Podcast on Proust
The Irish Proust conversations continue.
In this latest episode presented by Dr Patrick Geoghegan of Trinity College Dublin, Professor Patrick O’Donovan, Emeritus Professor of French at University College Cork joins other scholars to discuss the life and work of Marcel Proust and explore his connections with Ireland.
This podcast relates to The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern published by Bloomsbury in January of this year. The volume consists of eleven chapters charting Irish themes in Proust’s work and his widespread influence on Irish writers from Bowen to Behan. It originated in a conference held in the Museum of Literature Ireland in the centenary of Proust’s death, and sheds new light on modernist literary culture in Ireland in post-Independence Ireland. Patrick O’Donovan contributes a chapter on Proust’s playful exploration of the ancient Celtic belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls.
The volume, which was launched in January in the Irish Embassy in Paris, is edited by Max McGuinness, Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow, and Michael Cronin, 1776 Professor of French, both of them in Trinity College Dublin.
Frank Wynne reviewed the volume in the Irish Times, describing it as “a "livre de chevet" — a book to keep on a nightstand, to be read slowly and thoughtfully as a strange but enthralling exploration of the unexpected origins of modernism in Ireland”.
Max McGuinness and Patrick O’Donovan joined two further contributors to the volume, Barry McCrea and Richard Robinson, in a wide-ranging exploration of Proust and his unsuspected relationship with Ireland on Patrick Geoghegan’s Talking History.
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