The James Joyce Society requests that all non-members donate $10 to attend individual events.

Alison Armstrong: "Joyce in transition: the birth of ALP"
May
22

Alison Armstrong: "Joyce in transition: the birth of ALP"

Alison Armstrong’s talk will explore Jolas’s transition magazine as a modernist vehicle for experiments with language and in the other arts. Joyce’s “Work in Progress” would become Finnegans Wake and was arguably the most important and interesting of all the linguistic experiments. 

Alison Armstrong is a writer and visual artist. Her book-length publications include the literary cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill 1986) and “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell UP 1993), as well as works of fiction, memoir, and criticism. Her criticism and reviews have appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, the James Joyce Broadsheet, and American Arts Quarterly, among other venues. She is currently developing a series of large pastel drawings of prehistoric stones found at sites in Ireland, including the Boyne Valley.   

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Mary Burke, "Mixed: Race and Language in Ireland from Joyce to Ó Cadhain"
Feb
5

Mary Burke, "Mixed: Race and Language in Ireland from Joyce to Ó Cadhain"

The James Joyce Society announces its annual Joyce birthday event at the Morgan Library and Museum featuring Mary Burke

Free for Joyce Society and Morgan Library members. Joyce Society members and guests, RSVP (required) here: https://forms.gle/r5FibyPFqcnuynMV8

Long excluded from Ireland’s internationally recognized modernist canon, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s 1949 novel, Cré na Cille (usually translated as Graveyard Soil) is a late modernist western seaboard rejoinder to Ulysses in the Irish (Gaelic) language. Cré na Cille is set in Connemara, fetishized since Joyce’s lifetime as the linguistically and racially “pure” western heart of Gaelic Ireland. Joyce’s “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” inadvertently implies that the avant-garde was alien to a native language that was increasingly being hitched to the fantasy of a culturally, racially, and linguistically sealed West. However, Cré na Cille’s neologisms, French and English loan words, and mixed-race returned emigrant Connemara residents acknowledge the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration and Empire. Altogether, Ó Cadhain continues the debate initiated by Joyce’s creation of a Jewish Irishman, extending it to prophetically ask if Irish culture can create imaginative and linguistic room - in either of its official languages - for Irish citizens of minority identity. This talk will close by considering issues of race, immigration, and the teaching and speaking of the Irish language in contemporary Ireland and Irish America.

Mary Burke, Professor of English at UConn, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (2023) as well as a cultural history of Irish Travellers (both Oxford University Press). She collaborated with Tramp Press on the 2022 reissue of Traveller-Romany Juanita Casey’s cult novel, The Horse of Selene. Her work has placed with JJQ, NPR, the Irish Times, Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, and Faber. A former University of Notre Dame NEH Irish Fellow, she was a 2022 LRH Fellow at her alma mater, Trinity College Dublin. 

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