The Irish Seminar Public Lectures
The Irish Seminar, which is currently underway and runs until the 3rd of July, provides a wide variety of lectures, seminars and workshops on Irish studies by a number of writers, academics, journalists and curators. The topics include Irish literature, culture, politics and society within an international context and should be of interest to readers of Irish Left Review.
As part of the series organised in association with the Keough Naughton Centre, at the University of Notre Dame Professor Declan Kiberd will deliver a public lecture entitled “After Ireland: The Death of a National Literature? this Thursday, June 25th at 7pm in the National Gallery of Ireland (Merrion Street entrance). The lecture, which is the second in the Irish Seminar 2009 series, will address issues to do with the status of a national literature in the current conjuncture.
The third and final public lecture will be given by the distinguished American scholar, Professor Paul Bové on Thursday 2nd July on the theme: “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory.” The author of several books on American intellectuals and cultural criticism, Professor Bové will discuss the idea of utopia in Fredric Jameson’s work and apocalyptic modes of rhetoric in contemporary cultural debate. The venue will also be the National Gallery of Ireland and this lecture will also start at 7pm.
Both lectures are free to the public and all are welcome.
As the Irish Seminar website explains, the theme of the series is apocalypse and utopia:
“2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. An epochal moment in modern history, this event presaged the collapse of Soviet Communism and elevated capitalism into unrivalled global command, suddenly freeing it of a serious ‘modern’ global competitor-ideology. Against the backdrop of a digital and information revolution that accelerated cultural and economic globalizations, this novel situation encouraged a mood of post-historical exhilaration, most vividly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History?He argued that liberal capitalism had decisively vanquished all rival ideologies and thus represented the final end-point of political evolution.
However, two decades later, and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the endist imagination has taken a darker apocalyptic turn as Western liberalism and capitalism wrestle with systemic crises. These include climate change and environmental degradation, energy crises, a ‘clash of civilizations’ between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West,’ a fiscal convulsion of a magnitude that has recalled the Great Depression, and a fundamental restructuring of the world system represented by the ‘rise of Asia.’ Liberal capitalism may have inherited the earth after 1989, and it may still lack a serious global competitor-system, but its ability to redress or resolve these crises remains far from apparent.
The modern Irish political and cultural imagination was never a stranger to rhetorics of utopia and apocalypse. The period from the early modern plantations to the calamitous history of the long nineteenth-century - the extended breakdown of Gaelic culture, the bloodletting of 1798, the devastation of the Great Famine, the violent class struggles of the Land Wars, the repeated collisions of nationalism and unionism that eventually issued in partition - fed catastrophist versions of history in modern Irish Catholic and Protestant cultures alike. Across much of the twentieth century, Irish society seemed too poor, backward and conservative to greatly nurture the utopian imagination, except in savagely thwarted or dystopian versions: the period between Yeats and Beckett experienced an efflorescence of radically experimental literary and cultural production steeped in a sense of historical catastrophe, cultural exhaustion and linguistic collapse.
Later, in the 1990s, as the island experienced the unprecedented prosperity of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the sense of a welcome release from a baleful history represented by the ‘Peace Process,’ a heady consumerist and end-of-history euphoria coursed through Irish popular culture too. A new confidence flourished that hope and history might be made to rhyme. Even then, however, the sense of history as catastrophe, long embedded in the Irish cultural imagination, persisted in subdued form, and the recent turbulence in the capitalist system has churned up a renewed sense of radical uncertainty.
Looking to these complex histories, present disturbances, and imagined futures, the IRISH SEMINAR 2009 will investigate the rhetorics of progress and catastrophe, apocalypse and utopia, millenarianism and anti-millenarianism, in Irish culture from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. The twentieth anniversary of ‘the Fall of the Wall’ offers an occasion to reflect on how the utopian promises of the Enlightenment and modernity issued in the nightmarish vistas of Cold War Nuclear Winters and post-Cold War Global Warmings. Within this framework, the IRISH SEMINAR will consider Irish literature in both major languages, film, popular culture, and social and intellectual history in a broad international context.”
Full program schedule is available here.
Discussion
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Comment by: Wally
Jun 22nd 2009 at 14:06
If they’re looking for literature that expresses the tensions inherent in the celtic tiger boom, two novels by Dermot Bolger stand out. The first was The Journey Home (1990) which looks at people on the social margins amid corruption by get-rich-quick builders and cutehoor politicians. The second, even more detailed in its examination of corruption in the building trade and the link with politicians (the story mainly goes back and forth between Navan and Dublin, with glances at episodes in Scotland and England) is the 2001 novel, The Valparaiso Voyage.
Literary analysis tends to go off on a jargon orgy, so I hope they avoid that in Bolger’s case and draw the literary and social messages from his works in approachable terms.