Finnegans Wake, Flann O'Brien, Human and Nonhuman

Please join us at the James Joyce Centre on Saturday, October 5th at 6.30pm for the launch of two extraordinary new works of scholarship about James Joyce and Flann O'Brien.

(Edinburgh University Press; edited by Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan) opens new ground by exploring the productive tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric readings of James Joyce’s final modernist masterpiece. Drawing on the most up-to-date theories and methodologies, twelve leading Joyce scholars offer valuable new insights into the interwoven historical and planetary dimensions of Finnegans Wake. The volume’s focus allows the contributors to read the Wake’s nonhuman imaginary in original, often surprising comparative contexts and to spotlight enlightening nonhuman themes in Joyce’s circular history. A century later, Finnegans Wake remains a vibrant and vital text in which to interrogate the limits, exploitations and common plight of human and nonhuman life in the 21st-century.

(Cork University Press; edited by Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan and John Greaney) is the first book to explore in detail the author’s interest in the agency, materiality, and potential sentience of environments, animals and machines. At every turn, O’Brien’s writing challenges anthropocentric values and troubles conventional notions of the human. O’Brien’s deconstruction of conventional narratives of the human-nonhuman binary extends across genres. Drawing on a wide range of methodologies, paradigms and theorists, the contributors unearth new historical contexts for the study of O’Brien. These interventions not only bring new dimensions of O’Brien’s work to the surface, but reveal him as a key but overlooked figure for understanding the role of the nonhuman in Irish modernist cultural production.

The collections will be launched by Sharae Deckard and Tom Walker, with additional remarks by the editors Paul Fagan, Richard Barlow, Katherine Ebury and John Greaney.

Doors open at 6pm. Tickets are free but booking is essential.

Richard Barlow is an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University and a former Academic Director of the Trieste Joyce School. He is the author of The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture (Notre Dame University Press, 2017) and Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Sharae Deckard is Associate Professor in UCD’s School of English. Her most recent book is Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture, co-authored with Michael Niblett and Stephen Shapiro (SUNY Press, 2024). Sharae has co-edited six special issues of journals, including: “Food, Energy, Climate: Irish Culture and World-Ecology” for Irish University Review and “Ireland in the World-System,” for Journal of World-Systems Research. With Treasa De Loughry, she is co-investigator of the ‘Cultural Imaginaries of Just Transition’ project at UCD.

Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (2014) and Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (2021) and the co-editor of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writing: Outside his Jurisfiction (2018), Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (2023) and Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature (2024).

Paul Fagan is Assistant Professor at LMU Munich, and the leader of the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s–1950s. He is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021), Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (2021) and five Flann O’Brien essay collections with Cork University Press.

John Greaney is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is the author of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation (2022) and co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021).

Tom Walker is Associate Professor at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time (2015) and the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts (2024).

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Host or Publisher James Joyce Centre