English

Dr Michael G. Cronin, Maynooth UNiversity

16 November 2022, 3-4 pm

ORB 2.12

‘Hopeful and homoerotic spaces in Irish writing’ As the late José Esteban Muñoz observed, hope ‘is a backward glance that enacts a future vision’. Or, as Ernst Bloch argued, cultivating a revolutionary consciousness requires a hopeful temporal reasoning in which one is alert to ‘what is’ but also to the utopian possibilities of the ‘not-yet-become’ and even the ‘not-yet-conscious’. This, Bloch argued, required merging the ‘cold stream’ of rational analysis with the ‘warm stream’ of imagination. Taking our cue from Bloch, in this seminar we will discuss a group of Irish novels, from the turn of the millennium, in which homoerotic desire is a vector of utopian longing. We will reflect on some paradoxes. Novels plotted around social space – the city; the gay sauna – rather than around time generate more radical perspectives on history. Novels committed to politicised identity – these are novels about gay men in modern Ireland – create aesthetic affects which radically weaken our assent to neoliberal conceptions of identity and the self; and they achieve this most effectively through a style of writing about the human body. Novels under discussion will include work by Keith Ridgway, Michael Ó Conghaile, Jamie O’Neill and Barry McCrea.