A place for School of English postgrads and staff to exchange ideas
Prof. Gerald Dawe introduces our final speaker for this evening, the wonderful Dr Rosie Lavan
Thank you to Dr Rosie Lavan for wrapping up this year’s seminar series with a fantastic paper. Thanks to all who came.
We’d also like to thank all our speakers and keen listeners who joined us over the course of the year. We’ve had a blast!
Goodbye for now—Kate, Nora and Gavin.
Thank you to Kaitlyn Culliton, who offered insight into fairies and demons in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream last Tuesday!
Dear All,
We are pleased to invite you all to the final session of the Staff-Postgraduate Seminar Series this academic year. It’s been a wonderful run and we’d like to thank everyone who has presented and attended thus far. We are particularly excited about our last evening next Tuesday, 5 April at 17:00 in the Trinity Long Room Hub’s Neill Lecture Theatre, where the School of English’s own Dr Rosie Lavan will be giving the last paper of the year.
Dr Lavan’s paper is titled: “History is now and Derry: McCann, McCafferty, and Life-Writing.“
This paper looks closely at two non-fiction texts about Derry – or, more specifically, about the Bogside area of the city – which together span the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s: Eamonn McCann’s War and an Irish Town (1974; rev. eds. 1980, 1993), and Nell McCafferty’s Peggy Deery: A Derry Family at War (1988). McCann seeks to offer an account of the origins of the civil rights movement and the early years of violence, but his book is also a submerged autobiography, charting the development of his own political convictions. By contrast, McCafferty’s approach is explicitly biographical: she profiles the life of that most elusive of subjects, an ‘ordinary woman’, and the domestic and familial implications of the experience of conflict. Both texts are centred around the interplay between collective and individual experience. Both too raise questions about the mutability of genre in specific relation to non-fiction or journalistic writing. To explore these, the paper will consider the distinctive narrative presences of McCann and McCafferty, and their management of their own central involvement in the shared stories they tell. Their contemporary concerns are receding into a past which is increasingly historical, but they were historicising the present from the outset.
After reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, Dr Lavan trained as a journalist at City University, London. She worked on the business desk at The Times for two years, as a media assistant to a London MEP during the European elections in 2009, and for House of Lords Hansard. After this, she returned to Oxford for postgraduate study in 2010 and completed her doctorate, ‘Seamus Heaney and Society, 1964 – 1994’, in 2014. Dr Lavan joined the School of English at TCD in September 2015.
The talk will be introduced by founder-director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at TCD and poet, Professor Gerald Dawe.
Please share the event and come along. There will be a wine reception following the talk. We look forward to seeing you there!
Thanks to Conor and Yuhki yesterday for fascinating papers yesterday evening on Arthur Conan Doyle and Oliver Goldsmith. Many thanks also to all who came along!
We have two exciting papers lined up for tomorrow Tuesday 22nd!
Dr Conor Reid (TCD) will be speaking on “The Lost Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger Series,” and Yuhki Takebayashi will give a paper entitled, “Oliver Goldsmith and History-Writing.” See their abstracts below.
Looking forward to seeing many of you back in the Trinity Long Room Hub at 5pm.
Dr Conor Reid
Trinity College Dublin
The Lost Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger Series
“[W]hat I am writing is destined to immortality as a classic of true adventure”, states Edward Malone, narrator of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). One imagines that Conan Doyle, having witnessed the phenomenal popularity of his Sherlock Holmes stories, could declare this with some degree of confidence. Indeed, The Lost World has remained Conan Doyle’s most well-known and influential non-Holmes story for over a century. Far less frequently read or critically analysed, however, are the remaining works in the Challenger series, a group of texts comprising two novels, a novella, and two short stories, spanning the period from 1912 to 1929. As a series the Challenger stories can seem somewhat disconnected, with changes in narrator, tone, authorial intent and genre as the series progresses. However, there is a fundamental connection between the stories, and examining the series as a whole brings this to the fore, in the extent to which all five tales attempt to explore, record, verify and, ultimately, conquer lost or impenetrable worlds. Challenger, as scientist-adventurer, is at their centre as they each attempt to use objective, empirical science to access and authenticate a lost world. In this regard, each story centres on scientific evidence, while at the same time dangerously and often humorously flirting with fraud. This paper, therefore, will explore the ambiguous, and often contradictory, nature of the lost worlds of Professor Challenger.
Yuhki Takebayashi
Trinity College Dublin
Oliver Goldsmith and history-writing
Oliver Goldsmith (1728?-1774) was a prolific writer whose works include translations, reviews, essays, children stories, plays, biographies, history-writings and a popular natural history work. But it was his poem, The Traveller, which won him recognition among his fellow writers and elevated him to the status of a literary celebrity. To this day he is largely valued and remembered as a poet.
In contrast, his historical works have fallen into a state of limbo. Modern scholars refer to them in the capacity that they provide support for arguments with little elaboration as to how this particular genre of writing may be used appropriately. In other cases the histories are dismissed outright.
This paper will discuss the changing reception of Goldsmith’s oeuvre and trace how modern scholarship has come to de-value his historical outputs as mere hackwork. Particular attention will be paid to Michael Griffin’s work, Enlightenment in Ruins (Bucknell University Press, 2013), as it is the most recent extended study of Goldsmith. His division of Goldsmith’s writings into two categories, with the poems being distinguished as “useful” pieces and the histories being demoted as a confused patchwork of other authors’ works will be reflected upon. Following this, problematic issues associated with such interpretations will be pointed out. Importantly, the need to clarify the historical status of history-writing will be referred to and elaborated upon. Histories as political tracts; as “polite” texts and as an experimental frontier during the Enlightenment will be detailed. To this extent, figures such as Clarendon, Voltaire, Hume and Robertson and their histories will be referred to. Lastly, based upon these reflections, tentative ways Goldsmith’s history-writings may be of use to Goldsmith studies will be provided. Before concluding, this paper will broadly and briefly discuss how the methodology of historical investigation of genres may be of continuing benefit to the scholarly examination of authors.
Dr Ashmita Khasnabish
‘Negotiating Capability: Sea of Poppies: a Diasporic Construct’.
Different location this week: Room AP3.19 in Aras an Phiarsaigh at 5pm.
The talk, based on the chapter V of Negotiating Capability and Diaspora: a Philosophical Politics, focuses on the theory of diaspora / globalization through the Indian philosopher Amartya Sen’s theory of justice which strikes at the root of oppression. Sen de-constructs that master-slave paradigm and gives us an opportunity to think in a fresh way about injustice. He owes his theory a great deal to John Rawls’s political philosophy, in which Rawls proposes that one has to inculcate communitarian identity, or the focal group, prior to developing an international community. However, Sen opposes that; a focal group, according to Sen, is parochial and he thinks that Rawls’s model, which unites everyone in the community through political justice and overlooks all the differences through the “veil of ignorance” may not work for different international groups. This chapter is an engagement and dialogue between Sen’s theory of capability and the Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh’s vision of diaspora in the light of his novel Sea of Poppies. I see a distinct connection between the two authors as the theory of capability works as a twofold theory to uncover dis-crimination of underdogs, immigrants, and people of diaspora and to work as a positive willpower to achieve one’s goal, if one could learn to inculcate it positively. Sen boldly articulates his complaint about utilitarianism in his The Idea of Jus-tice and although it seems that it is directed toward only economics, it encompasses all kinds of discrimination when not just women are treated as second-class citizens—all the immigrants are treated as underdogs too. Sen observes, “The utilitarian calculus based on happiness or desire-fulfillment can be deeply unfair to those who are persistently deprived, since our mental make-up and desires tend to adjust to circumstances, particularly to make life bearable in adverse situations” (The Idea of Justice 282).
We were delighted by Professor Patten’s fascinating paper on Virginia Woolf and Charles Stuart Parnell!
Thank you to everyone who came along!
No seminar this week, but NEXT week — Tuesday 8th March — we have an exciting paper lined up from Professor Eve Patten from the School of English:
“‘Joostice and Liberty’: Virginia Woolf and Charles Stewart Parnell”.
Professor Patten’s primary research interests are in nineteenth-c
entury Irish literature and culture and twentieth-century British and Irish writing, particularly the fiction of the two world wars. She has published and edited numerous works including Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Literatures of War, and Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War.
Usual time and place: 5pm in the Hub.
Enjoy Reading Week!
Many thanks Jack and Sarah for their fascinating papers, and to everyone who attended the seminar yesterday.
TCD Staff and Postgraduate Seminars 2015 