FINAL PROGRAMME
WIDENING FIELDS OF RESEARCH
10-12 September 2008
Symposium Organisers:
Collaborators:
Robério Rubem de Matos (UFBA) Sonia Simão (UNEB)
Denise Scheyerl (UFBA) Adelaide Oliveira (UNEB)
Luciano Ribeiro Lima (UFBA/UNEB/UCSAL) Rafael Rogel Oliveira (UFBA)
Luzia Helena Santiago Fernandes (UFBA/CFET) Sônia Alcântara (Faculdades Jorge Amado)
Katia Maria Silva Andrade & Ivana Mara Costa Ferreira (Colégio Militar de Salvador)
Academic Committee
Munira Hamud Mutran (USP/ABEI/IASIL)
Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra (USP/ ABEI/SILAS)
Beatriz Kopschitz Xavier Bastos (ABEI/IASIL)
Peter James Harris (UNESP/ABEI)
Rosalie Haddad (ABEI)
Zoraide Mesquita (UniB/ABEI)
Sponsored by
DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF IRELAND
CULTURE IRELAND
EMBASSY OF IRELAND IN BRAZIL
The Brazilian Association of Irish Studies (ABEI)
The Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS)
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA
Venues by Brazilian Artists:
“Irlanda” - Panel of Photographs by Elis Taves (Auditorium Nádia Viana)
Programme
Wednesday 10 September
9:00 Opening Ceremony by Ambassador Michael Hoey -Auditorium João Gonçalves
9:30-10:40 Lecture 1: Colin Graham (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
“Peace and Luxury: New Photography in Northern Ireland”
Chair: Ambassador Michael Hoey
10:40-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:10 Lecture 2: Edward Larrissy (Queen’s University, Belfast)
“The Poetry of Ciaran Carson: History, Locality and Global Ireland”
Chair: Luci Collin Lavalle (Universidade Federal do Paraná)
12:10-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Panel 1 (Auditorium Nádia Viana) & Panel 2 (Room 103)
15:30-15:50 Coffee break
15:50-17:30 – Seminar 1: Rosa González (Universitat de Barcelona)
“Revising the Role of Irish Cinema in the Construction of the Irish
Imaginary”
Chair: Noélia Borges (Universidade Federal da Bahia/ABEI)
17:50- Reception
Thursday 11 September
9:00-10:10 Lecture 3: Lawrence Taylor (National University of Ireland Maynooth)
"Crisis of Faith or Collapse of Empire? A report from the centre and
edge of Irish Catholicism"
Chair: Peter James Harris (Universidade Estadual Paulista/SJRP)
10:10-10:30 Coffee break
10:30-12:10 Seminar 2: Colin Graham (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
“Photography, the Troubles and the Peace in Northern Ireland”
Chair: Rosalie Haddad (ABEI)
12:10-13:40 Lunch
13:40-15:30 Panel 3 (Auditorium Nádia Viana) & Panel 4 (Room 103)
15:30-15:50 Coffee break
15:50-17:00 Lecture 4: Margaret Kelleher (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
“Omnium Gatherum: Historical and Contemporary Resources in Irish
Studies”
Chair: Miriam Souza (Universidade Federal da Bahia)
17:00-18:00: An Interview with Vincent Woods by Beatriz Kopschitz Xavier Bastos
(ABEI/IASIL)
Friday 12 September
9:00-10:10 Lecture 5: Maureen Murphy (Hofstra University, NY)
“ ‘I call to The Eye of The Mind’ : Memoirs of Time and Space in
Contemporary Ireland”
Chair: Zoraide Mesquita (Universidade Ibirapuera/ABEI)
10:10-10:30 Coffee break
10:30-12:00 Panel 5 (Auditorium Nádia Viana) & Panel 6 (Room 103)
12:00 -14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:10 Lecture 6: Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade do Porto/IASIL)
“Poetry and Portraiture: Figuring the Author in Heaney and Longley”
Chair: Laura Izarra (Universidade de São Paulo/ABEI/SILAS)
15:10-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-16h40 Lecture 7: Marcos Barbosa (Universidade Federal da Bahia)
"Lampião and Maria Bonita: A playwright's approach to a modern
Brazilian legend."
Chair: Munira H. Mutran (Universidade de São Paulo/ABEI)
16:45 Final remarks
20:30 Farewell dinner
WEDNESDAY - PANELS: 14:00 – 15:30
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PANEL 1 – Auditorium Nádia Viana | ||
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Contemporary Irish Theatre Chair: Roberto da Rocha (Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro) | ||
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Peter James Harris (Universidade Estadual Paulista) |
Translations and Portia Coughlan: the reception of two Irish plays in London | |
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Alexandre Sampaio (Universidade de São Paulo) |
Irish historical revision and the strategic position of the postcolonial writer in Brian Friel’s Translations | |
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Rosalie Haddad (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses) |
Making History and Translations: Brian Friel’s Episodes in the History of Ireland | |
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PANEL 2 – Room 103 | ||
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Contemporary Irish Criticism Chair: Magda Velloso Tolentino (Universidade Federal de São João del Rei) | ||
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Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses/ IASIL) |
Literary and Cultural Criticism in Contemporary Ireland” | |
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Zoraide Rodrigues Carrasco de Mesquita (Universidade Ibirapuera) |
Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Ireland | |
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Luci Collin Lavalle (Universidade Federal do Paraná) |
Contemporary Irish Essayists – O’Toole, Kiberd and Arthur translated into Portuguese | |
THURSDAY - PANELS: 13:40 – 15:30
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PANEL 3 – Auditorium Nádia Viana | ||
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Ireland and South America Chair: Robério Rubem de Matos (Universidade Federal da Bahia) | ||
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Maria Eugenia Cruset (Universidade Nacional de La Plata, Argentina) |
Diasporas and communitarian press: Irish and Basques in Argentina | |
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Andrés Romera (University College Cork, PhD Student/SILAS) |
Translating history in the works of Eduardo Cormick | |
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Julie Donovan (University of Maryland) |
Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and the Politics of South America | |
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PANEL 4 – Room 103 | ||
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Irish Poetry Chair: Gisele Wolkoff (Universidade de Santo Amaro, SP) | ||
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Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação (Universidade de São Paulo - PhD student) |
Translating Seamus Heaney | |
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Mariese Ribas Stankiewicz (Universidade de São Paulo - M.A. student) |
Shepherds on the Shore: Enya’s Dialogue with “The Sad Shepherd” by William Butler Yeats
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Gisele Wolkoff (UNISA / Universidade de São Paulo – PhD student) |
Women Poets and Politics in Ireland Today | |
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Claudio Quintino Crow |
From Fílidh to Films: Irish Bardic Spirit Through The Ages | |
PANELS: 10:30 – 12:00
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PANEL 5 – Auditorium Nádia Viana | ||
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Literature and Other Fields of Research Chair: Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação (USP-PhD student) | ||
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Magda Velloso Fernandes de Tolentino (Universidade Federal de São João del Rei) |
The Maamtrasna Massacre – Re-visiting History: James Joyce and Andrew M. Greely | |
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Noélia Borges (Universidade Federal da Bahia) |
Spaces of History and Identity in “The Wind That Shakes The Barley” | |
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Roberto Ferreira da Rocha (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) |
McPherson´s This Lime Tree Bower/Saltwater: The Filmic Metamorphosis of a Play | |
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PANEL 6 – Room 103 | ||
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The Irish Abroad: Questioning Heterotopias Chair: Denise Scheyerl (Universidade Federal da Bahia) | ||
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Laura Izarra (Universidade de São Paulo/ABEI/SILAS) |
Echoes of Irish Cultural Nationalism in South America | |
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Maria Graciela Elligi (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina) |
Away from home? Away… ‘at home’? Heterotopias and the construction of place. | |
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María Graciela Adamoli (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina) |
The role of heterotopias as real sites of creativity and of artistic manifestations. An analysis of Colm Tóibín’s novel The South. | |
ABSTRACTS
Lectures and Seminars
During the course of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and particularly from the 1980s on, Northern Irish photography gained a reputation for its socio-documentary representation of the human and social after-effects of violence. Since the Peace Process began photography in the North has had to find a new mode of seeing its post-conflict society. This lecture will discuss two recent examples of photographic work by Northern Irish photographers which both directly and obliquely attempt to find new ways in which to view Northern Ireland, and specifically its economically and socially changed circumstances in the post-devolution era. John Duncan’s Bonfire series is made up of photographs of Eleventh Night bonfires, traditionally lit on the evening of the Eleventh of July as part of the events surrounding the commemoration of the Twelfth of July, ‘celebrating’ the victory of William of Orange over King James in 1690. Duncan photographs the bonfires in the process of being constructed and his images question their place in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland. Victor Sloan’s exhibition ‘Luxus’ is made up of images of a bar in Berlin, but the photographs (and accompanying text by Glenn Patterson) make clear that an analogy is being drawn between post-communist Berlin and post-Troubles Belfast. The lecture will discuss these two exhibitions in the context of Northern Irish photography and the new political contexts and critical spaces of devolutionary Northern Ireland.
Lecture 2: “The Poetry of Ciaran Carson: History, Locality and Global Ireland”
Edward Larrissy (Queen’s University, Belfast)
Building on my essay, “Irish Writing and Globalisation” (Essays and Studies (2006)), this lecture will assume the long-standing global consciousness of Irish writing. This effectively means recognizing the truth of what Simon During says in his “Postcolonialism and Globalisation” in Postcolonial Studies (1998): “[t]he colonial era is going to be remembered as always already global.” That notion is demonstrated in European literature, During argues, as early as the eighteenth century in the fashion for Orientalism; and also in the way the cult of Ossian was adopted on an international stage as the model for promoting the claims of indigenous literary traditions, even as it proved that these were outmoded in the modern world of commerce. The orientalist and Ossianic motifs, though famously present in Irish writing from this period onwards, cannot there have the same function as that which they adopt, for instance, in British writing. They carry a different tale – of defeat, of defiance, of accusation, of proud identification.
Ciaran Carson’s poetry has always been marked by the way in which, not unlike the work of his friend Paul Muldoon, he brings a learned understanding of Gaelic myth, history and language into relationship with learnedly international allusions, motifs and styles. Yet Carson’s exoticism is thoroughly historicised, and speaks of the particularity of Irish history. In Breaking News (2003), he displays a Belfast whose streets bear the names of distant places in the Crimea; but they are those of British imperial battles, and these operate as a reminder of Ireland’s submission to the Empire. Carson has always referred to American poetry; but the way in which he employs occasional stylistic allusions to Carlos Williams could itself be seen as an index of the historicizing of the aesthetic, for his Belfast black taxi rusting in a field of blue thistles deliberately suggests the historicizing of the impulse to write about a red wheelbarrow. In his new (February, 2008) collection, For All We Know, questions of riven identity and political conflict appear to be amost entirely displaced into the terms of an uncanny and deliberately repetitious romance set in European locations, including Paris and Berlin. (Note that this lecture may well be among the first scholarly treatments of this new book.) The encounter with the lover, who is occasionally seen as foreign, becomes a surreal exploration of the way identity is founded on identification with others; nor does the book seek entirely to dissolve this fundamental existential condition into the terms of a particular stage of history. Yet at the same time, ominous and haunting references to the Northern Irish Troubles intrude, as a reminder of the ways in which the splitting inherent in identity can issue in conflict: a reminder which also insists on historical specificity.
Seminar 1: “Revising the Role of Irish Cinema in the Construction of the Irish Imaginary”
Rosa González (Universitat de Barcelona)
The recurrence of a reduced number of signifiers in the representation of Ireland and the Irish on screen has led to the assumption that Irish-themed films are unrealistic, that they offer simplistic and somehow condescending images of the isle with a view to attracting tourism.
However, I shall contend that this form of popular culture may also act as a site of resistance, and will illustrate with examples how received and stereotypical notions of Irishness are being undermined, particularly in the area of gender politics.
What is the current state of Irish Catholicism? Do the great transformations in power, practice and perhaps belief amount to a crisis of faith or a collapse of ‘empire’ – that is a religious regime that exercised monolithic power in Ireland and its Catholic Anglophone dominions abroad? This lecture addresses these questions through an ethnographic encounter with the centre of Irish Catholicism – the national seminary at Maynooth – and one of its edges –in the form of a return to the people of a parish in the hills of Donegal who were the subjects of Taylor’s 1995 book, “Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics.”
This seminar will investigate the responses of photographers to the Troubles and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Beginning with works by Paul Seawright and Victor Sloan, it will examine the ways in which photographers reacted to journalistic modes of representation of the Troubles by creating a pseudo-documentary art that both recorded the Troubles and asked questions about the ways in which photography sees violence and its after-effects. The second part of the seminar will discuss the ways in which a new generation of photographers (such as Gareth McConnell, Daniel Jewesbury and Ursula Burke, Donovan Wylie, John Duncan, and the German photographer Claudio Hils) have reacted to the post-conflict situation in Northern Ireland. Finally the seminar will return to the work of Paul Seawright, discussing his work in Africa and Afghanistan and assessing whether in these projects an aesthetic and political response, which is initiated by the history of Northern Ireland, is carried over into Seawright’s more ‘global’, recent work.
Lecture 4: “Omnium Gatherum: Historical and Contemporary Resources in Irish Studies”
Margaret Kelleher (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
This lecture will analyse the ‘compilation impulse’ in Irish studies, from both a historical and contemporary perspective. It will begin with a discussion of the ten-volume anthology Irish Literature, published in the United States in 1904, and will analyse the ambition and international significance of this compilation. Moving to more contemporary compilation projects, the lecture will examine the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991; 2002) both as a pioneering project and as the last in a lineage of printed compilations, Finally, the focus will move to contemporary electronic resources in Irish studies. Is the database the new genre of the twenty-first century? What new research possibilities and problems emerge from these resources?
FRIDAY
Lecture 5: “‘I call to The Eye of The Mind’: Memoirs of Time and Space in Contemporary Ireland”
Maureen Murphy (Hofstra University, NY)
In the last ten years or so, Irish writers have become known as writers of memoirs. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) and Nuala O’Faoláin’s Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (1996) are perhaps the best known, but Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) and John McGahern’s Memoir (2005) are perhaps the more interesting and better examples of the genre which differs from the autobiography - chronological and purporting to be objective - by its episodic structure and its selectivity.
This lecture will consider the shapes of sadness that inform time and place in the four memoirs. The opening of Frank McCourt’s memoir, an allusion to the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, speaks for all. “When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” The miseries of these four memoirs differ: poverty and alcohol, neglect and alcohol, death, politics and betrayal. The tone of each memoir differs as well. How did each writer negotiate her/his passage through the events of the past? How did the events of their lives relate to the times in Ireland? How do the memoirs relate to other works by the writer?
Lecture 6: “Poetry and Portraiture: Figuring the Author in Heaney and Longley”
Rui Carvalho Homem (Universidade do Porto)
This lecture will address some of the many instances of ekphrasis that can be found in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Particular attention will be given to cases in which the relation between verbal and visual artefacts extends and inflects the traditional generic description of the lyric as a representation of the “speaking” self, a space for subjective revelation. This will entail a particular focus on poetic confrontations with the art of portraiture, but also its close implication (in Heaney and Longley) with another pictorial genre: the still life.
Lecture 7: "Lampião and Maria Bonita: A playwright's approach to a modern
Brazilian legend."
Marcos Barbosa (Universidade Federal da Bahia)
Lampião and Maria Bonita are the two most important characters related to Cangaço, the social phenomenon of rural bandits that lived in the countryside of Brazilian Northeast in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their importance to the understanding of this rural gang has continuously attracted the attention of Brazilian historians for the past seventy years, as well as of foreign well known researchers such as Eric Hobsbawm. This lecture is a playwright´s recollection of the writing of "Auto de Angicos", a history play on the Cangaço, now in its second production, touring the country under the direction of Amir Haddad.
PANELS
WEDNESDAY
PANEL 1: Contemporary Irish Theatre Auditorium Nádia Viana
"Translations and Portia Coughlan: the reception of two Irish plays in London”
Peter James Harris (Universidade Estadual Paulista/SJRP)
This paper will present the contribution of the author to the project "From Ireland to Brazil: Critical Texts". Focusing on the reception by the London critics of the first productions of Brian Friel's Translations, in 1981, and Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan, in 1996, the paper will begin with a short history of English theatre criticism, a genre that is notable by its absence from the Brazilian press. The analysis of the critical response to the two productions will particularly emphasise the English perception of the Irishness of the two plays, suggesting that this provides a snapshot of Anglo-Irish cultural relations at two historical moments.
“Making History and Translations: Brian Friel’s Episodes in the History of Ireland”
Rosalie Haddad (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses)
The two plays analyzed in this paper explore episodes in the history of Ireland, in one case through the lives of ordinary people, and in the other through those of people who contributed to the changes that took place. They indicate how a statement, an emotion or an aspiration can have one meaning the moment it is uttered and another meaning a second later, when what is intended is received, decoded and understood or misunderstood – appreciated, assessed – by its intended audience. As a result these two plays have had an important impact on twentieth- century audiences, both in Ireland and abroad.
“Irish historical revision and the strategic position of the postcolonial writer in Brian Friel’s Translations”
Alexandre Sampaio (Universidade de São Paulo - PhD student)
This paper aims at analysing Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), based on a postcolonial reading of the Irish situation at the end of the 1970s. We propose that Friel’s play takes the form of a historical updating which operates both denotatively and figuratively, in which aspects of the colonial history of Ireland and England are used as a metaphor for contemporary problems involving the Republic and the North. Thus, in seeking a concept for Irish national and cultural identity, we consider Friel’s play as a form of nationalist historical revision, represented as a fictional re-reading of the nineteenth-century colonisation. In Translations, we see that the search for identity reveals the author’s conscience and political intention; in addition, Friel conducts a self-critical examination of the image and strategic position of the postcolonial writer.
PANEL 2: Contemporary Irish Criticism ROOM 103
“Literary and Cultural Criticism in Contemporary Ireland”
Beatriz Kopschitz Bastos (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses/ IASIL)
This paper, part of the inter-institutional research project “From Ireland to Brazil: Critical Texts”, focuses primarily on criticism in Ireland after 1980, considering the development of Irish Studies in the academia and commenting on two broad scholarly approaches: revisionism and post-colonialism. The paper begins with a comparative brief review of criticism in Ireland in the Revival and after Partition, and, in the end, points out to contemporary critical perspectives that have emerged with the social transformations of The Celtic Tiger years and the impact of globalized world on Irish culture.
“Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Ireland”
Zoraide Rodrigues Carrasco de Mesquita (Universidade Ibirapuera)
As part of the research project “From Ireland to Brazil: Critical Texts”, this paper focuses on some of the topics – such as multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism – that have commanded the attention of scholars about contemporary Ireland. How does an already divided country concerning religious/political convictions deal with the recent waves of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers? This central question will be examined in this paper, considering the ideas of Edna Longley, Declan Kiberd and John Brannigan on this subject.
“Contemporary Irish Essayists – O’Toole, Kiberd and Arthur translated into Portuguese”
Luci Collin Lavalle (Universidade Federal do Paraná)
The paper aims at discussing a translation project which focuses on the literary production of three contemporary Irish essayists, namely, Fintan O’Toole, Declan Kiberd and Chris Arthur. Framed by some theoretical reflections, this analysis of the translational process intends to point out relevant cultural (historical and political references, for instance) and linguistic (structural and lexical) implications which came out from the translation of the cited essayists into Portuguese.
THURSDAY
PANEL 3: Ireland and South America Auditorium Nádia Viana
“Diasporas and communitarian press: Irish and Basques in Argentina”
Maria Eugenia Cruset (Universidade Nacional de La Plata, Argentina)
The similarities between the non-statal nationalisms, such the case of the Irish and the Basque, are so obvious that is has become commonly thought that one is the reflection of the other,- as in a mirror-, however, we must start facing their differences to fully understand them. And this, done from the Diasporas. Doing this establishes a difference with the “Homeland” and brings an original vision.
Ideas such as nationalism and self determination and what it implied, the role of the Church and the woman; the question of the “race”; the armed fight as a way to achieve political objectives; not only differenced Irish and Basques in Argentina, but also did it between them and their origin places. Differences, more than similarities, we will look for through communitarian press.
“Translating history in the works of Eduardo Cormick”
Andrés Romera (University College Cork, PhD Student/SILAS)
This presentation intends analysing the Irish presence existing in the works of the Irish-Argentinean writer Eduardo Cormick, a descendant from Irish emigrants who immigrated to Argentina in the XIX century. He was born in Junín (in Buenos Aires County) in 1956, and has received several awards for his works, mainly short novels and short stories. Junín was a key city in the development of railroads, and many young Irish migrants found employment there.
This paper will examine some of Eduardo’s works, where he writes about the lives of Irish emigrants through his own eyes. It presents an analysis of the Irish Diaspora through the literature of Eduardo, a vision of the Irish migration into Argentina. As Eduardo states in the introduction to his book Entre Gringos y Criollos: ‘family tales mix within general city tales, growing, changing, and when told again, they are not the original tale, and they are not true, but they are a version of the truth’.
Firstly, I will discuss the story El padre Victor da batalla, where we will review the visit of an Irish priest to a family of Irish farmers in La Pampa. These priests visited the “estancias” or “chacras” (big and small farms) in order to facilitate the needs of their various parishes spread throughout the country.
Secondly, I will examine the presence of real characters in his works, such as Claudio Cormick (his father), or Maria “Molly” Killian (the writer’s grandmother).
Finally I will briefly review one of his essays (Buenaventura Luna o los Irlandeses sin saberlo) and his short novel Quema su Memoria. In this essay he writes about John Dougherty, an unknown Irish soldier who came to Argentina, and in this novel Eduardo writes about another soldier, the most famous Irish man in Argentina, Guillermo Brown.
“Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and the Politics of South America”
Julie Donovan (University of Maryland)
This paper analyzes the role South America played in the work of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan, c.1783-1859), a relatively neglected figure, although she was one of the most successful, famous and controversial authors in early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. As a means of combating colonialism, Owenson sought to frame Ireland not as an outlying province of Britain, but rather as a member of a wider Europe and the world. In her travelogues on France and Italy, she stressed long-standing cultural links between Ireland and continental Europe, but she also emphasized the links that Ireland had with other countries, in particular South America. This is particularly evident in her 1818 novel, Florence Macarthy. The work opens with a ship called El Libertador (which recalls the independence fighter, José de San Martin) drawing into the Irish coastline. On board is the hero of the novel, Lord Fitzaldem. He is Irish, but also does not seem assigned "to any particular country. He seemed rather to belong to the world" (1.5). Though Fitzaldem is returning to his homeland to retrieve his family's property after it was appropriated by colonial stealth, he is a thoroughly cosmopolitan character, speaking Spanish to his fellow shipmen, and later revealing that he has been to a "West India island, on a secret mission" (1.6) and South America, taking part in its Wars of independence.
Owenson's novel goes on to intertwine Ireland's quest for independence from British rule with much of South America's quest for independence from Spain. During debates on the question, the villain of Florence Macarthy, a lackey of colonial powers, does not sympathize with the independence movements of South America, engendered by what he dubs as "a race defined by one of the Spanish fiscals as creatures destined by nature to work like moles in mines" (3.133). He goes on to denigrate peoples of South America as "a bloody and inhuman people," declaring that their religion "is a religion of blood" (3.137). Similar arguments were made by Britain's colonial advocates made against the Irish. As Owenson's hero and heroine, who have earlier met in South America, reunite to re-stage their campaign for independence in Ireland, Owenson clearly wants to broaden the colonial debate and pronounce that Ireland is not alone in its struggle against inequitable authority.
PANEL 4: Irish Poetry ROOM 103
“Translating Seamus Heaney”
Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação (Universidade de São Paulo - PhD student)
The aim of this paper is to discuss the conceptual difficulties in the translation of Seamus Heaney’s theoretical oeuvre. As a poet from the North of Ireland, the Nobel laureate of 1995 inscribes in the root of its critical analysis his dubious relationship with the country he comes from. Through a dialectical relationship of presence and absence, the author rehearses an epistemological exile in which, at the same time he depicts his appreciation for other poets, he is indeed, representing his own geographical and psychological distancing from his native land. Our translation of four of his essays enables us to comprehend this feature as the way in which Heaney tries to get rid of his guilt of leaving the country in the middle of a civil war.
Mariese Ribas Stankiewicz (Universidade de São Paulo - M.A. student)
This article deals with an analysis of textual dialogue between William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Sad Shepherd” and the lyrics of “Anywhere Is,” by singer Enya, while verifying similarities and differences between them. It also aims at explaining how the historical consciousness defined by Hans-Georg Gadamer, which is implicitly expressed through contemporary Irish songwriters’ works, operates as a suitable literary organisation activated by the circumstances in which these songwriters live. Among other factors, these circumstances are frequently enlivened by Irish history and by the literary past lived by many of Ireland’s writers. In view of this fact, “Anywhere Is” functions as an illustration of Enya’s transformation of past values into something modern and present. Further analyses of her work and of the relevance of literature and history for many artists’ poetic imaginations corroborate this view considerably, and occasionaly reveal textual dialogues with the work by Yeats.
“Women Poets and Politics in Ireland Today”
Gisele Wolkoff (UNISA / Universidade de São Paulo – PhD student)
The lyrical discourse can be understood concomitantly both as representation and expression of places of enunciation and subjectivity. The contemporary Irish case of women poets, therefore, reveals the spaces from and in which women write and think of themselves, their counterparts and the social dynamics of their own contexts of production. According to Edna Longley (1994, p.11) "literature makes a good barometer of asymmetric consciousness in Ireland", which provides us with a sense of how diverse and contradictory women´s poetic discourse from the 1960´s up to the present days in Ireland is. This paper outlines the main authors and issues found in their works, in the light of the critical discussion on poetry and politics - nationalism and feminility - and recuperates the need for constant examination of how elocutions are predominantly revealed both explicit and implicitly.
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From Fílidh to Films: Irish Bardic Spirit Through The Ages
Claudio Quintino Crow
A nation of poets, storytellers and writers, Ireland preserves and transforms – sometimes unwittingly - the tradition of the old Celtic Bards, the Fíli. In this talk we will address some key topics on the subject, including: “By the Gods my Ancestors Worshipped”: the importance of the Word for the Celts; “Holy Writ” – the preservation of Celtic Myths and Sagas by Early Irish Christian Monks; “Gaelic Forbidden”: The Statutes of Kilkenny and the imposition of English Language; “Changes galore”: English language, Irish mind; “Celtic Twilight”: Yeats reawakens the Celtic Gods; “Pop Mart: Irishness for the crowds” – from O’Carolan to U2 to Roddy Doyle; “Bards of the Silver Screen”: imageing the Irish Soul; “Cyber-Bards”: Evolution, Revolution & Devolution – the Irish Bardic Spirit lives on.
FRIDAY
PANEL 5: Literature and Other Fields of Research
Auditorium Nádia Viana
“The Maamtrasna Massacre – Re-visiting History: James Joyce and Andrew M. Greely”
Magda Velloso Fernandes de Tolentino (Universidade Federal de São João del Rei)
In August 1882 , five members of a family were killed in the West of Ireland, and five other men were unjustly sentenced as the murderers. The trial took place in England, and the testimony was given in the Irish language. Later, James Joyce wrote an essay commenting on this trial, in which he depicts his ideas of the case being of greater concern in terms of Irish identity. Recently, in 2001 to be exact, Andrew M. Greely, who re-visits Irish history in many of his novels, re-tells the story of the murders and of the trial of Myles Joyce and his companions.
This paper, based on the use that History makes nowadays of new data as documents for understanding history, aims at bringing back into focus the issues of pre-independent Ireland, when the massacre took place, and the way the two writers mentioned, at different points in time, see these issues.
“Spaces of History and Identity in ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’”
Noélia Borges (Universidade Federal da Bahia)
It is true that the emphasis on history inevitably results in the valorization of tradition and the past, and it also exerts a prominent role in the forging of individual, social and cultural identity. “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” (2006) – the top prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival - , made by the British director Ken Loach, dealing as it does with a contentious historical and pivotal period of Ireland (events that sparked the Irish War of Independence and the eventual 1921 treaty partitioning through two young men), seems to give emphasis not only to cultural nationalism but also to the past captured with fresh painterly detail, in muted blues, grays, browns and greens, and some lamp-lit interiors. Set in insurgent Ireland, in rural Cork County, in the turbulent years of 1920- 1922, the film paints history in stark colors and observes as these blur and bleed. Injustice, in Loach’s world, tends to be a simple matter. It resides in the unprincipled, dehumanizing exercise of power—whether wielded by capital, the state, or an occupation army—against the powerless. The proposed paper addresses the role of history in developing a shared sense of identity, examining how xenophobia, exclusion, discrimination, violence, power/powerlessness, war and genocide are parts of the dark and brutal underside of the imperial machine manipulated by a devious and callous colonial master. It also analyses the astonishingly realistic view of the action's savagery-ordinary people organized themselves to fight against foreign or oppressive rule – which provides a striking counterpoint to the compelling beauty of the landscape - the green fields, earth-brown interiors and darkening grey skies. Historical movies, of course, are made in response to events in their own time.
Roberto Ferreira da Rocha (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Considered by the critics one of the most innovative Irish playwrights, Conor McPherson (1971) has also a career as screen writer and film director. So far, he has written the script of I Went Down (1997) and directed three films: Endgame (based on Samuel Beckett’s play and done for TV, 2000), Saltwater (2000), and The Actors (2003). Based on his play This Lime Tree Bower (1996), Saltwater is a complete reworking of the original text. In this paper I want to examine the way in which the dramatic discourse is adapted and appropriated to fit filmic narrative, by analyzing the textual rearrangements done in the screen play and the film itself. The paper relays deeply in the various theories of adaptation and appropriation (Hutcheon 2006; Sanders 2006), particularly those who deal more specifically with literature and film (Stam and Raengo 2005) and theatre and film (Helbo 1997; Knopf 2005).
PANEL 6: The Irish Abroad : Questioning Heterotopias ROOM 103
Echoes of the Irish Cultural Nationalism in South America
Laura Izarra (Universidade de São Paulo/ABEI/SILAS)
In the turn of the nineteenth century the cultural national movement aims at raising consciousness of Ireland’s Irishness as a way of de-anglicising the nation. A great debate on what a national literature should be, stirred an intellectual controversy that appeared in a series of articles on the Saturday issues of the Daily Express in 1899 penned by foremost Irish writers and critics, such as William Butler Yeats, A.E., John Eglinton, William Larminie. This paper explores how this new movement of ideas echoes in the diaspora across the Atlantic in the southern hemisphere. The Irish diasporic writer William Bulfin, editor of The Southern Cross in Argentina, disseminated Douglas Hyde’s and Yeats’s concepts of a national identity and literature creating a space in his imagined community abroad (and in Ireland when he returned) that though it does exist in reality it is outside of all places.
This paper will unfold the contradictory functions in relation to the space: either they create a space of illusion that exposes every real space still more illusory, or create a space that is real and perfect, a site of compensation if compared to the past space. The main questions posed here based on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias are: how are these places constituted?; how do the juxtapositions of the real and the unreal function in the construction of different kinds of heterotopias in Ireland and Argentina?; do heterotopias help to keep a national identity alive in the diaspora?
Away from home? Away… ‘at home’? Heterotopias and the construction of place.
Maria Graciela Elligi (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa)
Either Irish or of Irish origin, both main characters of the novels Alias Grace by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and Moira Sullivan by Argentine writer Juan José Delaney are women “world travelers” (Lugones in Soja 1996) “caught between patriarchies, ambiguous past and futures” (Clifford 1997) in search of their own places.
This paper will address how the notion of place is worked out in these characters on the basis of heterotopias- other spaces of real existence defined by Michel Foucault as spaces that simultaneously represent, contest, and invert all other spaces (in Harvey 1989). Understanding these two particular constructions of place implies, necessarily, revisiting the concept of home as defined by several critics (Brah 1996, Clifford 1997, Sarup 1996) and considering which one/s underlies/y the analyzed texts.
The role of heterotopias as real sites of creativity and of artistic manifestations. An analysis of Colm Tóibín’s novel The South.
María Graciela Adamoli (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa)
In our modern society new meanings are assigned to older materializations of space and time so much so that ideas about these concepts are charged with ambiguity, contradiction and struggle. In the field of aesthetic architects, painters, sculptors, poets and writers try to communicate certain values through the construction of a spatial form striving to achieve a sense of eternity in the midst of flux and change. In addition, subjective spaces -product of our mental perception, imagination, fantasy or fiction- affect our interpretation of the world and action. Philosopher Michael Foucault, for example, considers space as a metaphor for a site of power which usually constrains but sometimes liberates processes of Becoming. In this sense, the act of bringing into being of an aesthetic product can be essential to discovery and growth of self, and this process is developed through life paths in time and space. Taking into account the different representations of space the purpose of this work is to analyse the role of heterotopias in connection with the building of an artistic identity, in Colm Tóibín’s novel The South.
DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF IRELAND CULTURE IRELAND EMBASSY OF IRELAND IN BRAZIL Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses
ABEI
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA
www.freewebs.com/irishstudies