26th November at Dublin Castle was the occasion of a 'State Trial' conducted by the membership of Aosdána with Francis Stuart, the nonogenarian novelist so recently elected Saoi, being called to book for supposedly anti-Semitic remarks on a Channel 4 TV programme made by Simon Sebag Montefiore, who set out to illustrate the smart idea that Irish republicanism is ever and always racist.
Apparently under the misapprehension that the programme was about himself, Stuart recited a sentence from his Black List, Section H which caused deep offence to those who only heard him say that Jews were the worm in the rose in the televised word-bite. Máire Mac an tSaoi appeared for the prosecution in those august surroundings and made an incoherent showing. It seems that her hereditary Saoi-ship was momentarily impaired by morphine administered during surgical treatment in hospital prior to the event. In the absence of a video-recorder to play the offending tape her case unravelled.
Whereupon, according to reportage in Magill - and all the oui-dire of literary Dublin besides - Anthony Cronin took up the defence in unambiguous terms, reading from the novel and drawing on remarks of Stuart's in Robert Fisk's In Time of War: 'I could never be a writer in the bosom of society. I disliked Allied sanctimoniousness about fighting a Christian crusade against evil.'
Epistolary skirmishes continued to rage in The Irish Times - with some fearsome blusterings from old stagers in the anti-Hitler war across the border - until Stuart submitted an apology and a denial of the charges alleging that he had been misunderstood in the first place. Whether a figure with his wilful genius for being misunderstood is suited to the role of national 'wise man' remains an open question but certainly he escaped the opprobrium that he might have best enjoyed on this occasion.
Anniversary Greetings to Fritz Senn, the doyen of Joycean philologico-philosophers,on his 70th birthday which fell on New Year's Day, 1998. In recognition of his immense contribution both to written criticism in Joyce studies and to the well-being of the Joycean family world-wide through his role in setting up the Foundation in Zürich (which he has directed since 1985), Lilliput Press of Rosemount, Dublin, have brought out a Festschrift edited by Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller.
A list of 38 contributors,. making for a snapshot of Joycean studies in the last two decades, includes Clive Hart, Derek Attridge, Margot Norris, Hugh Kenner, Hans Walter Gabler, John Bishop, Zack Bowen, Karen Lawrence, Jean-Michael Rabaté, Katie Wales,and Morris Beja - along with IASIL colleagues such as Marilyn Reizbaum, Geert Lernout, and Michael O'Shea. The book is divided by major Joycean titles, but includes also a section on 'Transgressing the Boundaries' and another on 'Translation'. In a nice touch, the publisher's brochure offering inclusion of early subscribers' names in the tabula gratulatoria bore the plea, 'Please help us to keep the Festschrift a secret and do not mention it to Fritz Senn before the end of January.' [Well, we're okay then, aren't we? -Ed.]
IASIL Newsletter extends congratulations to Dr. Inez Praga of Burgos University, on whom an honorary degree in recognition of her work for Irish studies is to be conferred at University College, Cork (NUI), this summer - and to Colin Smythe, the publisher to whom Irish literary scholarship and IASIL in particular owes so much, who is to receive a doctorate from TCD (Dublin University) in the same period.
Joseph M. Hassett, an IASIL member and former student of Professor Augustine Martin and best known for his work on Yeats and The Poetics of Hate (1986), has made a gift to UCD to fund an award to students of Anglo-Irish literature in memory of the sadly-missed teacher, scholar, enthusiast, and long-standing IASIL member. Hassett invites others to join him by making cheques payable to the John Henry Newman Foundation with the undertaking that these will reach the targeted students intact. All such donations can be set off against tax in the US. Contact Joseph Hassett, 555 13th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004; <jmh@dc3.hhlaw.com>.
The Keough Institute for Irish Studies of Notre Dame University will establish a permanent study centre in Dublin from Autumn of 1998 with Professor Seamus Deane (Keough Professor) and Kevin Whelan presiding over its operations, according to the gripevine [Oops, grapevine! -Ed.]
The Institute's base at Newman House - now brilliantly refurbished - will provide students with in situ exposure to the history and the literature of Ireland (so says US Chronicle of Higher Education). Tuition will be conducted by members of departments in UCD and Trinity College, Dublin. Annual conferences tied in with the programme are to be held alternately in Dublin and at Notre Dame. Additionally, a 'tenure track' Asst. Professorship in Irish literary studies advertised this Autumn will take effect from August. That advertisement called for special interests in the periods 1660-1800, or 1800-80, or 1940 to the present. (Literary revivalists need not apply.)
Budgetary requirements of the Notre Dame Irish Studies scheme are said to run to some $13 millions, with the largest share of the necessary donations coming from Donald R. Keough, chairman of Notre Dame's Board of Trustees and former president of Coca-Cola. Standing expenses include the rental of Newman House and the endowment of two professorial chairs in the institute, one in modern Irish literature and the other in medieval Irish history (as the astute reader might already have inferred). A visiting chair in Irish Studies is also planned.
In announcing the programme Rev. Edward A. Malloy, President of Notre Dame, proclaimed that the University sees it 'not only [as] an important and worthwhile intellectual endeavour, but also as a vital and renewed link between the people of Ireland and the many more people of the international Irish diaspora.' Notre Dame University previously sponsored the publication of Professor Deane's monumental Anthology of Irish Writing (1991).
Claire Connolly has edited a 1997 deluxe edition of Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl for the London-based publisher Pickering & Chatto. This small company that has assigned itself the task of with publishing multi-volume collections of fine editions of mainly 18th and 9th century literature. Currently available in the series is a 12-volume set of The Works of Maria Edgeworth priced at £6,695. Further information about the publishers and their wares will be available at the Limerick Conference.
Márton Mesterházi, who will be familiar to those who attended the IASIL Debrecen conference some years back, has written a brief account of his current round of Irish literary activities in a letter to the Treasurer. As a Script editor at Hungarian National Radio Drama/Literature department, he has produced Lady Gregory's At the Gaol Gate and The Rising of the Moon (translated also), J. M. Synge's Shadow of the Glen, Yeats's Words Upon the Window-Pane and Dreaming of the Bones, O'Casey's Plough and the Stars (with a substantial essay in a literary weekly) and Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Behan's The Big House, Padraic Fallon's At the Bridge Inn; McGahern's Sinclair, Bernard Farrell's Gliding with Mr Gleeson and Antoine Ó Flatharta's Blood Guilty, as well as complete translations of The Loves of Cass McGuire, Translations, and The Commumication Cord by Friel, Famine by Tom Murphy, Prayers of Sherkin by Sebastian Barry (for which no publisher as yet), and Hall of Healing by O'Casey-on which playwright he published a monograph in 1993 concerning the Hungarian reception of his work.
A long essay on 'Irish Drama and History' in the monthly journal Nagyvilág and a paper on 'A Practitioner's View on Brian Friel's Wonderful Tennessee' in the recent HJEAS, as well as another on 'The Hidden Genius of Padraic Fallon, Radio-Playwright' delivered at the Pecs HUSSE/ESSE Conference round off his list of Irish literary activities. In 1997-98 Márton has been teaching a two-semester seminar on Irish drama subvented by the Irish Foreign Affairs Department, which has contributed to IASIL fortunes in the past. Bless them …
… On the other hand, sorry reports are filtering through to the
effect that erstwhile CRC grants from An Roinn Gnotaí Eachtrachta
have fallen off, surceased,
Colbert Kearney, Director of IASIL 1995 - the Conference hosted
by the English Department which he heads at University College, Cork - is
to be congratulated on placing a selection of the stranded papers
from that conference with a publisher - we believe it is Rodopi of
Amsterdam whose extraordinary scope and productivity we have noticed
previously in the Newsletter (March 1997).
Professor Kearney has written to all participants inviting them to
submit their papers - if they had not already done so - so that he
can proceed with a selection. A diskette written in Word or Word
Perfect before Friday 13th of February is required, but that date
being past, as soon as possible represents the only chance. (E-mail
lines were still a-hum with messages from people who had missed
the date at the time of going to press with this Newsletter,
so perhaps there is still some latitude to make amends.)
Contact Colbert Kearney, English Dept., University College, Cork;
Tel: 021 276871; Fax: 021 345122; e-mail <colbert@bureau.ucc.ie>
Papers of the 12th James Joyce 'Images of Joyce' Symposium
munificently hosted at the Princess Grace Irish Library in 1990,
which were likewise stranded for some time during a changing of the guard,
are now going forward rapidly towards publication in two volumes under
the Library imprint published by Colin Smythe, who has brought out
all the books in the Literary Studies series todate - including the
prize-winning Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the
First Production of The Importance of Being Earnest edited by
Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggen in 1995.
Immediately after appearance of the 1990 Transactions, the Library
will turn to publishing those of the Samuel Beckett Conference
which followed two years after, while papers to be delivered at
the forthcoming conference on 'The Supernatural and the Fantastic
in Irish Literature' (29 May-1st June 1998) will be published
before the end of the year.
Anglophone academics await with glee and trepidation the outcome
of this year's "Bad Writing Contest", fourth in the
series sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature at
Johns Hopkins University, conducted along the lines of 'Pseud's
Corner'. A sentence that began, 'The visual is essentially pornography
…', and ended several miles later, '… the most austere
films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress
their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to
discipline the viewer)' made Frederic Jameson last year's overall
winner.
Among those receiving honourable mention for their attempts to
intimidate, befuddle or enrage the ordinary reader was Professor
Richard Kearney, whose Continental Philosophy Reader contained
this offering: 'Since thought is seen to be "rhizomatic"
rather than "arboreal", the movement of differentiation
and becoming is already imbued with its own positive trajectory.'
In commenting on it, the founder-adjudicator Dr. Dutton said, 'no
undergraduate I've given this to has been able to make the slightest
sense of it. Neither has any faculty member.' Reporting the awards the
Guardian Weekly (22 June 1997) described the runner-up
as 'a British academic' from University College, Dublin.'
Imprimantur
Images of Joyce
English for Special Purposes
Helping hands
He Ning is a teacher in the English Department of Najing University,
China. He is currently working on his Masters in Yeats, with a
focus on 1910-19, and in particular on poems about encroaching
age. If anyone feels that they can palliate the lack of critical
works on Yeats in Chinese university libraries, He Ning would
be most grateful to hear from them at e-mail
<diligent@publicl.ott.js.cn>