Irish Modernism Research Articles

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism ed. by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (review)

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism ed. by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (review)

'A Joycean Smutmonger': Echoes of Joyce in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Rural Modernism

Since its publication, critics of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language masterpiece Cré na Cille (1949; Graveyard Clay) have consistently namechecked James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), usually for the sole purpose of conveying its perceived difficulty and/or vulgarity. Indeed, Cré na Cille was first refused publication because, in Ó Cadhain’s words, it was too long and too ‘Joycean’. Ó Cadhain himself evidently saw his work as existing in dialogue with his renowned progenitor and during a late lecture revelled in retelling an overheard conversation in which he was described as nothing more than a ‘Joycean smutmonger’. This article goes beyond such surface-level comparisons to unpick how Ó Cadhain proffers a radical portrayal of rural Irish modernity to compare with Joyce’s predominantly urban equivalent. It argues that Ó Cadhain’s characters, like those found in Joyce’s oeuvre, are consistently forced to navigate the forces of tradition and modernity, which existed at the heart of rural Irish society in the mid-twentieth century. This essay will first compare how Ó Cadhain and Joyce treat the predicaments of a young woman preparing for emigration in their respective short stories ‘An Bhliain 1912’ and ‘Eveline’, before moving on to treat Ó Cadhain’s experiments in form and language in Cré na Cille. In particular, it will examine such experimentation in the context of his lasting obsession with Finnegans Wake (1939), as evidenced by his stated belief that he ‘could write a work like Finnegans Wake’. Informed by recent developments in ‘alternative modernities’, this essay attempts to offer a nascent definition of what might be signified by ‘rural modernism’ in an Irish context.

The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation by John Greaney (review)

The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation by John Greaney (review)

Subjects of tradition: cultural construction and Irish comprador capitalism

ABSTRACT On the weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Irish Consulate in Chicago memorialised a different occasion: the 86th anniversary of the death of Francis O’Neill (1848–1936), a Cork-born collector of Irish music in the United States. This paper posits that the sociopolitical construction “Irish traditional culture” constitutes an exercise of power over land and bodies, shaping and sustaining the structures of the island’s political economy as part of a racial/colonial/imperial project. My argument centres James Byrne (1868–1931), an itinerant piper “discovered” in Kilkenny in 1903. O’Neill’s account of Byrne’s life demonstrates the development of an ideological narrative of tradition as the foundation of Irish modernity. To deterritorialise land-based practices and construct a White Irish citizen subject to global capital, colonial technologies of governance mobilise resources from “authentic” points of origin, inventing their administrators as the heroic saviours of vanishing culture. James Byrne, in contrast, is situated as a possession containing value to be extracted and as a contaminated body refusing to become a compliant capitalist subject harnessed to empire. By interrogating this narrative, I hope to foster nuanced discussion around the enduring structural interdependence of “Irishness” with transnational political economy.

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (2023) by Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston’s Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health combines archival research with incisive textual analysis to examine how topics such as sex, fertility, contraception, hygiene, and eugenics were circulated in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Reading medical case studies and newspaper articles alongside literary works by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O’Brien, and Brian O’Nolan, Houston’s book is a remarkable history of sexual politics and sexual rhetoric in Irish public life.

The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation by John Greaney (London: Bloomsbury 2022)

John Greaney's The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation explores a point of tension in Irish Studies between modernist aesthetics and postcolonial historiography. Challenging the theoretical paradigms prevalent in contemporary Irish Studies, the book invites us to interrogate the meta-historical and political narratives that inform our reading of literary works by Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and Kate O’Brien.

Review of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation, by John Greaney

Review of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation, by John Greaney (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 248 pp., ISBN: 978135012528, £91.99 (hardback)

Greaney, John. The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation

Influenced by new modernist studies, John Greaney diligently interrogates the simultaneous proximity and distance that Irish modernism has to a national narrative of social and political history, particularly as enabled through form, aesthetics and questions of language and translation. The Distance of Irish Modernism adopts what Greaney calls a ‘flexible formalism’ (p. 26) in order to emphasize the importance of aesthetic features when approaching Irish modernism’s relationship to Irish history. In Chapter 1, Greaney complicates historicist readings of Beckett’s work, specifically Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnameable (1953). He convincingly illustrates the ways in which Beckett deflects ‘the capacities of even basic representation’ (p. 58), as apparent in his engagement with the Holocaust and Irish colonial history, and thereby enables his works to ‘operate at a remove from history to negotiate its trauma and ineffability’ (p. 58). Chapter 2 interrogates the questions of authorship and voice raised by the various pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, as well as the subsequent destabilizing forces of fragmentation and trivia located within texts such as At-Swim-Three-Birds (1939). Greaney argues that O’Nolan/O’Brien/na gCopaleen’s texts actively refute being conflated with their cultural and historical contexts. Chapter 3 perhaps best captures the spirit of Greaney’s endeavours. His metacommentary on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) highlights that the variability in academic definitions and readings of Bowen’s novels acts to destabilize the text’s relationship with Irish history. In his textual analysis, Greaney argues that Bowen’s representation of Ireland during the War of Independence through the perspective of female Anglo-Irish characters, whose worlds are limited by their class and gender, serves to put distance between the novel and the wider revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Greaney argues that Kate O’Brien’s application of omniscience is a formal modernist device which functions to distance the narratives of Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Land of Spices (1941) from her contemporary social history. Greaney clearly demonstrates how in O’Brien’s work, the setting of postcolonial Ireland is rendered ‘spectral’ (p. 139) by her omniscient narrator, who thus serves to detach O’Brien’s texts from their historical contexts. In his final chapter, Greaney considers the work of John McGahern, a writer usually associated with naturalism and social realism (p. 141), and tests the presumed distinctions between these attributes and modernism. Focusing on a wide range of McGahern’s texts, Greaney argues that McGahern’s critique of mid-century Ireland is informed by a modernist fragmentation of various narrative operations that render reality a ‘hermeneutic enigma’ (p. 165).

John Greaney, The Distance of Irish Modernism. Memory, Narrative, Representation (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic 2022)

John Greaney, The Distance of Irish Modernism. Memory, Narrative, Representation (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic 2022)

Review of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019), edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism builds on the interdisciplinary turn of the new modernist studies to present coordinates and episodes through which we can perceive the interfaces between Irish modernism and scientific and technological discourses. By these lights, the chapters of this volume compellingly recast Irish modernism as a literary period bracketed by the invention of dynamite and a late modernist investment in astronomical ideas of spacetime. In doing so, Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism tackles some of the definitional cornerstones of Irish modernist discourse to offer new possibilities of narration and organisation for the field.

Review of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021), edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak.

Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities is a thought-provoking and field-expanding intervention in Irish modernist studies and one which will prove hugely profitable to students and scholars alike. The collection’s inclusion of a variety of theoretical conceptions of the body and other media like comics offers perspectives that expand the field of Irish modernism.

Fourwalkers, taildanglers, headhangers: labouring animals in Ulysses

ABSTRACT This article takes as its broad premise two related questions: how does Ulysses register the animal labour from which modernity was produced? And, in turn, how do Joyce’s textual innovations—his labouring of language—respond to the human-animal relationships that existed in early-twentieth-century Ireland? Although critics are increasingly attuned to the way in which Ulysses is a novel that teems with all sorts of animal life, less attention has been paid to the working animals whose presence would have been part of Joyce’s everyday life; animals who are present on the pages of Ulysses in the form of draught horses and dairy cows, among others. Focusing predominantly on the figure of the horse, the species which played a central role in the production of the modern city and is perhaps the most frequently represented animal in Ulysses other than the human, this article will examine Joyce’s alertness to the multispecies history of Irish modernity. Moreover, by looking at the formal innovations through which Joyce presents his equine figures—through, for instance, an instability of focalisation and an attention to material conditions—I will argue that Ulysses presents the subjectivity of both humans and nonhumans as produced through moments of affective entanglement. Highlighting moments of trans-species empathy that we find registered in the text’s labouring of language, such as Bloom’s encounter with the sweeper horse in ‘Eumaeus’ from which I take my title, this article will outline how working animals are integral to Joyce’s task of presenting the everyday fabric of modernity, and that Ulysses demonstrates the ethical possibilities and, just as importantly, limitations that come with acknowledging such a fact.

‘A Striking Air of Modernity Tempered with Tradition’: Vernacular Modernism and the Design of the Public House in Cork and Dublin, 1934–1969

Abstract In design history discourse, modernity and tradition can be seen as intimately related rather than dichotomous. For example, Michelangelo Sabatino has noted the complex relationship between them in Italian twentieth-century architecture. What was the relationship between modernity and tradition in post-Independence Ireland? One way of investigating this is to consider the design of a quintessentially everyday space: the pub. From the 1930s, many pubs in Cork and Dublin were re-designed through a series of negotiated responses to modernisation. By 1960, this was complicated by the construction of what we would recognize as interiors designed to appeal to an imagined tourist vision of the pub in Ireland. This article argues that these changes were design responses to three interlinked historical forces: modernization, the retention or invention of vernacular design, and the influence of international trade and tourism. This considerably complicates our understanding of Irish modernism and illustrates that, for the public house in Ireland at least, British design was a dominant influence.

The Forms of Irish Modernism

Reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman through Roberto Schwarz's notion of misplaced ideas, this essay demonstrates how these key works of Irish modernism formally mediate the experience of incongruity generated by Ireland's semiperipheral status. This experience is most visible when the characters grapple with the various discourses that do and do not describe their everyday realities. Thematizing questions of scale—and internalizing the dialectic of tradition and modernity out of which they emerge—the forms of Irish modernism reflect on the world economic system that conditions them.

"TRUTH IS AN ODD NUMBER": MODERNISM AND THE EARLY POSTMODERNISM OF FLANN O BRIEN S AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS

This paper explores Flann O’Brien’s novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) in a unique position located right between modernism and postmodernism. Influenced by Irish Modernism as well as Irish Nationalism, the novel carries some significant elements from Irish mythology into the present day and creates a superimposition of the historical and the modern. Moreover, its postmodern take on creative processes and the autonomy of characters within itself reveals the novel’s highly metafictional and self-reflexive in nature, which at first seems to be in conflict with its modernist roots. In addition, the distinctive postmodernist essence of At Swim-Two-Birds can be considered to be the precursor to John Fowles’ Mantissa. Moreover, the clash of modernist and postmodernist elements in the novel emphasizes the difference between the two movements as O’Brien uses postmodernist techniques to challenge the modernist ones he, himself, uses frequently. In this regard, he demystifies concepts such as myth, literary creation and being a young artist through its humorous yet critical take on the unnamed narrator.

Redefining twentieth century ideals of Irish womanhood: Dorothy Tyrconnell Forrest, Erina Brady, and early Irish modern dance

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of two women choreographers working with modernist dance forms in Ireland during the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of reviews, photos, and archival film, I demonstrate how these women navigated the moral panic surrounding modernist dance forms in early-to-mid twentieth century Ireland. I argue that the obstacles these women negotiated were directly related to societal norms and legislation centered on kinesthetic control of women’s bodies and sexuality. These norms resulted in associations of modern styles of dancing with improper sexuality – meaning any sexuality outside the confines of heteronormative married relationships – and suspicion of any dancing that was seen to undermine the ideals of Irish womanhood as a uniquely chaste identity.

The Concept of Nature in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Nature is one of the most important themes that English poetry comprises. Most of the Irish modern poets tackle the concept of nature in their works. They depict the image of nature in many different ways. The purpose of this study is to analyse the theme of nature in selected poems by Seamus Heaney.        Heaney is widely recognised as one of the major poets of the twentieth century.  He draws his tremendous joys and vitality from the Irish landscape, which enables him to explore himself and the mysteries of nature through poetry. His poems were also characterized by the titled "Death of a Naturalist", "Blackberry picking", "Churning Day" with colours, smells, tastes and experiences. In "Death of a Naturalist" Heaney distinctly explains everything the frogspawn, with a child's wide-eyed wonder and natural magic. In "Blackberry picking", "Churning Day"  His attention to detail is impressive, minutely observing the people and their places of work, which he explains richly. These poems bear various images of nature. Heaney's poems contain a wealth of description of immense evocative force, implying the poet's intimate relationship with nature and a desire to find solutions to contemporary problems through the lens of nature.  Profoundly and conveniently, Heaney connects art, nature, politics, religion, and memory. He emphasizes in his writings the work of man: ploughing, planting, butter churning, blackberry picking and potato picking. In his poetry, he embodies nature, childhood memories, places, and the sense of community in his family.      Finally, nature is one of the most significant concepts that Heaney deals with in his poetry. The natural environment and rural life on the Mossbawn family farm in County Derry are discussed in this research.

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting

The Case for Irish Modernism:Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting Karl O'Hanlon (bio) In September 1935, the League of Nations Assembly was convened to discuss the Abyssinia crisis, with Italy's belligerence making war seem increasingly likely. On September 3, the Irish delegation to the League departed from Dun Laoghaire en route to Geneva, the city where, as Susan Pedersen writes, "internationalism was enacted, institutionalised, and performed," with "a genuinely transnational officialdom" functioning as "its beating heart."1 The delegation was headed by Éamon de Valera, President of the Executive Council and Minister for the Department for External Affairs. The delegation had Cabinet backing for de Valera's support for a League-mediated solution.2 The secretary to the delegation was the poet and diplomatic cadet, Denis Devlin (fig. 1). Devlin was among the "youngest generation" of Irish poets, modernists such as Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, in whom a year earlier Samuel Beckett located "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland" in his August 1934 essay in The Bookman "Recent Irish Poetry," a blistering attack on the "antiquarians" in the line of the Irish Revival.3 On October 4, two days after Italy invaded Ethiopia, de Valera addressed the nation a day later than scheduled on Radio Athlone (known as 2RN prior to 1933), in which he conceded that all hopes for a League-sponsored resolution to the crisis were now gone. Several hours earlier on the same station, Devlin, de Valera's most junior diplomat in the delegation, delivered a talk on Irish poetry, "A Reply to F. R. Higgins," in which he waded into debates surrounding modernism and revivalism in response to an earlier series of radio talks by Higgins, an associate of [End Page 157] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Denis Devlin (center) and other Irish diplomats seated with Èamon de Valera, Geneva, mid-1930s. Dorothy Macardle, de Valera papers, UCDA P150/2818, c. 1935. W. B. Yeats and one of the leading proponents of an anti-modernist, postrevivalist "racial consciousness" in anglophone Irish poetry. De Valera's Abyssinia crisis address and Devlin's defense of modernist poetry airing in the same evening program on Radio Athlone emphasizes the cross-fade complexity of Irish modernism's radiophonic mediation, as well as modernism's inextricable situation within national and transnational political contexts. As this article explores, Devlin's involvement in international broadcasting against the backdrop of the September 1935 session of the League has a curious, significant place in the history of Irish modernism.4 While the centrality to modernism of what Timothy Campbell calls "the radio imaginary" has been firmly established thanks to pioneering scholarship, Irish modernism's broadcasting context, with notable exceptions, has not been extensively investigated, studies tending in the main to focus on major figures such as Yeats, and the BBC rather than Irish radio.5 This article recovers Radio Athlone's role in the 1930s international mediascape as a fertile site for debates about Irish revivalism versus modernism, debates which also had echoes in the intrigue surrounding the legitimacy of the station's state-mandated role as a transmitter of a specifically "Irish-Ireland" collective consciousness.6 By the mid-1930s, Radio Athlone played a crucial role in relaying Irish national identity to international listeners, an identity which was the discursive subject of many of its broadcasts. This article reconstructs the "radio imaginary" of these debates in the absence of surviving recordings, weaving the conflicted dynamics of Irish modernism as they emerge in all their density. By reconstructing Irish modernism's archival traces, this article resituates competing statements on Irish poetry by modernists and their opponents within the full context of their delivery. [End Page 158] The case for Irish modernism as made by one of its most intriguing voices, the poet Denis Devlin, clarifies the case for the categorical and critical value of Irish modernism (and modernism tout court) in contemporary scholarship, which has recently been questioned. The most striking intervention in this regard is made by Edna Longley in Yeats and Modern Poetry (2013), in which the rap sheet against modernism includes the assertion that its post-hoc...