Long will the memory linger of the beautiful summer days passed as guests of Britta Olinder at IASIL 1997 at Göteborg University. The Humanisten Building, with its well-lit, spacious rooms and friendly atmosphere provided an ideal conference setting, while its sweeping lawn, strewn with Nordic sunworshippers and made melodious by flowing water, imparted an unexpectedly Mediterranean feeling to the venue. Alas, many a Celtic eye was out on stalks, and many a neck was cricked while strolling like accomplished flâneurs down the boulevards. But Sweden is a forgiving place and we were all forgiven.
Neil Sammells's opening lecture, given in the magnificent Vasaparken, struck the note of intellectual excitement on the threshold of a burgeoning future for Irish studies that dominated the proceedings. Each succeeding plenary speaker - Ann Saddlemyer, Robin Alston, and Norman Vance - sustained the sense of a joyful science come into its force with characteristic shows of scholarship, sensibility, and eloquence which likewise resonated through the small sessions.
A series of brilliantly conceived evening events and outings pressed home the sense of a whole community at carnival-for Göteborg was engrossed in the rites of Summer Festival during the days when we were there. A closing banquet in the fortress island of Elfsborg - where Medbh McGuckian read her poetry with some assistance from Bob Welch - brought an enthusiastic conference to a very warm conclusion. (Meltingly warm for some, in view of the low vaults of that beautiful, brick-lined muniments room.)
In all, eighty-five papers were delivered and a million ideas exchanged. The excellence of Irish writing was demonstrated by Colm Toibín and Michael Longley, while off-campus, around the precincts of the Irish Pub particularly, an unseemly number of schooners were emptied to the lees.
The post-conference tour brought the group back beaming with contentment and some idea of the 'very pressure' of the times in Sweden, as its most famous son might have said. For that and many other reasons, this was indeed a Conference to remember. Our thanks to Britta and her colleagues, particularly, to Marie Arndt who showed unfailing concern for the visitors welfare and brought the bus-trips to life with her commentaries.
Under the title 'Irelands in the Asia-Pacific', Peter Kuch, Professor of English at University of New South Wales, hosted this year's conference in the IASIL Pacific Rim series which has opened up such a rich new field for Irish Studies. The gathering of some thirty-six souls from Up Over and Down Under as well as Points East made for a wide variety of perspectives and a rich network of exchanges. Irish-Australian links were forged by Jarlath Ronayne (Vice Chancellor of Victoria University) in a paper on '"The Port Phillip Gentlemen Still Neglected"', an anything-but complacent study of the role of TCD graduates in the Australian judiciary. Heinz Kosok took on the classic Austral-Hibernian text, John Mitchell's Jail Journal, while Ann Saddlemyer spoke about the search for relatives of Georgie Hyde-Lees, which led her to some moving encounters in Australia. Terence Brown constructed a powerful engine of literary criticism uniting post-colonial readings of Shakespeare with a detailed account of the versions purveyed by Edward Dowden and his young antagonistic, W. B. Yeats, while Nicholas Grene scrutinised the allegory of national liberation extracted from The Playboy of the Western World in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland. Warwick Gould gave a tour-de-force account of the intricate and compelling textual history of Yeats's poems, and Bruce Stewart tried to prove that St. Patrick was his own grandfather's ghost with a little help from Joyce. Maurice Harmon and Maurice Elliott gave magisterial interpretations of Irish poetry in their several distinctive keys.
The inevitable postcolonial strand was spun out in bright colours by Bill Ashcroft in a technicolour demonstration of the ways in which the freight of imperial culture is turned to the purpose of post-imperial peoples, using pictures of the Tom Jones singing contest hoardings in Malaysia as a key example. Csilla Bertha looked at postcoloniality in Irish drama and its criticism, while the Helen Fulton and Daniel Conlon constructed readings of plays by Friel that stressed his riposte to hegemonic discourse. Emigration, transportation, and exchange featured in many guises, whether the Irish girls arriving in Australia in Maureen Murphy's characteristically resourceful exploration of the lives of women who dedicated themselves to the role of 'emigrant's friend' in Australia and America, or in Jim Doan's exposition of the history of the Scotch-Irish in 18th American colonies. The reception and the teaching of Irish writers in Australia, Asia, and America provided a common element in finely-tuned papers by Andrew Parkin, Toshi Furomoto, Laura Izarra, and Munira Mutran (Brazil)- whose achievement in promulgating a love of Irish writing was acknowledged in a warm ovation. Stimulating readings of major Irish figures from an Asia standpoint in papers by Youngmin Kim, Eun-Kyung Chun, and Chan-Hyeok Bang shed orient light on Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, while Ciaran Murray (talking mythopoeic tongues) and George Hughes (speaking fluent Franglais) divided Lafcadio Hearn between them in the manner of Solomon.
Perhaps the happiest moments were those when the writer and nothing but the writing was the subject as in Julie Tapper's carefully-wrought paper on Wilde's art criticism, though a scintillating account of the place of food and attitudes to food in Irish women writers in a paper from Joan Coldwell was worth hearing and worth coming to hear. Dr. Pall Santosh, founder to the Yeats Society of India, demonstrated the intensity of Yeats's imaginative involvement with Indian dance culture, and Jin Di, the Chinese translator of Ulysses, gave an account of the core values of the book and its central personage Leopold Bloom which served as a persuasive reminder of the reasons why we read it.
The conference was located in the Australian Graduate School of Management at Randwick, a building designed to the highest architectural and planning standards and perfectly adapted to such an occasion, having the advantages of elegance, convenience, and supreme comfort (as befits the trainee chief executives for whom it was constructed). The additional fact that it was high summer with the Sydney Festival in full swing season did not constitute an unbearable distraction from the academic proceedings. Francis Devlin-Glass and Maureen Murphy led out the stalwarts of a morning swimming club and Professors Brown, Grene, and Doan along with a stocky Cruithin of their acquaintance were captured on film fighting the waves in true Cuchulain fashion.['They always went to Bondi and they always fell.' - Ed.]