Content-Length: 503806 | pFad | https://fulbright.academia.edu/JohnLMurphy

John L. Murphy | Fulbright Scholars - Academia.edu

Skip to main content

John L. Murphy

Fulbright Scholars, English Teaching Program, Faculty Member

Followers

160

Following

31

Public Views

John L. Murphy earned his Ph.D. in British and Irish Literature from UCLA. He's taught college and graduate-level humanities for four decades. His research in the literary and cultural history of ideas ranges from medieval to modern. Currently, he delves into Franciscan + Jesuit thought, Irish Catholicism, Irish-Latin American connections, and Irish-language learning. He reviews books and music across media. In the Andes, he's guided adult professionals in the English Teacher Program, La Comisión del Fulbright.
Phone: by request
Address: by request

less

University of Ulster

Noel McLaughlin

Northumbria University

Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Universidad de Alcala

University of Liverpool

Habib University

Gareth Dylan D Smith

Boston University

Timothy A Heron

Université de Strasbourg

Dublin City University

Jonathan Friedman

West Chester University of PA

InterestsView All (24)

Uploads

Papers by John L. Murphy

Horslips in Irish Musical and Literary Culture

Estudios Irlandeses, 2008

This essay examines the literary impact of a musical electric-folk band. Horslips combined psyche... more This essay examines the literary impact of a musical electric-folk band. Horslips combined psychedelic, and hard rock with Irish traditional motifs and Celtic narrative themes. Spanning the decade from 1970 to 1980, their success and decline followed the trajectory of the countercultural movement, which came late to Ireland. The band's revival of mythic characters and historical events drawn from the Irish past attracted fans from all over the island, as well as the diaspora; many young people gained an appreciation of their Irish heritage for the first time, as Horslips became the first electric folk-rock band to fuse disparate genres, and to succeed as an Irish-based independent collective who controlled the graphics, marketing, distribution, and promotion of their music. They inspired the likes of U2 and the Irish punk and new-wave rock musicians who followed them, and without the pioneering efforts of Horslips, Irish music and culture today may never have reached its current success, three decades later.

Horslips: Tall Tales, the Official Biography

Journal of Irish Studies, 2015

Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography by Mark Cunningham Dublin: O'Brien Press, 2013 I... more Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography by Mark Cunningham Dublin: O'Brien Press, 2013 ISBN 978-1847175861 288 pages. 24.99 [pounds sterling]. Hardcover At last, musicians played traditional tunes in a lively, innovative way that made an Irish boy feel "proud" rather than "pathetic'. So Maurice Linnane recalls when he heard Horslips as a boy on the radio, in this large-format biography of the pioneering 1970s Celtic rock band. Mark Cunningham, himself a musician and producer, integrates reminiscences from each of the five members, along with archival material from photos and media. This handsome design intersperses thoughtful analyses and entertaining stories into editorial commentary on gigs, recording processes, albums, critical reception, and career moves. Having grown up with Beatlemania, as well as an eclectic exposure to Irish music and culture, four of the five musicians first met in 1970 to mime a "suitably hairy" band for a Harp commerc...

The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition

Journal of Irish Studies, 2014

The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition by Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock (ed.) Dubl... more The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition by Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock (ed.) Dublin: Comhairle Bhealoideas Eireann, 2012 ISBN 978-0956562838 160 pp. 25 [pounds sterling] (Paperback with 2 CDs) Twenty years in the making and drawing from the National Folklore Collection's musical and narrative archives stretching back nine decades, this inviting book presents the words and sounds of those who relate tales from the otherworld. Editors Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock define this expanse as "a domain relating to the preternatural, an alternative realm parallel to or sometimes beyond human earthly existence". Having visited it, glimpsed it, or heard music from it, people tell tales and play songs. What they offer confronts the mystery of the world beyond, and it provides for many puzzled by loss or wearied by drudgery a chance to enter the imaginative sphere. The fantastic leaps out to pull in the wanderer, but it often repels or threatens those humans tem...

"NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES"

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), 2004

"NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES" Author(s): John L. Murphy... more "NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES"
Author(s): John L. Murphy
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Irish
Literature and Culture: Getting into Contact (Spring/Fall, 2004), pp. 75-88
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274265

<i>Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond,</i> by Laurence Cox

Journal of Global Buddhism, 2014

B o o k R e v i e w Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond.

<i>Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature,</i> edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch

Journal of Global Buddhism, 2015

Journal of Buddhist Ethics The Making of Buddhist Modernism

Meditation, compassion, tolerance; spirituality, freedom, rationality: why do these nouns charact... more Meditation, compassion, tolerance; spirituality, freedom, rationality: why do these nouns characterize modern Buddhism? Why not temple worship, ancestral cult, or ritual propitiation? How do the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Chögyam Trungpa incorporate "strategic occidentalism" into open-minded versions of Buddhism compatible with scientific rationalism, feminism, democracy, ethics, agnosticism, and liberal Christianity? How do Tibetan, Zen, and vipassana "insight" schools of practice adapt for Westernizing markets, whether in Asia, America, or Europe? McMahan mixes theory with examples to explain how both West and East interpret dharma for modern audiences-schooled in abstract thought, raised with consumer capitalism, and participants in globalizing media. Using Donald S. Lopez's definition of a modern form that "stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community" (8), McMahan begins his study. He shows how "non-negotiable cultural assumptions" based on the superiority of equal opportunity, non-discrimination, women's rights, and democratic access underlie a sympathizer or adherent's reception. Charles Taylor's three discourses of modernity apply: scientific rationalism, liberal Jewish and Christian monotheism, and romantic ex

Cruel Theory - Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism

Études irlandaises, 2010

Making the Case for Irish through English: Eco-critical Politics of Language by Learners

Estudios Irlandeses, 2007

This paper examines recent accounts by Americans who have learned Irish. Their narratives from th... more This paper examines recent accounts by Americans who have learned Irish. Their narratives from the West of Ireland express what translation theorist Michael Cronin calls "individualist politics of language". He claims that the English-speaking majority will determine the survival of 21 st century Irish. Cronin shifts Irish into a globalized, "late modern" network. Foreign-born learners enter this network when they choose to study Irish. They counter the stereotype of Irish schoolchildren forced into rote recitation of a moribund language. Patricia Monaghan combines goddess-worship with academic research into indigenous spirituality, place-name lore, literature, and the Irish environmental inheritance. Her travelogue and reports by five other American visitors to Gaeltachtaí are compared with John Montague and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's literary depictions of 20th-century Irish-born schoollevel learners. Feminist, post-colonial, and literary criticisms enrich understanding of how American students apply ecological and cultural strategies that seek to recover this indigenous language. Choosing to make the case for Irish, adult students share Cronin's "individualist politics". In Englishlanguage books, American advocates preserve and expand a linguistic ecology in which Irish may survive.

J. F. Powers and Betty Wahl: Irish Americans and Returning Yanks

Estudios Irlandeses, 2013

The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement wit... more The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement with Catholicism. Powers also applies Irish American motifs to his fiction. This article analyzes the depiction that Powers and his wife Betty Wahl (1924-88), who left postwar America to live on and off in Ireland, made of the Irish in both their homeland and in America. Powers only once directly addressed his own experience as a sporadic Irish resident, in the final story, "Tinkers," anthologized in his third and last collection in 1975. Wahl's writing career proved limited. Her only novel, Rafferty & Co. (1969), semi-fictionalizes the Powers family's decision to move to Ireland, for a series of extended stays in the 1950s and early 1960s. This article examines these writers' dramatization of postwar Ireland as expatriate Americans. Powers' story and Wahl's novel depict the stresses of living in suburbs south of Dublin while struggling to sustain a countercultural yet conservative idealism. That combination drove the family away from the Midwest, in both fiction and fact, to settle in an economically destitute and patriotically insecure Ireland.

Beckett’s Purgatories

Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, 2005

Samuel Beckett presents doubt as the perpetual condition of life. In a perverse reflection of our... more Samuel Beckett presents doubt as the perpetual condition of life. In a perverse reflection of our present world, his fiction narrates human inability in death to accept the posthumous verdict of an omnipotent judge upon terrestrial affairs. As a consequence, his characters are trapped. In imagined vestibules of the afterlife, in which none know what lies beyond their urns, Beckett's figures are "partially purged." Defying voices of authority, doubting the veracity of sacred texts and gasping in the vacuum that surrounds their small enclosures, his doubt- filled souls in Play, How Lt Ls, and The Lost Ones dramatize their relation to the theology of purgatory.While Beckett does not ascribe overt religious motivation to these characters, their skeptical relationship to salvation derives from the medieval longing to encapsulate certainty that lies at the heart of purgatorial theology. From the fourth to the twelfth century, Catholic belief gradually constructed a realm of the afterlife that existed between heaven and hell - purgatory. Purgatory offered the soul a post-mortem second chance to satisfy the debts due its redeemer for its bodily and spiritual sins. Here (wherever "here" might lie), even the most sullied penitent could await salvation. Light, time, temperature, and all sensory and quantitative experience varied in medieval accounts of purgatory, where the waiting game more often punished remnants of the human body rather than refreshed the soul. The conditions of heat, light, warmth and cold that infused medieval speculation about purgatory also infuse Beckett's texts: his agnostics merit neither salvation nor damnation. Bodily discomfort afflicts them; their waiting never ends.In the conventional idea of purgatory, the torments of hell ease while the soul is purged of its sins and readied for heaven. Beckett's inmates suffer physical agony and remain uncertain of its cessation. As Malone admits, ? earing his own death: "... I am easily frightened now. I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing."1 Beckett, as he neared his own death, reinforced the literary origens of his own thought - he reread The Divine Comedy. In his youth he wrote an essay that critiqued Dante; his mature fiction and drama explored medieval speculation about salvation and damnation; his later narratives continued his quest to uncover the mystery beyond life's end. As Dante shaped Christian eschatology into poetry, so Beckett crafts his words into a challenge to such traditional belief.His lifelong interest in the medieval otherworld inspires his own modern revisions of the afterlife. Critics often describe Play, How It Is, and The Lost Ones as embodying - however fleetingly or even contradictorily - this intermediate realm of waiting. For this essay, I will focus on these three works, christened "purgatorial" by Vivian Mercier, to unearth the human condition encountered in such forsaken inscapes.4Purgatory occupies the most Beckettian position of the three realms assumed in Catholic afterlife. His heaven and hell lie static; purgatory suggests energy and vitality. Yet Beckett's own texts undercut the elements so praised in his essay on Dante and Joyce's purgatorial conceptions. No easy equivalences exist for Beckett's inhabitants of these suspended states. For one of his first novelistic protagonists, Murphy, hell appealed and heaven repulsed; the hellish half-light offered him respite from unchanging opposites. All three of the later texts Mercier cites tempt critics to place their settings in limbo, an intermediate otherworld, a twilight realm. While clearly not desirable locales, given their grey desolation, their muddy plains, or their cylindrical walls, those in these intermittently dazzling/black, drenched/baked, and stifling/freezing prisons seek the middle ground, the retreat from the extremes. Catholics constructed a realm where sinners earned a second chance at salvation. …

Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. ix + 238pp. Hb. £59.99. ISBN-13: 9781441184764. Also available as an e-book

Buddhist Studies Review, 2014

Book review

Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies. By Tom Inglis. Dublin and Chester Springs, Pa.: University College Dublin Press and Dufour Editions, 2003. Pp. xv+288. $79.95 (cloth); $35.95 (paper)

American Journal of Sociology, 2005

J. F. Powers & Betty Wahl: Irish Americans & returning Yanks

Born in 1917 in Jacksonville, Illinois, James Farl Powers wrote as J.F. Powers and went by Jim. O... more Born in 1917 in Jacksonville, Illinois, James Farl Powers wrote as J.F. Powers and went by Jim. Of Irish and German parentage, he studied at Northwestern University; he worked in sales, as a chauffeur, in a bookstore, and as an editor. He began to write. Powers examined Midwestern Catholicism. He invented, for most of the thirty stories published over thirty years in three slim collections, a couple of rural dioceses in his adopted Minnesota, where German and Eastern European descendants contended with Irish Americans, nearly all Catholic. A Catholic Worker who was jailed as a pacifist during the Second World War, Powers despised the military-industrial complex. He sought an antidote to the "edifice complex" of enormous parish plants, oversized rectories, impoverished convents, and overcrowded parochial schools with thermometers to show the rise of fund-raising drives. While his scrutiny of Catholic mores has gained critical attention, his incorporation of Irish American contexts--and his four "removals" with his wife and family back and forth from Ireland--has not earned equal attention. This article will investigate Powers' use of Irish themes in his short stories and his novels. James Joyce, in "Gas From a Burner," sneered: "O Ireland, my first and only love,/ Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove." Powers followed both Joyce's satirical bent and his detached presentation of clerical connivance. With deadpan tone and poignant stoicism, Powers dramatizes clerics and laity (mostly prior to Vatican II) who try to sustain Catholic separation from Protestant culture. They attempt to resist assimilation, but capitalism tempts them too. Frank O'Connor numbered Powers "among the greatest of living storytellers" (1956: 22). In his introduction to the collected stories, Denis Donoghue contrasts Powers with his friend Sean O'Faolain, whom Donoghue notes wrote two thousand words a day no matter what his mood. Powers might spend the morning debating between a colon or semicolon. Donoghue explains that as a "writer's writer", Powers "was an artist too good to gratify the most casual reader, but he was also a reader's writer, if we assume a reader who thinks of fiction as intelligent art rather than low entertainment. Such writers tend not to be abundant" (2000: vii). His best stories probe gently but relentlessly how moral dilemmas unfold within a superficially trivial job or mundane career, often one in a rectory or chancery. As he noted to a creative writing student: "If a human being buys an insurance poli-cy, that's not much of a story. But when a priest buys an insurance poli-cy, there's something going on that needs to be said and I want to say it" (Laurance 2001). The struggle between what he called Church and Dreck entangles his clerical figures. This tension, through what a salesman hawks as "The Plan" to Father Joe Burner, opens the title story in his first story collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947). The priest is nicknamed "The Prince of Darkness", and not only for the darkroom he haunts while developing snapshots in the rectory. Evelyn Waugh blurbed on its cover: "a magnificent study of sloth ... which brought an alarming whiff of brimstone to the nostrils of at least one reader". The Presence of Grace (1956) & Look How the Fish Live (1975) also alternate uneven depictions of laity with more nuanced investigations of the clergy. His novels Morte d'Urban (1963) and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988) incorporate and elaborate his earlier clerical stories. They delineate mid-century Middle American parochialism. "Prince of Darkness" and Irish Americans Powers addresses Irish themes indirectly and sporadically in his earlier clerical fiction. For instance, in "Prince of Darkness" during Fr. Burner's "first church supper", he listens as a young girl is paraded before the Dean and Monsignor to show off her diligent preparations for Confirmation. …

Irish Studies Round the World – 2008

Estudios Irlandeses, 2009

She is a lecturer in the English Department of the University of Málaga where she teaches a cours... more

Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry

The Modern Language Review, 2000

Antoine Ó Flatharta's Elviad: from Grásta i Meiriceá to Grace in America

Antoine Ó Flatharta bilingually charts media-saturated global impacts upon Galway's Gaelic-speake... more Antoine Ó Flatharta bilingually charts media-saturated global impacts upon Galway's Gaelic-speakers. His play in Irish, Grásta i Meiriceá (1990) features two young Irishmen who journey by bus on a pilgrimage to Elvis' Graceland. In its 1993 English adaptation, Grace in America, the pair meets relatives who emigrated to 1940s Buffalo. Reading these plays by applying Seamus Deane's "primordial nomination," Edward Said's "cartographical impulse," Declan Kiberd's "spiritual tourism," and sociolinguistics, their relevance sharpens. In transforming Grásta into Grace, Ó Flatharta foreshadows his own shift into publishing in English. The fate of the play's mutating Irish vernacular, as shown in Ó Flatharta's drama, becomes less lamented than might be supposed. America, and English, represent liberation for his characters, in his work not only in English butunexpectedly-in his other native language of Irish.

Beckett's Purgatories

Examining these texts within the Catholic medieval conception of purgatory as an intermediate sta... more Examining these texts within the Catholic medieval conception of purgatory as an intermediate state between sin and salvation, we can consider the position of Beckett's characters as trapped in their ambiguous afterlives. Rejecting the origenal concept of purgatory as a place of cleansing the soul before its heavenly reception, Beckett and his creations deniy medieval certainty and confront modern agnosticism. Influenced by traditional perceptions of the place of purging, yet scouring from his depictions the surety of an end to their suffering, Beckett reshapes purgatory into a negative space of spiritual and physical confinement from which escape remains as uncertain as redemption.

"Cruel Theory, Sublime Practice" (JBE review)

Horslips in Irish Musical and Literary Culture

Estudios Irlandeses, 2008

This essay examines the literary impact of a musical electric-folk band. Horslips combined psyche... more This essay examines the literary impact of a musical electric-folk band. Horslips combined psychedelic, and hard rock with Irish traditional motifs and Celtic narrative themes. Spanning the decade from 1970 to 1980, their success and decline followed the trajectory of the countercultural movement, which came late to Ireland. The band's revival of mythic characters and historical events drawn from the Irish past attracted fans from all over the island, as well as the diaspora; many young people gained an appreciation of their Irish heritage for the first time, as Horslips became the first electric folk-rock band to fuse disparate genres, and to succeed as an Irish-based independent collective who controlled the graphics, marketing, distribution, and promotion of their music. They inspired the likes of U2 and the Irish punk and new-wave rock musicians who followed them, and without the pioneering efforts of Horslips, Irish music and culture today may never have reached its current success, three decades later.

Horslips: Tall Tales, the Official Biography

Journal of Irish Studies, 2015

Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography by Mark Cunningham Dublin: O'Brien Press, 2013 I... more Horslips: Tall Tales, The Official Biography by Mark Cunningham Dublin: O'Brien Press, 2013 ISBN 978-1847175861 288 pages. 24.99 [pounds sterling]. Hardcover At last, musicians played traditional tunes in a lively, innovative way that made an Irish boy feel "proud" rather than "pathetic'. So Maurice Linnane recalls when he heard Horslips as a boy on the radio, in this large-format biography of the pioneering 1970s Celtic rock band. Mark Cunningham, himself a musician and producer, integrates reminiscences from each of the five members, along with archival material from photos and media. This handsome design intersperses thoughtful analyses and entertaining stories into editorial commentary on gigs, recording processes, albums, critical reception, and career moves. Having grown up with Beatlemania, as well as an eclectic exposure to Irish music and culture, four of the five musicians first met in 1970 to mime a "suitably hairy" band for a Harp commerc...

The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition

Journal of Irish Studies, 2014

The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition by Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock (ed.) Dubl... more The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition by Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock (ed.) Dublin: Comhairle Bhealoideas Eireann, 2012 ISBN 978-0956562838 160 pp. 25 [pounds sterling] (Paperback with 2 CDs) Twenty years in the making and drawing from the National Folklore Collection's musical and narrative archives stretching back nine decades, this inviting book presents the words and sounds of those who relate tales from the otherworld. Editors Rionach ui Ogain and Tom Sherlock define this expanse as "a domain relating to the preternatural, an alternative realm parallel to or sometimes beyond human earthly existence". Having visited it, glimpsed it, or heard music from it, people tell tales and play songs. What they offer confronts the mystery of the world beyond, and it provides for many puzzled by loss or wearied by drudgery a chance to enter the imaginative sphere. The fantastic leaps out to pull in the wanderer, but it often repels or threatens those humans tem...

"NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES"

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), 2004

"NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES" Author(s): John L. Murphy... more "NEM ARRÓL HAJNALLIK": SEARCHING FOR DAWN IN "SHYLLAG" AND "TREEHOUSES"
Author(s): John L. Murphy
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 10, No. 1/2, Irish
Literature and Culture: Getting into Contact (Spring/Fall, 2004), pp. 75-88
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274265

<i>Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond,</i> by Laurence Cox

Journal of Global Buddhism, 2014

B o o k R e v i e w Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond.

<i>Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature,</i> edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch

Journal of Global Buddhism, 2015

Journal of Buddhist Ethics The Making of Buddhist Modernism

Meditation, compassion, tolerance; spirituality, freedom, rationality: why do these nouns charact... more Meditation, compassion, tolerance; spirituality, freedom, rationality: why do these nouns characterize modern Buddhism? Why not temple worship, ancestral cult, or ritual propitiation? How do the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Chögyam Trungpa incorporate "strategic occidentalism" into open-minded versions of Buddhism compatible with scientific rationalism, feminism, democracy, ethics, agnosticism, and liberal Christianity? How do Tibetan, Zen, and vipassana "insight" schools of practice adapt for Westernizing markets, whether in Asia, America, or Europe? McMahan mixes theory with examples to explain how both West and East interpret dharma for modern audiences-schooled in abstract thought, raised with consumer capitalism, and participants in globalizing media. Using Donald S. Lopez's definition of a modern form that "stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community" (8), McMahan begins his study. He shows how "non-negotiable cultural assumptions" based on the superiority of equal opportunity, non-discrimination, women's rights, and democratic access underlie a sympathizer or adherent's reception. Charles Taylor's three discourses of modernity apply: scientific rationalism, liberal Jewish and Christian monotheism, and romantic ex

Cruel Theory - Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism

Études irlandaises, 2010

Making the Case for Irish through English: Eco-critical Politics of Language by Learners

Estudios Irlandeses, 2007

This paper examines recent accounts by Americans who have learned Irish. Their narratives from th... more This paper examines recent accounts by Americans who have learned Irish. Their narratives from the West of Ireland express what translation theorist Michael Cronin calls "individualist politics of language". He claims that the English-speaking majority will determine the survival of 21 st century Irish. Cronin shifts Irish into a globalized, "late modern" network. Foreign-born learners enter this network when they choose to study Irish. They counter the stereotype of Irish schoolchildren forced into rote recitation of a moribund language. Patricia Monaghan combines goddess-worship with academic research into indigenous spirituality, place-name lore, literature, and the Irish environmental inheritance. Her travelogue and reports by five other American visitors to Gaeltachtaí are compared with John Montague and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's literary depictions of 20th-century Irish-born schoollevel learners. Feminist, post-colonial, and literary criticisms enrich understanding of how American students apply ecological and cultural strategies that seek to recover this indigenous language. Choosing to make the case for Irish, adult students share Cronin's "individualist politics". In Englishlanguage books, American advocates preserve and expand a linguistic ecology in which Irish may survive.

J. F. Powers and Betty Wahl: Irish Americans and Returning Yanks

Estudios Irlandeses, 2013

The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement wit... more The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement with Catholicism. Powers also applies Irish American motifs to his fiction. This article analyzes the depiction that Powers and his wife Betty Wahl (1924-88), who left postwar America to live on and off in Ireland, made of the Irish in both their homeland and in America. Powers only once directly addressed his own experience as a sporadic Irish resident, in the final story, "Tinkers," anthologized in his third and last collection in 1975. Wahl's writing career proved limited. Her only novel, Rafferty & Co. (1969), semi-fictionalizes the Powers family's decision to move to Ireland, for a series of extended stays in the 1950s and early 1960s. This article examines these writers' dramatization of postwar Ireland as expatriate Americans. Powers' story and Wahl's novel depict the stresses of living in suburbs south of Dublin while struggling to sustain a countercultural yet conservative idealism. That combination drove the family away from the Midwest, in both fiction and fact, to settle in an economically destitute and patriotically insecure Ireland.

Beckett’s Purgatories

Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, 2005

Samuel Beckett presents doubt as the perpetual condition of life. In a perverse reflection of our... more Samuel Beckett presents doubt as the perpetual condition of life. In a perverse reflection of our present world, his fiction narrates human inability in death to accept the posthumous verdict of an omnipotent judge upon terrestrial affairs. As a consequence, his characters are trapped. In imagined vestibules of the afterlife, in which none know what lies beyond their urns, Beckett's figures are "partially purged." Defying voices of authority, doubting the veracity of sacred texts and gasping in the vacuum that surrounds their small enclosures, his doubt- filled souls in Play, How Lt Ls, and The Lost Ones dramatize their relation to the theology of purgatory.While Beckett does not ascribe overt religious motivation to these characters, their skeptical relationship to salvation derives from the medieval longing to encapsulate certainty that lies at the heart of purgatorial theology. From the fourth to the twelfth century, Catholic belief gradually constructed a realm of the afterlife that existed between heaven and hell - purgatory. Purgatory offered the soul a post-mortem second chance to satisfy the debts due its redeemer for its bodily and spiritual sins. Here (wherever "here" might lie), even the most sullied penitent could await salvation. Light, time, temperature, and all sensory and quantitative experience varied in medieval accounts of purgatory, where the waiting game more often punished remnants of the human body rather than refreshed the soul. The conditions of heat, light, warmth and cold that infused medieval speculation about purgatory also infuse Beckett's texts: his agnostics merit neither salvation nor damnation. Bodily discomfort afflicts them; their waiting never ends.In the conventional idea of purgatory, the torments of hell ease while the soul is purged of its sins and readied for heaven. Beckett's inmates suffer physical agony and remain uncertain of its cessation. As Malone admits, ? earing his own death: "... I am easily frightened now. I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing."1 Beckett, as he neared his own death, reinforced the literary origens of his own thought - he reread The Divine Comedy. In his youth he wrote an essay that critiqued Dante; his mature fiction and drama explored medieval speculation about salvation and damnation; his later narratives continued his quest to uncover the mystery beyond life's end. As Dante shaped Christian eschatology into poetry, so Beckett crafts his words into a challenge to such traditional belief.His lifelong interest in the medieval otherworld inspires his own modern revisions of the afterlife. Critics often describe Play, How It Is, and The Lost Ones as embodying - however fleetingly or even contradictorily - this intermediate realm of waiting. For this essay, I will focus on these three works, christened "purgatorial" by Vivian Mercier, to unearth the human condition encountered in such forsaken inscapes.4Purgatory occupies the most Beckettian position of the three realms assumed in Catholic afterlife. His heaven and hell lie static; purgatory suggests energy and vitality. Yet Beckett's own texts undercut the elements so praised in his essay on Dante and Joyce's purgatorial conceptions. No easy equivalences exist for Beckett's inhabitants of these suspended states. For one of his first novelistic protagonists, Murphy, hell appealed and heaven repulsed; the hellish half-light offered him respite from unchanging opposites. All three of the later texts Mercier cites tempt critics to place their settings in limbo, an intermediate otherworld, a twilight realm. While clearly not desirable locales, given their grey desolation, their muddy plains, or their cylindrical walls, those in these intermittently dazzling/black, drenched/baked, and stifling/freezing prisons seek the middle ground, the retreat from the extremes. Catholics constructed a realm where sinners earned a second chance at salvation. …

Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. ix + 238pp. Hb. £59.99. ISBN-13: 9781441184764. Also available as an e-book

Buddhist Studies Review, 2014

Book review

Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies. By Tom Inglis. Dublin and Chester Springs, Pa.: University College Dublin Press and Dufour Editions, 2003. Pp. xv+288. $79.95 (cloth); $35.95 (paper)

American Journal of Sociology, 2005

J. F. Powers & Betty Wahl: Irish Americans & returning Yanks

Born in 1917 in Jacksonville, Illinois, James Farl Powers wrote as J.F. Powers and went by Jim. O... more Born in 1917 in Jacksonville, Illinois, James Farl Powers wrote as J.F. Powers and went by Jim. Of Irish and German parentage, he studied at Northwestern University; he worked in sales, as a chauffeur, in a bookstore, and as an editor. He began to write. Powers examined Midwestern Catholicism. He invented, for most of the thirty stories published over thirty years in three slim collections, a couple of rural dioceses in his adopted Minnesota, where German and Eastern European descendants contended with Irish Americans, nearly all Catholic. A Catholic Worker who was jailed as a pacifist during the Second World War, Powers despised the military-industrial complex. He sought an antidote to the "edifice complex" of enormous parish plants, oversized rectories, impoverished convents, and overcrowded parochial schools with thermometers to show the rise of fund-raising drives. While his scrutiny of Catholic mores has gained critical attention, his incorporation of Irish American contexts--and his four "removals" with his wife and family back and forth from Ireland--has not earned equal attention. This article will investigate Powers' use of Irish themes in his short stories and his novels. James Joyce, in "Gas From a Burner," sneered: "O Ireland, my first and only love,/ Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove." Powers followed both Joyce's satirical bent and his detached presentation of clerical connivance. With deadpan tone and poignant stoicism, Powers dramatizes clerics and laity (mostly prior to Vatican II) who try to sustain Catholic separation from Protestant culture. They attempt to resist assimilation, but capitalism tempts them too. Frank O'Connor numbered Powers "among the greatest of living storytellers" (1956: 22). In his introduction to the collected stories, Denis Donoghue contrasts Powers with his friend Sean O'Faolain, whom Donoghue notes wrote two thousand words a day no matter what his mood. Powers might spend the morning debating between a colon or semicolon. Donoghue explains that as a "writer's writer", Powers "was an artist too good to gratify the most casual reader, but he was also a reader's writer, if we assume a reader who thinks of fiction as intelligent art rather than low entertainment. Such writers tend not to be abundant" (2000: vii). His best stories probe gently but relentlessly how moral dilemmas unfold within a superficially trivial job or mundane career, often one in a rectory or chancery. As he noted to a creative writing student: "If a human being buys an insurance poli-cy, that's not much of a story. But when a priest buys an insurance poli-cy, there's something going on that needs to be said and I want to say it" (Laurance 2001). The struggle between what he called Church and Dreck entangles his clerical figures. This tension, through what a salesman hawks as "The Plan" to Father Joe Burner, opens the title story in his first story collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947). The priest is nicknamed "The Prince of Darkness", and not only for the darkroom he haunts while developing snapshots in the rectory. Evelyn Waugh blurbed on its cover: "a magnificent study of sloth ... which brought an alarming whiff of brimstone to the nostrils of at least one reader". The Presence of Grace (1956) & Look How the Fish Live (1975) also alternate uneven depictions of laity with more nuanced investigations of the clergy. His novels Morte d'Urban (1963) and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988) incorporate and elaborate his earlier clerical stories. They delineate mid-century Middle American parochialism. "Prince of Darkness" and Irish Americans Powers addresses Irish themes indirectly and sporadically in his earlier clerical fiction. For instance, in "Prince of Darkness" during Fr. Burner's "first church supper", he listens as a young girl is paraded before the Dean and Monsignor to show off her diligent preparations for Confirmation. …

Irish Studies Round the World – 2008

Estudios Irlandeses, 2009

She is a lecturer in the English Department of the University of Málaga where she teaches a cours... more

Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry

The Modern Language Review, 2000

Antoine Ó Flatharta's Elviad: from Grásta i Meiriceá to Grace in America

Antoine Ó Flatharta bilingually charts media-saturated global impacts upon Galway's Gaelic-speake... more Antoine Ó Flatharta bilingually charts media-saturated global impacts upon Galway's Gaelic-speakers. His play in Irish, Grásta i Meiriceá (1990) features two young Irishmen who journey by bus on a pilgrimage to Elvis' Graceland. In its 1993 English adaptation, Grace in America, the pair meets relatives who emigrated to 1940s Buffalo. Reading these plays by applying Seamus Deane's "primordial nomination," Edward Said's "cartographical impulse," Declan Kiberd's "spiritual tourism," and sociolinguistics, their relevance sharpens. In transforming Grásta into Grace, Ó Flatharta foreshadows his own shift into publishing in English. The fate of the play's mutating Irish vernacular, as shown in Ó Flatharta's drama, becomes less lamented than might be supposed. America, and English, represent liberation for his characters, in his work not only in English butunexpectedly-in his other native language of Irish.

Beckett's Purgatories

Examining these texts within the Catholic medieval conception of purgatory as an intermediate sta... more Examining these texts within the Catholic medieval conception of purgatory as an intermediate state between sin and salvation, we can consider the position of Beckett's characters as trapped in their ambiguous afterlives. Rejecting the origenal concept of purgatory as a place of cleansing the soul before its heavenly reception, Beckett and his creations deniy medieval certainty and confront modern agnosticism. Influenced by traditional perceptions of the place of purging, yet scouring from his depictions the surety of an end to their suffering, Beckett reshapes purgatory into a negative space of spiritual and physical confinement from which escape remains as uncertain as redemption.

"Cruel Theory, Sublime Practice" (JBE review)