natural elements. Hence, this study aims to analyse The Elementals from the perspective of the new materialism theory underlining the interaction of all beings in the universe through the constant recalling of Ireland as a significant part of the natural culture.

‘The Hungary of the West’

During the 19th century, several Irish authors looked for those smples from Europe, which might be inwoked during the targeted reconsideration of the Irish-British relationship. The Irish aim was to establish a dualist monarchy with Great Britain, or at least to achieve a broader autonomy within the Empire. For this purpose, Hungary was also often seen as a proper example, how a smaller nation could strenghten its position within a larger country. The Irish constitutional literature, and also the newspapers discussed the compromise between Austria and Hungary in 1867, and called for a similar agreement between Ireland and England to provide broader self-determination for Ireland. The study would outline the main arguments of these contemporary contributions, and would assess, how the real Hungarian development, and a mainly idealized image from Hungary influenced the Irish public discourse during that period. Special highlight would be given to a book published by Arthur Griffith, an important politician of that period, “The Resurrection of Hungary” which provided a detailed narrative from the Hungarian development, and used this sample as an argument in the particular Irish political context. Griffith was also one of the key figures of the negotiations in 1921, which lead finally to the agreement between Ireland and England, therefore, this Hungarian orientation had also clear practical impact. My purpose is to demonstrate this influence on the basis of the original, contemporary Irish sources.

Kevin BarryThat Old Country Music: Stories

BOOKS IN REVIEW semi-autobiographical novel. When asked in London by a young Palestinian student for advice about funding his education, Said mailed him a £1,500 check. His children teased him for having elitist taste in music. Unable to cope when his son, Wadie, was hospitalized with osteomyelitis, he fled to a concert. He saw a therapist his entire adult life. These are the delicious, humanizing details that sustain a compelling biography in part because they are not available in the subject’s own oeuvre. Brennan supplies these anecdotes in an altogether enthralling biography, but, much like reading Said, his focus on complex literary history can be exhausting. Nevertheless, Places of Mind is a masterful portrait that encourages readers to continue grappling with the complicated ideas to which Said devoted his life. Peter Krause New York Kevin Barry That Old Country Music: Stories New York. Doubleday. 2020. 208 pages. THOUGH NO GHOSTS move through its pages, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music is a catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate these eleven stories are bedeviled by phantoms: memories and possibilities, places they can’t forget, and people they really should. The resultant confrontations are chronicled by the Irish author with equal parts earthy relatability and offhand poeticism. Barry introduces his collection with a quote from filmmaker Jane Campion on “the romantic impulse,” characterized as both “heroic” and “foolhardy.” Several of Barry’s stories vividly evoke this tightrope walk. “The Coast of Leitrim” finds its underachieving-aesthete protagonist easing into an affair with a like-minded Polish émigré, then almost wrecking things through nothing more than petty insecurity . In “Saint Catherine of the Fields,” a middle-aged music scholar confronts his romantic failings while transcribing a folk ballad about a woman who, with her husband ’s support, enraptures and destroys an unsuspecting herdsman for “no more than a sport.” And in the titular tale, a young mother-to-be contemplates her destiny while waiting for her baby’s father, an exparamour of her mother’s, to return with the spoils of a petrol-station robbery. A raw form of self-discovery marks “Deer Season,” in which a country girl with a taste for Bolaño novels harnesses “the new soft rhythm of her power” to seduce a forestry worker into taking her virginity, running him out of town in the process. Two other stories offer alternate takes on notions of absorbing identity through others . In “Old Stock,” a writer inherits a country cottage from his satyrish uncle (“Cause of death: the west of Ireland”), then gets more than he bargained for when the house’s aphrodisiac properties begin to turn him into the old libertine reincarnate . Another elder bequeaths his self to the more willing protagonist of “Roma Kid,” who wanders away from her rootless family, is rescued from injury by a trailerdwelling pensioner, and slowly assimilates his home, his books, and his very way of being. Barry was once something of a nomad himself, boasting seventeen addresses by his midthirties, and an ambivalence about the itinerant lifestyle shades the narrator of “Extremadura (Until Night Falls),” a cynical wanderer washed up in western Spain, and the rich-pig mother and son of “Toronto and the State of Grace,” who crash-land in the narrator’s pub to reminisce about their rancorous ramblings as they drink themselves to metaphorical and (in one case) literal death. Even legends are not immune to the traveler’s travails in “Roethke in the Bughouse,” a fictionalized chronicle of the American poet’s unexpected institutionalization during an early 1960s pilgrimage to the coastal isle of Inishbofin. Yet no matter where we roam, our travels terminate the same way, a fact Barry examines in a pair of striking tales that grapple with the inevitability of death. The shaggy-dog-scented “Who’s-Dead McCarthy ” chronicles a man whose daily bread is the incessant sharing of the details of recent passings, simply because he finds the very notion of death “impressive . . . no one has the answer to it.” And a troubled small-town police sergeant aims to answer that yawning question in “Ox Mountain Death Song,” as he stalks the terminally ill scion of a clan...

Roman Poets in Modern Guise: The Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I by Theodore Ziolkowski

MLR, .,   engage with terms in the original language, revealing their multiple or shiing meanings). Overall, however, the collection demonstrates the importance of poetry to modern continental thinkers and offers a valuable study of their responses. U  B E W Roman Poets in Modern Guise: e Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I. By T Z. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. It is sad to think that eodore Ziolkowski, a faithful contributor to this journal, will never see this review. His death in December  means that, as this publication makes clear, we have lost someone who remained an active and stimulating author to the end. Potential readers of this wide-ranging study should not be misled by the title of the series in which it has been published, which suggests a specifically Germanic focus. As Ziolkowski points out, it concentrates at least as much on his other area of specialization, the anglophone literature of the United States and of the United Kingdom and Ireland, with a particular focus, where appropriate, on contrasts between the two. In addition, figures such as Gide, Valéry, Calvino, Kristeva, and others outside those two linguistic areas make appearances where appropriate. Although both wide-ranging and extremely erudite, the study does not seek to be exhaustive, but instead looks at a selection of key Roman authors in chronological order, relating them to the period in which they were writing. Hence Part : ‘Augustan Echoes’ is devoted to Virgil, the Eclogues rather than the Aeneid, and Horace, Part : ‘Republican Counterpoints’ to Lucretius, Catullus, and Propertius, and Part : ‘Imperial Dissonances’ to Ovid, Seneca, and Juvenal. e influences explored are literary, be it poetry, novels, plays, or essays, and the nature of the in- fluences ranges from quotation, adaptation, and translation to the use of biography as a plot device. A key feature of the study, and perhaps its most interesting aspect, is the way in which Ziolkowski relates the response to the various authors at different periods to political and cultural developments and changes which influence the interest in specific authors and works, and also the national differences, which mean that these differ from country to country. Although there is no shortage of examples of British and Irish authors or, as we have seen, those from other European countries being influenced by these classical authors, the rise of National Socialism and its aermath in Germany and the presidential nature of US politics seem to have made authors from these countries particularly ready to identify with the Roman model. Some authors have functioned as repositories of quotations either to be embraced with pleasure or to be disagreed with (Wilfred Owen, as Ziolkowski shows, was not the only writer to take issue with Horace’s ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’), others, such as Catullus, provide material for speculative biographical fiction, although he also, from the s on, provides an  Reviews excuse for otherwise respectable translators to talk dirty. A particularly interesting pattern emerges in the case of Ovid, whose popularity not only alternates with that of Virgil, but in different periods homes in either on the works dealing with exile or on those dealing with love and metamorphosis. ere will be few, if any, readers of this study who are familiar with all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors evoked here, and so a degree of summary is oen required, something that is more successful in the case of the poetic works than the more narrative texts, which require lengthier exposition, but the ground covered remains impressive. is is a rewarding study which inspires regret for the passing of the age of the classical education. S U D C e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory. Ed. by J R. D L. London: Bloomsbury. . xiii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory is the latest in a long line of texts aiming to introduce students to the body of theoretical work that underpins contemporary literary and cultural studies. is has always been a difficult task, drawing as it does on so...

The Deepest Breath by Meg Grehan

Reviewed by: The Deepest Breath by Meg Grehan Kiri Palm Grehan, Meg The Deepest Breath. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021 [192p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780358354758 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780358355458 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4–6 Eleven-year-old Stevie doesn’t understand why her classmate Chloe’s smile sets butterflies dancing in Stevie’s tummy. She also keeps track of Chloe’s weekly nail polish colors, admires her magic tricks, and notices her eyes when she’s never thought about anyone’s eyes before. When it begins to dawn on Stevie that she has her first crush, she worries that there’s something wrong with her. Irish author Grehan offers an encouragingly smooth coming-out story; though Stevie is uncertain of how others will feel about her revelation, her mother, friends, and even other adults in her community support and encourage her on her journey of self-discovery. First-person free verse opens readers to Stevie’s strategy of researching her feelings the way she researches the ocean and other things that frighten her. While other aspects of Stevie’s life, such as her distant father, are alluded to, Grehan keeps the plot focused on Stevie’s first crush and eventual acceptance of her attraction to girls. Filling a needed niche for younger queer and questioning kids, this is a gentle, hopeful read with a kid-friendly romance and a protagonist whom readers will want to befriend. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ВЛАДИВОСТОК КАК ПЕРЕХОДНЫЙ ЛОКУС В АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОЙ ПРОЗЕ ХХ ВЕКА

The paper discusses Vladivostok – “an eccentric city on the edge of cultural space”, in Yuri Lotman’s terms – as a locus of intercultural transfers (both in direct and indirect sense) in Somerset Maugham’s and Maurice Kennedy’s short stories as well as in William Gerhardie “novel on Russian themes” Futility. For Vladivostok (as for St. Petersburg whose natives founded the Pacific fort and became its first residents), railway stations and bridges are the key “topographic indices”, in Vladimir Toporov’s terms. For the transfer aspect various leisure institutions (restaurants, theatres, clubs) are also important as they mark existence outside home. Besides these cultural facilities, the locus of sea is important as it both divides and connects distant land locations. The paper argues that after Gerhardie’s novel Vladivostok entered English literary consciousness as a distant, practically unreachable topos of unfulfilled dreams. At least, this is the city’s function in the Irish author Maurice Kennedy’s short story titled “Vladivostok”. The expanding circle of city texts in cultural studies enables to discover new pages in literature. The “eccentric” marine cities such as St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, or New York have a special potential for such studies, since the sea routes initially determined their multicultural identity and a unique location sense for which the transfer possibility is just one of the many facets.

«АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ГОРКИ» РОРИ ГЛИСОНА НА РУССКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

The proposed material presents a translation of the short story “Space Mountain” by the contemporary Irish author Rory Gleeson. The works of the young writer have already been noted by academics and theater critics, arouse interest among a wide readership in the UK, but have not yet been translated into Russian. The translation of the story was made by the winner of the international competition “ Art & Craft of Translation”, which was held in 2020. The text is accompanied by a short commentary.

“Exile from Ireland Left Him a Stranger Everywhere“: Representation of Dublin in Selected Louis Macneice’s Poetry and Some of the Stories from James Joyce’sDubliners”

AbstractThis paper discusses the representation of Dublin in the selected poetry of Louis MacNeice and some of the stories from James Joyce’s collectionDubliners. A close investigation of the city as a representative of urban space is interlinked with an examination of its role from the perspective of psychogeography. Both techniques are applied to show why and how two Irish authors portray the multi-dimensional decay of life in the city. In order to paint a whole picture of the relation between ‘space’ and ‘human’, I will also review the biographies of MacNeice and Joyce. For MacNeice, who was tormented by the experiences of domestic Belfast, going to the South was a promising escape. Yet, the change of urban setting did not bring him the expected result. MacNeice quickly became aware of the dirty, paralysed face of Dublin. Similarly, the childhood and day-to-day reality of the lower-middle-class profoundly shaped Joyce’s perspective of Dublin and, eventually, prompted him to go into deliberate exile in Europe. In his writings, however, Dublin constitutes the focal point of the structure, becoming an active participant in the events. Therefore, Dublin for MacNeice and Joyce is a place characterized by blandness, powerlessness in the face of foreign influences, and suffering caused by inertia.

Beckett’s Purgatory through Dante, Joyce and the Absurd

This article aims to develop a brief explanation on Beckett’s theatre, how this famous Irish author had read Dante’s Divina Commedia and how deeply this literature had influenced in some aspects (especially aesthetical and narrative) the compositions written by Beckett, as well as to identify some correlations between the literary trajectory of Beckett and the purgatorial experience developed by Dante. In both authors there is a way through which their characters face the universal forces and the possibility to overcome their sins, purify their souls and achieve another state of narrative/personal living. It is not possible to track this path without facing Joyce as a middle term between the Florentine author and the Dubliner one, not as a kind of ascending level, but as a bridge that connects them particularly through the Joyce-Beckett partnership in Ulysses and how Beckett was introduced to the Commedia , probably in 1923-24.

Synecdoche's Obloquy: Beckett and the Performance of Indecency

In Beckett's Ireland, the practice of censorship was bound up with the workings of literary genre. The fact that printed matter was subject to censorship, while theatre was not, meant that the censor played a role in maintaining the distinction between dramatic and nondramatic writing. Many Irish authors responded to these conditions by remediating censored narratives as theatre. Beckett adopted an alternative strategy, rejecting the legal premises of Irish censorship and crafting his literary style around a critique of the censor's reading practices. Beckett's responses to the Irish censor track his turn from the novel to the drama. Across genres, Beckett's writing in English was shaped by the climate of post-publication censorship in Ireland, the effects of which are legible even in works that were never banned. Beckett's rejoinder to the censor was articulated using terms set out by the Irish Free State's Committee on Evil Literature, which held that censors could prohibit a text based on one ‘indecent’ passage, rather than evaluating that excerpt in the context of the work as a whole. For Beckett, the literary trope of synecdoche—that is, the rhetorical substitution of a part for the whole—became associated with the censor's mode of reading. Beckett harnesses the trope of synecdoche to impugn Irish censorship practices, a pattern evident from the direct address to the censor in Murphy to the dramaturgical evocation of self-censorship in Not I. The use of synecdoche illuminates Beckett's reckoning with his cultural inheritance as an Irish writer and indexes his shift towards a cosmopolitan literary identity.