IASIL 2005 Charles University, Prague
Ireland – A Global Village?
25-28 July 2005

Joyce and Beckett: Forging Irelands

Whether in relation to today’s global Ireland or to the Irish Revival at the turn of the previous century, a critical engagement of Irish identity and art must account for issues of authenticity, forgery and artifice. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were forgers in every sense of the word: as smiths molding material (soldering old parts into new forms), as manipulators of origin and signature, and as departures from past and motions towards future. Our panel will explore these different kinds of forgery as they circulate in select works of Beckett and Joyce and as they produce and are produced by constructs of Ireland and Irishness. The works of these writers, international yet Irish, act as precursors to existing and expanding theoretical discourses: postcolonial, postnational, global. Both authors problematize these discourses; both support and undercut them. As Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake, "[W]hat do you think Vulgariano did but study with stolen fruit how cutely to copy all their various styles of signatures so as one day to utter an epical forged cheque" (181.14-6).

Chair: TBC

Panellists:
Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp & the Antwerp James Joyce Centre)
Forging Ahead: “hesitency” in Joyce’s and Beckett’s Works in Progress

Andrew V. McFeaters (Florida State University)
Repeating Joyce: Poetics and Pathologies of Nostalgia and Exile

Zachary Hanson (Florida State University)
R.I.P.: Beckett’s Investigations of Nationalist Forgery in "Recent Irish Poetry"

Dustin Anderson (Florida State University)
Forging and Forgetting: Fraudulence, Postnationalism, and Finnegans Wake