Tom McCarthy attending Edinburgh Book Festival 2011

Author of C joins an impressive line-up

Tom McCarthy to appear at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival: 'C author Tom McCarthy is a genius at tracing myth through modernism – he promises to explain "how writing works" using Ovid, Rilke, Cocteau and a dash of Kraftwerk.' [Read More]

The Guardian website has also drawn attention to the following attendees: Alan Hollinghurst, Jennifer Egan, Karen Russell, Colm Tóibín, Alasdair Gray, Will Self, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, Alan Warner, Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, Audrey Niffenegger, Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Jo Nesbø, Kurdo Baksi, Michael Longley, Liz Lochhead, and Carol Ann Duffy.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Calling All Agents: Tom McCarthy Symposium

James Joyce's Dubliners

97th anniversary of Joyce's short story collection

James Joyce's Dubliners was published on this day in 1914: 'Before and long after publication, Joyce fumed that “nine years of my life” had been consumed by efforts to get his story collection into print — the "litigation and train fare and postal expense," the correspondence with "seven solicitors, one hundred and twenty newspapers and several men of letters," the refusals and humiliations received from forty timid or waffling publishers.' [Read More]

Peter Childs, Modernism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Continuum Press presents an online preview

Free online preview of Peter Childs' new book, Modernism: A Guide for the Perplexed (link via Continuum Lit) [Read More]

Radio Bloomsday 2011

Tune in on 16 June for a series of live events

James Joyce. Photograph: Gisele Freund.

Radio Bloomsday airs on Thursday 16 June from 7pm to 2am
New York City: WBAI 99.5 FM
Los Angeles: KPFK 90.7

Radio Bloomsday, the annual 7 hour radio broadcast of artists interpreting James Joyce’s Ulysses, will be heard coast to coast on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York City and on KPFK, 90.7 in Los Angeles. This year’s international celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses will feature artists from New York City, Los Angeles, London and Dublin. The show will be streamed live on wbai.org

Radio Bloomsday brings together contemporary world class international artists to make Joyce’s text new and accessible to modern audiences. Highlights from this years broadcast include Booker Prize winning novelist Anne Enright narrating the entire Calypso episode as Leopold Bloom starts his day with quintessential New York playwright and performer Wallace Shawn as Bloom. Paul Muldoon reads an excerpt from the Proteus episode. Actor John Lithgow, who was a regular on WBAI in the 1960s, performs the poetry of James Joyce as well as Charles Lamb’s version of the Ulysses legend, Joyce’s first encounter with the story while a student.

Our international broadcast features students from James Joyce’s alma mater, Belvedere College in Dublin, who will perform the Nestor episode in Ulysses depicting Stephen Dedalus teaching a group of students. In New York, Jim Fletcher (Gatz) performs John Milton’s Lycidas, the poem the students are studying in Nestor. In London, author Nick McDonell performs Stephen Dedalus in Wandering Rocks, as he thumbs through books in a second hand bookstore. In Los Angeles, actors Bob Odenkirk and Paul Dooley interrogate each other in the style of the Catholic Catechism performing an excerpt from the Ithaca episode. Comedian Marc Maron portrays a neurotic Leopold Bloom.

The Dublin based instrumental group, Tarab, makes their American debut on Radio Bloomsday. Their original music fuses traditional Irish reels with modern Jazz. Actors perform an excerpt from Sheila Callaghan’s Dead City, her modern retelling of Ulysses set in present day New York and featuring a female Bloom named Samantha Blossom. The show will also include poetry by Joyce and works that inspired him by Charles Lamb, John Milton and his mentor WB Yeats.

The show ends with a two and half hour live performance of the complete Molly Bloom episode, performed by Galway native Caraid O’Brien. Other actors in the program include Kate Valk, Marc Singer, John O’Callaghan, Conn Horgan, Marie-Louise Bowe, Aaron Beall, Shawnee Benton and many others.

For the seventh year, Radio Bloomsday is directed by our Molly Bloom, Caraid O’Brien. Peabody award winner Larry Josephson, who has been broadcasting Ulysses on the Radio for 30 years is the producer. Janet Coleman is the Artistic Director.

Website

• radiobloomsday.blogspot.com

Twitter

• @mollyinbed

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Radio Bloomsday: 16 June 2010

Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf

Author of The Hours explains how reading Virginia Woolf inspired him during his teenage years

Nicole Kidman's Oscar-winning performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002)

In an article for The Guardian, Michael Cunningham discusses how his enthusiasm for the work of Virginia Woolf has shaped his life. He relates what prompted him to use her biography as the basis of his novel, The Hours (later made into an Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore); he speculates on what distinguishes Woolf from that other modernist giant, James Joyce, and goes on to suggest that she is perhaps 'the greatest chronicler of the lives of women' [Read more].

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?

James Joyce: Dublin Bloomsday Celebrations 2011

4-16 June 2011

James Joyce as a young man

The James Joyce Centre in Dublin has orchestrated another annual celebration of Joyce's work, complete with readings, exhibitions and walking tours. It begins on 4 June 2011, with the Bloom Garden Show in Phoenix Park, and concludes with a whole host events on Bloomsday itself (16 June).

Saturday–Sunday, 4–5 June 2011

12–1pm
‘JOYCE IN BLOOM’ IN THE DUBLIN UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE GARDEN
The BLOOM Garden Show, Phoenix Park

Wednesday 8 June 2011

6.30–8pm
‘IN THE SHADOW OF JAMES JOYCE’ EXHIBITION & BOOK LAUNCH
Photographer Motoko Fujita presents a collection of Joycean inspired images focused on the village of Chapelizod. The Joyce Centre is also pleased to host the launch of Fujita’s companion book (Lilliput Press, 2011) featuring essays by David Norris, Barry McGovern, Sam Slote, John McCullen, Danis Rose, WJ McCormack, Thomas MacGiolla and Shigehisa Yoshizu. The exhibition will run until 24 July 2011.

James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Great George’s St.
Free. Booking required for the launch event.

12–1.30pm
JOHN A. MCCULLEN – THE SHADOW OF JOYCE IN PHOENIX PARK
OPW Chief Superintendent of Parks John McCullen will guide us through a Joycean history of Dublin’s great Phoenix Park. Drawing on images from the OPW archive, McCullen’s talk will illuminate the historic backdrop of some of Motoko Fujita’s contemporary photographs on exhibition at the Joyce Centre.

James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Great George’s St.
Free. Booking required. Click here for James Joyce Centre website.

Sunday 12 June 2011

9.30am-2.30pm
JAMES JOYCE BICYCLE TOUR
“Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.” Come with us on a journey aboard your very own velocipede as we explore dear dirty Dublin’s Northside. Visit the homes that played host to the Joyce family’s spiral into poverty at Fairview and Phibsborough, as well as the sights and spots that inspired the fiction, including Glasnevin Cemetary. Ticket includes a guided tour of the cemetery. Please note: this tour ends at the Brian Boru Pub in Glasnevin, where an optional Joycean lunch is on offer (not included in the ticket).

James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Great George’s St.
Tickets: €32. Booking strongly recommended. Click here for James Joyce Centre website.

Monday 13 June 2011

6.30–8.30pm
JOYCE AND JEWISH DUBLIN
The Irish Jewish Museum will host an evening of discussion on Irish Jewish culture in the time of Joyce featuring a talk by a member of the Irish Jewish community and a lecture on Jewish elements in Ulysses by James Joyce Centre Research Scholar Terence Killeen. Co-sponsored and hosted by the Irish Jewish Museum, located in the former Walworth Road Synagogue.

Irish Jewish Museum, 3 Walworth Road, Portobello, Dublin 8.
Tickets €7/€5. Bookings recommended. Contact the Irish Jewish Museum: 1 453 1797/085 706 7357

Tuesday 14 June 2011

10am-3pm
JAMES JOYCE BUS TOUR
Jump aboard our bus and take a sojourn into Joyce country. Delving into south Dublin’s suburbs, we’ll explore Joyce’s early formative years alongside the locations that became so central to his fiction. Stops will include Dublin’s old Jewish quarter known as ‘Little Jerusalem’, Rathgar and Rathmines, the Martello Tower, Mr. Deasy’s School at Dalkey, and Sandymount Strand. The ticket covers the cost of admittance to the Irish Jewish Museum where a talk will be delivered on the history of the Irish Jewish community; the tour will stop for lunch in the picturesque village of Glasthule.

Tickets €30; booking strongly recommended. Click here for James Joyce Centre website.

6.30-8pm
CARLOS GAMERRO – JAMES JOYCE & JORGE BORGES
Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, Carlos Gamerro is a prominent contemporary Argentine writer. He has authored four novels, including Las Islas (The Islands, 1998) and El secreto y las voces (The Secret and its Voices, 2002) and has translated Shakespeare and Auden. This talk is hosted in association with The Embassy of Argentina. (Mr. Gamerro will also be in conversation with noted Spanish journalist Juan Cruz at the Instituto Cervantes on Wednesday 15 June at 6pm – contact the Instituto Cervantes for details, 1 631 1500).

James Joyce Centre, 35 N. Great George’s St.
Free. Bookings required. Click here for James Joyce Centre website.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

2–4pm
BLOOMSDAY AFTERNOON TEA AT THE WESTIN
Inspired by Leopold Bloom’s gift of Banbury buns to the seagulls on nearby Sackville Bridge, enjoy tea-time treats and traditional fare from Ulysses at Afternoon Tea in The Atrium Lounge. To the accompaniment of live music from the period, including some of Leopold's favourites, Joyce scholar Gerry Dukes will offer a special talk at 3pm sharp.

The Atrium Lounge at The Westin Dublin, Westmoreland Street.
€18 per person, inclusive of a glass of Burgundy. Bookings essential. Contact The Westin +353 1 645 1402

5-7pm
OPERAS & AIRS IN “STEPHEN’S” GREEN
On this first evening of our two-night tribute to Joyce and music tenors John Scott and Morgan Crowley, soprano Deirdre Masterson, pianist David Wray, and violinists Jane Rose and Fiona Regan perform hallmark songs from Ulysses. Hosted by Barry McGovern, this promises to be a romantic night in St. Stephen’s Green. Sponsored by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and supported by OPW and the Joyce Centre.

The Bandstand, St Stephen’s Green
Free. Limited seating. No Bookings.

Bloomsday: Thursday 16 June 2011

8, 9.30, 11am
BLOOMSDAY BREAKFAST AT THE GRESHAM
Join us for a traditional full-Irish Bloomsday Breakfast in The Gresham Ballroom, complete with all the Ulyssean fare you’ve come to expect!

The Gresham Ballroom, O’Connell St.
Tickets: €23. Bookings recommended: Click here for James Joyce Centre website.

9am–5pm
BLOOMSDAY AT THE JOYCE CENTRE
Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Come up to the Joyce Centre, rap at the door of No. 7 Eccles Street and explore Joyce’s world on exhibition. Grab some Bloomsday grub streetside. Eavesdrop on Molly’s musings then head off for one of our special tours of Joyce’s Dublin. It all starts here!
Entry: €5 adults/€4 concession.

11am–2pm
READINGS AND SONGS IN THE GREEN
This year, join us at The Bandstand in St Stephen's Green as Master of Ceremonies Alan Stanford hosts another gala afternoon of readings and songs from Ulysses. Joyceans of all ages and backgrounds are most welcome! Come and read your favourite few words from the book of the day. We’ll be treated to music of the era and songs from the big blue book of Eccles.

The Bandstand, St Stephen's Green
Free and open to the public, limited seating available, no bookings.

3–4pm
O ROCKS!
Keep your eyes peeled for Almidano Artifoni, the evangelist Alexander J Dowie, the Vice Regal Cavalcade and a host of Ulyssean characters as you wander through rocky Dublin this afternoon. They’ll take you by surprise!

Free. No bookings.

6–8pm
POEMSONGS & BALLADS IN STEPHEN’S GREEN
Join us in St Stephen’s Green for the second session of our two-part tribute to Joyce and music. Lyric tenor Noel O’Grady and pianist Eamon Keane will join musician and poet John Sheahan of The Dubliners and classical guitarist Michael Howard to perform a Bloomsday bouquet of music and melodies. The Eastern Harps trad band will delight us with soulful and rollicking ballads from Finnegans Wake. With Danis Rose as Master of Ceremonies, this Bloomsday soirée is not to be missed. Sponsored by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and supported by OPW and the Joyce Centre.

The Bandstand, St Stephen’s Green
Free. Limited seating. No Bookings.

8.30pm-late
THE GREAT HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS PUB QUIZ
“Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.”
So you think you know Dublin? Or do think you know yer Joyce? Gather a team of four and test your knowledge of 1904 Dublin at our grand Charity Pub Quiz! Great prizes from our sponsors for the winner and runner-up plus dozens of wonderful raffle prizes including accommodation, travel, dining, literature and much more! Proceeds will support SHINE, Ireland’s largest mental health charity.

The Mint Bar at The Westin, Westmoreland St. (Just north of Tommy Moore’s roguish finger).
All welcome. €10 per person to play (€40 per team). To register your team, call the Joyce Centre or click here for James Joyce Centre website.

Walking Tours

11 – 16 June starting at the James Joyce Centre
Join us for one (or all!) of 4 tours of Joyce’s Dublin. Be sure to book ahead: the Bloomsday Walk is €8 per person; all others are €10 per person (€8 concessions). Click here to access the online box office

In the Footsteps of Leopold Bloom – Sunday 12/2pm; Monday 13/11am; Tuesday 14/2pm; Wednesday 15/11am

This tour explores the background to Joyce’s Ulysses and to Bloom’s thoughts as he crosses the city in search of something to eat in the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode. A humorous contrast of well-fed and under-fed citizens is mixed with a commentary on city buildings, and the presence of police constables reminds us of the realities of Dublin as a colonial city. In these footsteps, food becomes the central issue of social, cultural and political life in Dublin in 1904. The tour starts from the James Joyce Centre and finishes at the National Museum.

Joyce Circular – Saturday 11/11am; Sunday 12/12pm; Monday 13/1pm; Tuesday 14/11am; Wednesday 15/1pm

On our andante dander around the Hibernian metropolis, we take in North Earl Street and the ‘Prick with the Stick’; the house where Oliver ‘Buck Mulligan’ Gogarty was born; the setting of the Dubliners story ‘The Boarding House’; the house in which Sean O’Casey was born; the site of 7 Eccles Street, home of Leopold & Molly Bloom; and Belvedere College, which Joyce attended in the 1890s. The tour starts from and returns to the James Joyce Centre.

Dubliners – Saturday 11/2pm; Monday 13/2pm; Wednesday 15/2pm

Join our guide on a ramble through the city of Joyce’s first and most accessible work, Dubliners. Completed in 1907, Dubliners skilfully treats both turn-of-the-century Dublin and Joyce’s surroundings in continental Europe where the stories were written. The tour examines Joyce’s life in Dublin and the Dublin he created in his stories, as well as looking at how the city has commemorated its famous son. Joyce’s Dublin was a city of politics and intrigue, of religious devotion and disaffection, as well as a city in which the pressures and ties of family and society were never far off. The tour starts from the James Joyce Centre and finishes near Trinity College.

Bloomsday Walk – Wednesday 16 10am/10.30am/11am/11.30am/12pm/12.30pm/
1pm/1.30pm/2pm/2.30pm/3pm/3.30pm/4pm

This special Bloomsday walk features some of the most important Northside locations from Joyce's Ulysses. Our hour-long wander will take in Belvedere College, Eccles Street, Leopold and Molly Bloom’s residence, and variety of key locations along Parnell Square and O'Connell Street.

Website: James Joyce Centre

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• James Joyce: Political Controversialist
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Anthony Burgess: Unpublished Work Discovered

Archive contains writer's previously unseen fiction, drama and music

Anthony Burgess. Photograph: Getty Images.

Source: Stephen Bates, 'Researchers find 20 unpublished Anthony Burgess stories', guardian.co.uk, 11 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce

Walter Benjamin, Early Writings 1910-1917

A new collection sheds light on the thinker's early development

Walter Benjamin

In a recent review for The Tablet, Adam Kirsch takes a look at Walter Benjamin's Early Writings 1910-1917, translated by Howard Eiland. Kirsch explores how the life of this young intellectual was shaped by Jewish identity, and Jewish twentieth century history:

In April 1911, the 18-year-old Walter Benjamin took a hiking trip with a friend in the Thuringian Forest. His diary of the trip is one of the first items included in Early Writings 1910-1917, the latest volume to appear in Harvard University Press’ Benjamin edition—an exemplary scholarly project that has now been ongoing for 25 years. Nothing especially noteworthy seems to have happened on the trip, and the diary, which is just a few pages long, contains fairly cursory accounts of the natural splendors Benjamin saw (“The sunset was marvelous after the rain … the woods were irradiated with red, and individual branches and tree trunks along the path were glowing”).

The most interesting thing about the diary is its Jewish subtext. Benjamin notes that it’s Passover, and that the pension he’s staying in is owned by a Jewish man who “kept saying, ‘So, what do we make for Yontev?’ ” Benjamin parses the word in a way that suggests it is new to him: “One does not say ‘Good day’ but ‘Good Yontev.’ ”

Similarly, the proprietor subscribes to the Israelitisches Familienblatt (“Jewish Family Journal”), and Benjamin notes that the magazine contains advertisements for “dishes for the Seder.” It takes his traveling companion to explain to him what these Seder plates are: “The latter are used for the Passover feast and have different compartments for different foods. So says Steinfeld.” Later Benjamin complains, “with coffee there was matzoh, and that’s how it will be; for … we are in Pesach week.” But while the pension seems to keep kosher for Passover, there is no actual Seder, which seems to both relieve Benjamin and disappoint him: “Thank God they didn’t do Seder. It might well have been very interesting and might even have moved me, but it would have seemed to me like theater, nothing holy.”

Much can be gleaned about Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—more, ignorant of the basic details of Jewish practice—and he feels a nervous disinclination to be “claimed” in any way by Judaism; a 20th-century man, he could find “nothing holy” in organized religion. Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to notice that Benjamin is surrounded by Jewishness like a fish by water. His traveling companion is Jewish; the house he’s staying in is Jewish. As his friend Gershom Scholem, a product of a similar background, would note, it was quite normal for assimilated German Jews never to enter a Gentile home or invite a Gentile to theirs. Jewish identity was much more durable than Jewish belief. [Read more]

Adam Kirsch, 'Youth in Revolt'

The Tablet, 10 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Walter Benjamin's Library Card
• Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Bliss of the Collector
• Peter Mendelsund's Book Designs
• On Listening
• The State of Criticism in 2011

PJ Harvey on Pinter, Joyce and Yeats

Music star Polly Jean Harvey shares her love of literature

PJ Harvey

To promote her new album, Let England Shake, PJ Harvey discusses her life and influences with The Observer's Dorian Lynskey. Among the topics of conversation are Pinter, Joyce, Yeats and the role literature plays in Harvey's life (link via Susan Tomaselli):

"Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like 'American Football' or 'The Disappeared'. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce." She leans forward, freshly excited. "Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I'm reading John Burnside's poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I'm getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going 'Oh my God!'" She clutches her chest and laughs. "And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words." [Read more]

Source: Dorian Lynskey, 'PJ Harvey: 'I feel things deeply. I get angry, I shout at the TV, I feel sick', The Observer, 24 April 2011

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

James Joyce. Photograph: Roger Viollet/AFP/Getty

Literature:

Ready Steady Book: A crisp new design
Samuel Beckett: Research Day Seminar at the University of Reading, May 2011
Samuel Beckett: Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (PDF)
Samuel Beckett: The novelist, poet and playwright discusses form with Harold Pinter
Samuel Beckett: Thomas Pors Koed on impersonal subjectivity and The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett: Continuum offers a free online extract from Jonathan Boulter's study, Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed
Writers and Kitties: Includes Samuel Beckett, Joyce Carol Oates, William S. Burroughs and others
James Joyce: Finnegans Wake and the Nazi Occupation
James Joyce: Passages from Finnegans Wake: The Film
James Joyce: Singer Kate Bush given permission to use extracts from Ulysses by the Joyce estate
An annotated, online edition of Finnegans Wake
Anaïs Nin’s Silver Lake Home
Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics: Embroidered covers of classic novels
A Bookless Library?
Harold Pinter: Blake Morrison reviews a recent production of Pinter's Moonlight
Picture Books: A letter to the New York Times stresses the continuing importance of picture books
Will Self: Opposed to the idle life
Franz Kafka to the Bodleian
Franz Kafka: Sleep and transformation
Joyce Carol Oates: Miranda Popkey reviews Oates' recent memoir, A Widow's Story
Joyce Carol Oates: Julian Barnes reviews A Widow's Story
What makes literature literature?
Sylvia Plath: Jacqueline Rose on her conflict with the Plath estate

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Modernism and Nihilism: A new study by Shane Weller
At home with Susan Sontag
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (PDF)
Jacques Lacan at UBUWeb
Maurice Blanchot: Review of the recently published Political Writings: 1952-1993
Maurice Blanchot: HTMLGiant reviews Blanchot's Aminadab
Dante Alighieri: Steve Donoghue reviews David Slavitt's new translation of La Vita Nuova

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: Continuum offers a free online extract from its Online Theatre Guide to Waiting for Godot
How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers
The Original Portrait of William Shakespeare

Film:

Woody Allen: The Guardian on Woody Allen's long association with the Windsor typeface
William Shakespeare: Alan A. Stone reviews Julie Taymor's recent adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest
David Lynch: 60-Second claymation adaptation of Lynch's midnight movie classic, Eraserhead

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism

New study explores connections between two influential Western traditions

Shane Weller,  Modernism and Nihilism
(Palgrave MacMillan, 2011)

Happy to note an interesting new work from Shane Weller, exploring literary and philosophical intersections between modernism and nihilism.

Summary

At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept’s appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and ‘high’ modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche’s claim that art is the ‘only superior counterforce’ to nihilism, I argue that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein.

Read more: Palgrave MacMillan website

About the Author

Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His research interests lie in the field of modern European literature, especially the works of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald. He has published books on Beckett, on literature and ethics, and on literature and nihilism, plus essays on a range of writers and theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Hölderlin, Wyndham Lewis, and Sylvia Plath. Weller is also co-director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at Kent, and a member of the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Read more: Shane Weller, Staff profile, University of Kent

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan website: Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (2011)


Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
• A Companion to Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett Summer School: July 2011

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Samuel Beckett is now on Twitter: Follow him @samuelbbeckett

Literature:

Samuel Beckett on Twitter: Poet, playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett now has a presence on Twitter. Follow him for daily quotes, news, events and links to online content. Enjoy!
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Beckett Documentary: A very rare treasure, well worth your time
Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
Samuel Beckett: Ends and Odds
Samuel Beckett and Silence
Samuel Beckett: One of Beckett's favourite chess books, Irvine Chernev's The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played
Samuel Beckett: Portugese productions by Teatro Plástico
Samuel Beckett: Audio recording of David Warrilow performing A Piece of Monologue
Samuel Beckett: Madeleine Renard as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Oh Les Beaux Jours (Happy Days)
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: The Video Game
Samuel Beckett on James Joyce
James Joyce on Hamlet
James Joyce: Fourth Annual James Joyce Research Colloquium, 14-16 April 2011
Barry Miles' top ten counterculture books
Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
George Orwell: The Guardian reviews A Life in Letters
Joyce Carol Oates: Los Angeles Times reviews Oates' recent memoir, A Widow's Story
Joyce Carol Oates: Elle interviews the American author about her new memoir, A Widow's Story
Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates receive National Humanities Awards
Philip Roth on Fact and Fiction
Philip Roth on God and Religion: 'I don't have a religious bone in my body'
Margaret Atwood: Atwood profiled as part of The Guardian's Top 100 Women series
J. M. Coetzee: Stephen Abell on Coetzee, suffering and the novel
Don DeLillo: American novelist reads from Mao II at a 2011 PEN event
The Great Gatsby as video game
Our favourite writers as Legos
Dante Alighieri's Death Mask

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Assuming Gender: Second issue of the online academic journal is now free to download
Roland Barthes on the Labyrinth Metaphor
Jacques Lacan: Unpublished seminars
Why should we care about Immanuel Kant?
Lisa Appignanesi on the language of love
Gilles Deleuze University Lectures 1979-1987
Jacques Derrida: Television interview in which Derrida reflects on 'what comes before the question'
Judith Butler: Critical theorist profiled as part of The Guardian's Top 100 Women
Friedrich Nietzsche: Was Nietzsche the first psychologist?
Verso Book of Dissent: Competition

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: Conor Lovett to perform First Love and The End at the Samuel beckett: Out of the Archive festival
William Shakespeare: Helen Mirren: 'I want to play Hamlet!'
William Shakespeare: Was Hamlet a melancholy Dane? That is the question

Film:

J. G. Ballard: Christian Bale (Empire of the Sun) to reunite with Brad Anderson (The Machinist) on adaptation of Ballard's Concrete Island
Michel Gondry adapting Philip K. Dick's Ubik
Allen Ginsberg: Peter Bradshaw reviews Howl, a new biopic of the American Beat poet

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Roth and Oates receive 2010 National Humanities Medals

Roth and Oates among those to receive prestigious award for their contributions to American letters

U.S. President Barack Obama

The New York Times reports that American writers Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are to be honoured with the 2010 National Humanities Medal:

Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are among the 2010 winners of the National Humanities Medal, and Harper Lee, Meryl Streep, James Taylor and Quincy Jones are among the winners of the National Medal of Arts, the White House announced on Tuesday. [Read more]

Source: Kate Taylor, 'Roth and Oates to Receive National Humanities Medals', newyorktimes.com, 1 March 2011

From the official White House website:

Joyce Carol Oates for her contributions to American letters. The author of more than 50 novels, as well as short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, Ms. Oates has been honored with the National Book Award and the PEN/ Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

[...]

Philip Roth for his contributions to American letters. Mr. Roth is the author of 24 novels, including Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and his criticism has appeared in our leading literary journals.

Source: 'President Obama to Award 2010 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal', whitehouse.gov, 01 March 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O'Rourke on Grief
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan
• Writers: Philip Roth

James Joyce on Hamlet

From Conversations with Frank Budgen

The indispensable Biblioklept finds James Joyce discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet with Frank Budgen:

Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall. [Read more]

Frank Budgen, Conversations with Joyce

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct
• Hamlet: Play or Novel?
• James Joyce: Political Controversialist
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Franz Kafka, The Sons (Schocken).
Design: Peter Mendelsund.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: This week's Ends and Odds over at Samuel Beckett: Debts & Legacies
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf
Stanley Fish: Adam Haslett reviews critic's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
William Burroughs' Home Movies: Features Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others
Phillip Pullman: Call to defend libraries resounds around web
James Joyce reads Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: Ulysses, illustrated with historical documents and photographs
James Joyce: Frank Callanan on the political attitudes of Ireland's high modernist
J. D. Salinger's Private Passions
Can Literature be Philosophical? James Ryerson on the philosophical novel
Writers Obsessed with Writers
Margaret Atwood: A new collection of scholarly articles exploring Atwood's work
Joseph Conrad: Phil Mongredien on Joseph Conrad's classic novel of postcolonial corruption
W. G. Sebald: W. G. Sebald turned a walk through Suffolk into an extraordinary book. As a film inspired by the work is premiered, Stuart Jeffries retraces his steps

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Susie Orbach: Orbach talks about bodies (podcast)
Continental Philosophy Bulletin Board: A crisp new design
Roland Barthes: Lori Soderlind reviews Barthes' Mourning Diary in the New York Times

Film:

Werner Herzog: In Conversation, New York, March 23rd, 2011

Art, Design & Photography

Franz Kafka: Peter Mendelsund shares his passion for Kafka, and some forthcoming designs to be released by Schocken
Joyce Carol Oates: Story of photographer Jane Yarborough Creech, whose work is featured on recent Oates memoir
Joris Karl Huysmans: À Rebours illustrated

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

James Joyce: Political Controversialist

Frank Callanan on the political attitudes of Ireland's high modernist

James Joyce, Paris, 1937. Photograph: Joseph Breitenbach

In a recent article for the Irish Times, Frank Callanan explores recently unearthed evidence pointing to the political leanings and attitudes of writer James Joyce (link via Susan Tomaselli):

James Joyce had graduated from University College Dublin in September 1902 and was in Paris from December 3rd to 22nd that year, on the risible pretext of studying medicine at the Sorbonne. After an extended Christmas in Dublin, Joyce was back in Paris from January 17th to April 10th, 1903, impecunious and undernourished, at the Hôtel Corneille, a now-vanished Irish lieu de mémoire in Paris, on Rue Corneille, flanking the Théâtre de l’Odéon. His sudden return to Dublin was brought about by the last illness of his mother. May Joyce lingered, dying on August 13th, 1903. Joyce thereafter remained in Dublin until he left on October 8th, 1904, with Nora Barnacle to commence what transpired to be a lifelong exile from Ireland.

The intrinsic significance of Joyce’s transcription of the two United Irishman lists will be a subject of debate. Its extrinsic significance is the proof it affords that Joyce was reading the United Irishman at the time he was in Paris and that he was not drawn to the paper solely by reason of its political content. It bears out the recollection of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus that Joyce had declared that “the United Irishman was the only paper in Dublin worth reading, and in fact he read it every week”. [Read more]

Frank Callanan, 'Why Joyce, the 'bohemian aesthete', was also a political controversialist'

The Irish Times, 22 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf

American poet and musician pays tribute on the anniversary of Woolf's death

Patti Smith pays tribute to Virginia Woolf, Fondation Cartier, 28 March 2008 [via Lauren Elkin and 3:AM Magazine].

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Is Modernism Boring?

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Daniel Kramer.

Literature:

London Review of Books: Winter Lecture s 2011: Includes Judith Butler on Franz Kafka, T. J. Clark on Picasso's Guernica and Elif Batuman on Cervantes and Balzac.
Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010: An academic conference to be held at the University of London, June 2011
James Joyce & Samuel Beckett: Top 10 Literary Mentorships
Joyce Carol Oates: New short story collection, Give Me Your Heart
Thomas Bernhard: German television documentary, spanning 1967-88
Beat Generation: Neal Cassady's wife, Carolyn, is interviewed by The Guardian on life with the Beats
J. D. Salinger: David L. Ulin reviews Jeffrey Slawenski's J. D. Salinger: A Life
Jorge Luis Borges: Martin Schifino reviews five new anthologies of the Borges' work
Jorge Luis Borges: The Riddle of Poetry, a lecture delivered at Harvard University 1967.
H. P. Lovecraft: GalleyCat presents a free documentary
Edgar Allan Poe: For the second time in two years, the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' fails to appear at the writer's gravesite

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Roland Barthes: Columbia University Press publishes The Preparation of the Novel
Roland Barthes: Mairéad Hanrahan reviews Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel in the Times Literary Supplement
Roland Barthes: University of York launches a new reading group based around Barthes' The Neutral
Susan Sontag: Varia celebrates the birthday of the renowned cultural critic
Friedrich Nietzsche: Slate on why Nietzsche is so often misunderstood by angry young men
Jacques Derrida speaks about 'Forgiveness'

Film:

65 Things You Didn't Know About David Lynch

Art & Design

Ezra Stoller: Exploring Mad Men era New York through the photography of Ezra Stoller

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: A translation of Elisabeth II
Frankenstein: The Guardian on Danny Boyle's new production at the National
Theatre and Performance: An online preview

Music

Bob Dylan: American musician signs six-book deal, which will include two further volumes in the Chronicles series
Patti Smith appears on Charlie Rose
Joy Division: Recordings from two Dutch concerts

Etc.

Woody Allen: 'Money Can Buy Happiness-As If', in the New Yorker
Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Flavorwire lists their top ten literary mentorships

James Joyce (left) and Samuel Beckett (right)

Flavorwire select their top ten literary mentorships, including Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates and more. This is what they have to say about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett:

After being introduced by a mutual colleague, Samuel Beckett befriended the renowned Ulysses author and served as his assistant on research for what would later become Finnegans Wake. Beckett was displeased, however, by how much his writing was reminiscent of Joyce. In a letter to him, Beckett observes about an early poem, “Of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavors to endow it with my own colors.” This led the celebrated playwright to find a literary voice by creating one in opposition to his mentor’s. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could,” Beckett once said. “I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” [Read more]

Kirthana Ramisetti, 'A History of Famous Literary Mentorships'

Flavorwire, 19 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010

13-14 June 2011

Design: Rhys Tranter

Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010
13-14 June, 2011

Institute of English Studies, University of London,
Senate House

About the Conference

Plenary Speakers:
Professor Derek Attridge (York)
and, as John Coffin Memorial Lecturer, Professor Michael Wood (Princeton)

James Joyce's influence on literature has been enormous. This conference will examine Joyce's complex international impact on fiction, long or short, and on poetry. The field remains under-explored. Valuable studies have appeared: either following the links between Joyce and individual authors (Beckett most obviously) or asking about Joyce's example for the twentieth-century avant-garde. In Irish Studies, too, a strong sense has obtained of Joyce as challenge and example. But much productive work remains to be done to bring these strands together, to broaden the range of influences considered, and to ask critical questions about the nature of influence and legacy. We want to consider Joyce as model, shadow, inspiration, irritation or obstacle for a roster of writers like the following:

Amis
Auden
Ballard
Banville
Beckett
Borges
Bowen
Brooke
Rose
Burgess
Burroughs
Coetzee
DeLillo

[Click here for a complete list]

This two-day conference will address these and other questions through particular studies or broader enquiries. The conference will feature some forty papers alongside prestigious plenary speakers, chosen from the most dynamic critics and writers at work today.

Call for Papers

Please send proposals of up to 300 words, for 20-minute papers, to both Joe Brooker (j.brooker@bbk.ac.uk) and Finn Fordham (finn.fordham@rhul.ac.uk) by James Joyce's 129th birthday, 2 February 2011.

General Enquiries

Jon Millington (Events Officer)
Institute of English Studies
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

Tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859
Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

The School of Advanced Study is part of the central University of London.

The School takes its responsibility to visitors with special needs very seriously and will endeavour to make reasonable adjustments to its facilities in order to accommodate the needs of such visitors. If you have a particular requirement, please feel free to discuss it confidentially with the organiser in advance of the event taking place.

Website: Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010, University of London

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce