Guest Lecture Series in Irish Studies: “Coming to Terms with the Tundish: The Languages of Irish Modernism” by Dr. Aidan O’ Malley

 
ABSTRACT:
By focusing on the ways in which the language shift in Ireland haunts the works of Irish writers in the early 20th century, this lecture aims to provide students with an overview of a key characteristic of Irish modernist literature. After a brief survey of the history of languages in Ireland, the lecture will illustrate how a set of Irish writers, including James Joyce, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien responded to what Thomas Kinsella termed ‘the dual tradition’ of Irish literature. While the variety of their very different responses to this split inheritance will be emphasised, the lecture will highlight how language itself is always, on some level, unheimlich and under question in their works. And it will be suggested that this unsettled perspective on language is one of the ways in which these Irish writers spoke to Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative, ‘make it new’.

 
Guest speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aidan O’ Malley 
                               University of Rijeka, Croatia
 
BIODATA:
Aidan O’Malley is Associate Professor at the Department of English, University of Rijeka. His research has largely focused on different transnational and translational approaches to Irish literature. Besides numerous chapters and articles, edited journals and a volume of essays co-edited with Eve Patten, his publications include two books, Field Day and the Translation of Irish Identities: Performing Contradictions (Palgrave, 2011), and Irska književnost i kultura, 1600-2000: Stvaralaštvo na jeziku kolonizatora (Being Irish in English: Literature, Language, and the (Post-)Colonial Experience in Ireland, 1600-2000) (FFRI Press, 2021). Recently, he also co-edited a special issue of Elope 21:2 (2024), on ‘Irish Literature and Non-Anglophone Europe’.

Date: 23 October 2025
Time: 11.45- 13.15
Room: N.1.44
Contact: Dr. Nursen Gömceli
Nursen [dot] goemceli [at] aau [dot] at
(Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik)
 
Der Beitrag Guest Lecture Series in Irish Studies: “Coming to Terms with the Tundish: The Languages of Irish Modernism” by Dr. Aidan O’ Malley erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.