The Irish Seminar 2009
The Keough Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame announces the IRISH SEMINAR 2009 at O'Connell House, 58 Merrion Square, Dublin.
An intensive graduate Seminar aimed at the best minds in the emerging group of Irish Studies scholars worldwide. Under the Executive Directorship of Joe Cleary and the Directors, Seamus Deane, Maud Ellmann, Christopher Fox, Luke Gibbons, Breandán Ó Buachalla and Kevin Whelan. The IRISH SEMINAR will be held from 15 June - 3 July 2009, at the Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre, located in historic O'Connell House in prestigious Merrion Square at the heart of Dublin city.
The aims of the IRISH SEMINAR are to promote ambitious new scholarship in Irish Studies and to generate a supportive environment that will nurture the intellectual poise of young scholars. Edward Said was the first keynote speaker to address the IRISH SEMINAR in 1999; others keynotes have included Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacqueline Rose, Derek Walcott, Tom Paulin, Homi Bhabha, Edna O'Brien, Paul Muldoon, John McGahern, Stephen Rea, Alice McDermott, Medbh McGuckian, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Benedict Anderson.
Participants will have unprecedented access to the finest scholars in Irish Studies during daily closed sessions with programme faculty. Participants will also enjoy access to major libraries in Dublin, including the National Library of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, and Trinity College.
Theme: Apocalypse and Utopia
2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. An epochal moment in modern history, this event presaged the collapse of Soviet Communism and elevated capitalism into unrivalled global command, suddenly freeing it of a serious ‘modern’ global competitor-ideology. Against the backdrop of a digital and information revolution that accelerated cultural and economic globalizations, this novel situation encouraged a mood of post-historical exhilaration, most vividly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History?He argued that liberal capitalism had decisively vanquished all rival ideologies and thus represented the final end-point of political evolution.
However, two decades later, and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the endist imagination has taken a darker apocalyptic turn as Western liberalism and capitalism wrestle with systemic crises. These include climate change and environmental degradation, energy crises, a ‘clash of civilizations’ between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West,’ a fiscal convulsion of a magnitude that has recalled the Great Depression, and a fundamental restructuring of the world system represented by the ‘rise of Asia.’ Liberal capitalism may have inherited the earth after 1989, and it may still lack a serious global competitor-system, but its ability to redress or resolve these crises remains far from apparent.
The modern Irish political and cultural imagination was never a stranger to rhetorics of utopia and apocalypse. The period from the early modern plantations to the calamitous history of the long nineteenth-century - the extended breakdown of Gaelic culture, the bloodletting of 1798, the devastation of the Great Famine, the violent class struggles of the Land Wars, the repeated collisions of nationalism and unionism that eventually issued in partition - fed catastrophist versions of history in modern Irish Catholic and Protestant cultures alike. Across much of the twentieth century, Irish society seemed too poor, backward and conservative to greatly nurture the utopian imagination, except in savagely thwarted or dystopian versions: the period between Yeats and Beckett experienced an efflorescence of radically experimental literary and cultural production steeped in a sense of historical catastrophe, cultural exhaustion and linguistic collapse.
Later, in the 1990s, as the island experienced the unprecedented prosperity of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the sense of a welcome release from a baleful history represented by the ‘Peace Process,’ a heady consumerist and end-of-history euphoria coursed through Irish popular culture too. A new confidence flourished that hope and history might be made to rhyme. Even then, however, the sense of history as catastrophe, long embedded in the Irish cultural imagination, persisted in subdued form, and the recent turbulence in the capitalist system has churned up a renewed sense of radical uncertainty.
Looking to these complex histories, present disturbances, and imagined futures, the IRISH SEMINAR 2009 will investigate the rhetorics of progress and catastrophe, apocalypse and utopia, millenarianism and anti-millenarianism, in Irish culture from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. The twentieth anniversary of ‘the Fall of the Wall’ offers an occasion to reflect on how the utopian promises of the Enlightenment and modernity issued in the nightmarish vistas of Cold War Nuclear Winters and post-Cold War Global Warmings. Within this framework, the IRISH SEMINAR will consider Irish literature in both major languages, film, popular culture, and social and intellectual history in a broad international context.