This Scholarcast is an extract from Helen Lawlor's book, Irish Harping: 1900-2010 (Four Courts Press, 2012). This study provides a musical ethnography and a history of the Irish harp. It gives a socio-cultural and musical analysis of the music and song associated with all Irish harp styles, including traditional style, song to harp accompaniment, art-music style and the early Irish harp revival.
Movements in ecocriticism that call for links to be made with postcolonialism challenge us, here in Ireland and outside of it, to do work that has not come naturally. As critics like Rob Nixon have pointed out, ecocriticism and postcolonialism were, in fact, often at odds with each other as the fields arose, operating at a disconnect.
This episode argues for a politicization of cultural and literary critiques of environmental issues in Ireland. It demonstrates methods through which Irish Studies can enter into a creative correspondence with the growing field of Environmental Humanities scholarship.
This episode explores the process whereby dance was transformed from a practice enjoyed for its own sake into ‘a conscious symbolic act' of Irish nationhood during the Revival. Drawing on the work of dance scholars and historians, Barbara O'Connor examines the role of the Gaelic League in developing an‘authentic’ national dance canon that called for an ideal Irish dancing body.
The fall of the great forests of Ireland provided James Joyce with a rich literary trope laden with cultural memory and socio-political resonances, which he utilized throughout his works and most fully in Finnegans Wake. The trope taps into a chain of historical events well-rehearsed by nationalist rhetoric and thus it is compatible with Joyce's innovative utilisation of repeated motifs with multiple textual resonances.
The episode focuses on one of the most elaborate artworks to be made in Ireland in the 1920s, Harry Clarke's Geneva Window. The work, intended for the League of Nations, illustrates extracts from the texts of fifteen Irish writers. Clarke's innovative approach to the technique of stained glass and his wide knowledge of ancient and modern art and literature made him one of the most remarkable and versatile visual artists of his generation.
This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia, in which the past was cut off from experience; nor was it nostalgia in the sense of longing of a time that never was. Rather it was a deliberate attitude toward time, in which a "backward glance" brought the past into a present moment of critical reflect...
Examining the infiltration of new notions of urbanism into Irish culture in this era, in particular through the Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland, this talk looks at the Dublin-based writings of James Stephens to show how revivalist writers were responsive to the peculiarities of Irish urban experience.
In this episode Adam Putz explores complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman.
One of the most complicated and persistent questions in the study of childhood in the past relates to the experiences of individual children. How can we know how children perceived the world around them when they have left little written evidence of their own experience and interpretations of their world? In this lecture, Riona NicCongáil attempts to address the above question by looking at the everyday lives of Irish-speaking children during the revivalist period.
In this episode Sharae Deckard analyses the unprecedented commoditization of new ecological commons under neoliberal capitalism and reflects on the importance of environmental humanities approaches to historicize conceptions of environment and configurations of environment.
The Van, the final novel in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, explores the physical, psychological and social impact of unemployment on the protagonist, Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. Having been laid off from his job as a plasterer, Jimmy struggles to find a new role for himself within the family that is not connected to being the breadwinner.
In spite of the linguistic license that defines Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper, the characters maintain crucial silences throughout in relation to meaningful issues. This episode examines the system of self-imposed censorship that operates among the female characters in particular and how it leads to isolation and an absence of true intimacy.
Roddy Doyle is perhaps the single most successful novelist of this period, gaining an audience far beyond the environs of Dublin's Northside where most of his writing is set. Along with the emergence of rock group U2, Doyle represents a brash generational shift, a confident certitude in his generation's worth and ability. His literary focus is not exactly the urban world; rather it is the suburban world.
Fredric Jameson proposes that a "utopia" is a political idea that hopes to transcend, or exist outside, politics, but that must, inevitably, begin inside politics – at "the moment of the suspension of the political," the political must inevitably return. This holds true for the utopian imagined community – a "Dublin soul band" – proposed and tested in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. If the imagined community represented by the band is haunted by the inevitable return of the political, the novel n...
What has become known as the Barrytown trilogy: The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), have become iconic in Irish culture. Centred on one family, the Rabbittes, Roddy Doyle makes reference to current events like the 1990 Soccer World Cup, and in dealing with the issues of teenage pregnancy and unemployment captures the mood of a nation requiring something light and entertaining amid the economic and cultural gloom of the late 1980s.
In Irish Studies, the term Irish Revival broadly defines the cultural nationalist movement which thrived in Ireland from the late nineteenth-century up until the establishment of the Irish Free State. It refers to the pre-Independence period when powerful narratives of de-colonization and cultural reaffirmation mobilized communities both locally and internationally. These lectures explore the historic, cultural and and artistic ramifications of the Revival.
This episode discusses how and why various Irish nationalist individuals and organisations attempted to engage children and youth in the Irish cultural revival, particularly in the early twentieth century. It also explores the link between the promotion of a specifically Irish cultural identity and the political socialisation of Irish nationalist youth in the same period.
Every reader and scholar of Irish literature is familiar with its extensive genealogy of nature writing, and a 'sense of place' found across a great variety of texts. While not unique to Ireland such a rich heritage has produced some of the most enduring and exciting literary and cultural criticisms. However, given our contemporary concerns with environmental issues, of which climate change is one, literary and cultural narratives need to be re-read and re-energized to help us find a language th...
In this episode, Eamonn Ryan deliberates on the collective leap which individuals and nation states need to make for a sustainable, habitable future. He argues that individuals cannot be faced with moral choices about the environment on a daily basis. Instead, he indicates that it is through sound governance that environmental habits are nurtured effectively. Ryan also persuasively demonstrates the importance of everyday language and stories for an environmental consciousness. The task for the i...
In this lecture Paula Meehan delivers the Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014. The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 and is jointly held between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
This talk explores the challenges involved in writing the city of Dublin into poetry. It considers the insights and emotions that emerge from reading the work of these poets as they write to remember, to celebrate and to interrogate Dublin as a place of personal and national significance.
This talk explores some poems by women published in the last one hundred years, from lesser-known figures such as Winifred Letts to contemporaries Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan.
This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meehan, revealing the important representation of Dublin people in these texts...
The poems that appear in this anthology reflect the broad spectrum of relationships that exist between the city and those that inhabit, however briefly, its public and private spaces. From speakers who trace their Dublin roots through generations, to those who visit the city for a short time, perhaps to visit a hospital there, these poems express the varying emotions generated by the experience. Featuring reflections on poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Kennelly and John Montague, among others,...
Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land. New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.
Belfast, as a city, has come to be represented in recent years by the shadow of its industrial heritage. The Titanic, and the shipyards in which it was built, have become central to the city's attempt to give cultural and economic purchase to its contemporary identity. This lecture uncovers some of the history behind that branding of Belfast. It takes Thomas Carnduff's shipyard poetry, written in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way in which to understand the complexities of labour which underpinned th...
This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip. Yet his contemplative gaze almost never turns westward. He also refuses to produce a historical narrative of the area: here history is episodic, incoherent. Nor is Nicholson the poet of an `organic community'. He is rather a messianic poet for whom the coastal strip is an ab...
In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, as well as a comment on the craze for projects and speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics and circulation, resource management and political arithmetic, and improvement and reclamation. The conceptual leap made in Draining the Irish Channel is th...
This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce. The lecture begins by following Buck Mulligan's invitation in the opening of Ulysses to 'come and look' at the sea, and at the mailboat crossing from Kingstown to Holyhead. Looking at the sea takes us to questions of boundaries and connections, to the...
