Membership News

One of the casualities of our regrets about the failure to bring out an Autumn Newsletter is the lost opportunity to enscribe members' names on the Tabula Gratulatoria associated with the Festscrift for Professor Heinz Kosok, which was open to subscription up to 31st. December. Heinz took up the Chair of English at the newly-opened University of Wuppertal in 1973, being appointed to the University Senate at the same time. From then on he strongly influenced the development of English Studies not only at his own university but throughout Germany through his championing of the New Literatures in English, while simultaneously turning Wuppertal into a primary site for Irish literary research through his own teaching and his stocking of the library's Irish holdings - all without relinquishing his reputation as one of Germany's foremost Anglicists.

On 12th February Heinz celebrated his 65th birthday and marked his retirement surrounded by the friends and scholars so much indebted for his encouragement, as for his steady cultivation of theatrical scholarship in others. Heinz first turned to Irish drama after he had finished a doctoral dissertation on Gothic elements in Herman Melville (1963). His Habilitationsschrift on Sean O'Casey (1972 - translated into English in 1985) was the first fruit of a life-long dedication to the modern literature of the country. The comprehensive account of Anglo-Irish literature that he published in 1990 was the first of its kind in German; a subsequent essay-collection entitled Plays and Playwrights from Ireland in an International Perspective (1995) exemplified gifts of scholarship and criticism that secured him a place in the first rank of those writing on Irish literature in any language, while a monograph on British and Irish Plays on World War I, shortly to be published, attains the same standards in relation to a even wider literary canvas. Heinz has also edited critical collections on 18th and 19th-century English drama (1976) and 20th-century English drama (1980), and written extensively on poetry and fiction.

Such attainments have contributed to the place of high regard he holds among IASIL members - a regard warmed to lasting friendship through the vital role he played in hosting the first overseas conference of the Association at Wuppertal in 1981. This hugely successful event amply bore out the international hopes nurtured by Association's founders. Since then Heinz has made the growth of IASIL his special care, serving the association in a variety of roles including a term as Chairman (1982-85), many years as German representative on the Bibliographical Committee, even longer service on the Executive Committee and - most recently of all - a productive term as Chair of the Conference Protocol Committee. Throughout all of this he unfailingly presented papers marked by eloquence and lucidity at our conferences - just as his interventions at business meetings invariably revealed an ability to embrace complex issues with no less sensitivity than insight.

The Heinz Kosok Festschrift-an affair of nine-hundred-and-forty pages, with forty-seven individual contributors - has been edited by Jürgen Kamms under the title of Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama in English: Festschrift for Heinz Kosok on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 1999). Its Irish section contains scholarly contributions by many who have been active appreciative IASIL colleagues of Heinz Kosok down the years including Christopher Murray (Dublin), Andrew Parkin (Hong Kong), Hiroshi Suzuki (Tokyo), Toshi Furomoto (Kobe), Bernice Schrank (Newfoundland), Christoph Bode (Bamberg), Richard Wall (Calgary), Munira Mutran (Sao Paulo), Csilla Bertha (Debrecen), Werner Huber (Paderborn), Ruth Niel (Wuppertal), Rüdiger Imhof (Wuppertal). Among IASIL members writing in other sections devoted to British, American, Canadian, and New Zealand theatre are Richard Allen Cave (London), Stanley Weintraub (Pennsylvania) Jürgen Kamm (Passau), Donald Morse (Oakland), Joseph Swann (Wuppertal), and Wolfgang Zach - who followed in Heinz's footstep by hosting a marvellous conference in Graz in 1984 and co-edited our first three-volume essay collection. Order from WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Postfach 4005, 54230 Trier; tel. (0)651-41503, Fax: (0)651-41504, and quote the relevant details: ISBN 3-88476-334-2, hbk (DM 109,50); ISBN 3-88476-333-4, pbk. (DM 89,50).

On 17th April 1999, Stanley Weintraub, IASIL's most distinguished literary biographer, will be presented with a Festschrift entitled Shaw and Other Matters, compiled exclusively by former students in the first rank of Shaw scholarship-with the sole exception of Rodelle Weintraub who proclaims herself no student of his 'in that sense'. Stan is best known t us as the editor of Shaw's autobiographies and diaries and author of several masterful books on Shaw's life and works as well as editor of the Annual Shaw Studies; yet the reputation of his life of Disraeli and the recent reception of his biography of Prince Albert - widely deemed as good a biography can get - testifies to the more-than-scholarly magnitude of his literary talents, while the breadth of culture that he has always shown in modestly delivered masterworks to this Association underlines the value of his perennial friendship. Nor should Rodelle's talent be overlooked: Fabian Feminist: Bernard Shaw and Women (1977) was a landmark work and still remains the most judicious treatment of the subject.

Since his inauguration as Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at QUB (November 1998) - on the first lap of an itinerary round the campuses of Ireland - John Montague has been prominent at numerous literary and publishing venues. While the monthly Fortnight carrIed his portrait on its January cover to herald the inaugural lecture inside, Magill printed his review of Heaney's new selection Opened Ground (Oct. 1998), and subsequently devoted a page to Heaney's gracious encomium of Montague on his 70th birthday. This was not the first transaction of the kind between the poets since Eigse-Poetry Ireland had organised a reading at the Gate Theatre to mark the sixtieth birthday of both on Sunday, 11th June 1989. More consequential exchanges had, of course, taken place at other times. In his 1972 interview with Seamus Deane, Heaney had spoken of Montague's The Rough Field as a poem that seems to 'stick politically in one direction' in its affirmation of 'the mythos' of nationalist history (Crane Bag, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1972). Montague's reaction to Heaney's own treatment of mythic ingredients as presented in his recent review offers something of a counterpoint - especially where he comments that he finds the 'central myth' of the "Bog Poems" unsatisfactory in view of the dearth of bodies in Irish bogs, though yielding 'poems of loaded grace'. On 18th February 1999, Montague gave a talk/seminar in the QUB's Peter Froggatt Centre entitled "Short Reflections on the Long Poem", following shortly on a talk at the University of Ulster's Centre for Irish Literature and Bibliography where he was the guest of Professor Robert Welch - one of those who has come away from the Collected Poems (1996) with an enhanced estimate of Montague's achievement. The poet has been accompanied on his rounds by his wife Elizabeth Wassell, who made an impression with The Honey Plain (1996), a novel on the Irish summer-school experience. Celebrations of Heaney's 60th birthday took over the airwaves on April 13th, when chosen poems were broadcast on RTE at hourly intervals while BBC2 twinned him beautifully with Liam O'Flynn in "Keeping Time", directed by Philip King and Declan Quinn and set in one of the delapidated palaces of Georgian Dublin.

During May 1998 the young artist Robert Balogh [no, not our Bobby Ballagh - Ed.] presented a dramatised version A Modest Proposal in translation at the Third Theatre in Pecs. In a society after three years of austerity measures had reduced a quarter of the population to real poverty, Swift's satire had grim overtones. The April 1998 issue of Magyar Naplo (organ of the Hungarian Writers' Association) included a hefty selection of recent Irish poems translated by Thomas Kabdebo, including examples from Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Brendan Kennelly, Theo Dorgan, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Liz O'Donoghue, Robert Welch, Greg Delanty, Roz Cowman, Eaven Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Desmond Egan, Ciaran Ó Driscoll, and Bill Tinley. The issue included an essay on postmodernism and Irish literature by Brian Cosgrove (Chair, NUI Maynooth), as well as a short story by John MacKenna, excerpts from Sebastian Barry's Prayers of Sherkin, John Banville's Ghosts, John McGahern's Among Women, and John B. Keane's The Bodhrán Makers. Kabdebo, Librarian at Maynooth, has translated the poems of Attila József as "Can You Take on This Awful Life?" (Cardinal Press 1997) and published a comparison of Anglo-Irish Hungarian literary experience in Donald Morse, et al., eds., A Small Nation's Contribution to the World (Colin Smythe/Lajos Kossuth 1993). We have not seen the current issues of Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies which regularly features critics on Irish writers - pre-eminently in the "Irish Special Issue" of January 1996, guest-edited by Csilla Bertha, to which Maria Kurdi and Marton Mesterhazi contributed along with eleven other Hungarian scholars. Dr. Kurdi is herself a contributor to the Irish University Review and the author of a recent work in Hungarian on Irish drama.

Irena Janicka-Swiderska reports from Poland on continuing cultural links between University of Lodz and The University of Ulster (Coleraine), resulting in a volume edited by Maria Edelson (1998). Chris Corr, whose challenging study of Yeats's place in the 'specialist' tradition of Victorian English literature appeared in a recent Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 1998), and Richard Mills, one of the "New Voices" referred to elsewhere in this Newsletter, have both spent constructive periods at Lodz, as well as Gráinne Elmore, Jolantha Burgoyne-Johnson and others. Stipe Grgas of Zadar in Croatia has long kept Irish literature in the public eye with essays on Beckett and O'Brien, Heaney and Montague in journals such as Studia Romanica et Anglica (Zagreb), and with translations of Heaney, Longley, and Mahon in Dubrovnik and Glasje.

1997 saw the setting-up of a Centre for Irish Studies in the English Department of The University of Bucharest (Romania) under the direction of Ioana Zirra, who is nurturing a small library devoted to Irish literature and society. Donations are greatly needed, especially in view of lively enthusiasm of the students' whose great wish is to see a single-author course conducted by an Irish writer/scholar in Bucharest. Irish Studies are also on the agenda at St. Theresa Catholic Institute (Bucharest), where the Head of the English Department is Rev. Sister Dr. Monica Brosteanu. Dr. Ioana Gogeanu, who lectures on medieval literature there, makes frequent reference to Celtic mythology of the Early Irish period as well as to the influence of Irish monasticism in and Europe. Contact St. Theresa Roman Catholic Institute, Str. G-ral Berthelot 19, 70749, Bucharest, Romania; tel. 401-613-9988. Ioana Gogeanu has an email at <ioana@mnd.ro>.

During the week beginning 8 March 1999, Lucy McDiarmid (outgoing ACIS President) gave a sponsored lecture series at NUI Galway. Under the general rubric of "Three Modern Irish Controversies" she offered three topics epitomising her distinctive brand of wry enthusiasm for the cultural politics of the revival. These were, 'Hugh Lane and the Politics of Interior Decoration'; 'The Man who Dissed the Bishops' (Father Michael O'Hickey); and, finally, 'The Socialists, the Priests and the Stolen Children', featuring the Labour leaders of the 1913 Lockout and its bourgeois-clerical opponents - not forgetting the misused children and their mothers. The lectures are a foretaste of her imminent publication on literary and political controversies in turn-of-the-century Ireland. A similar visitation took place at Catholic University, Washington.

Expressions of gratitude are due to John Norstedt and Robert Brinlee, owners of the brilliantly informative and occasionally dramatic Irish Studies electronic list at Virginia U., who have just announced their retirement from this onorous commitment. In a context where literary and diasporic research, Irish social issues and political passions focused on the Northern Ireland crisis frequently intertwine, they attracted a high standard of contribution and maintained an even tenor for three full years - occasionally by the expedient of bolting the door. Other moderators may take their place but we shall not see their like again.