11 Mar 2005

"George Moore: Literature and the Arts" - UCC Conference

Academics, students and George Moore aficionados from Brazil, USA, UK and all over Europe will arrive in UCC on March 18th next for a ground-breaking, trilingual conference on "George Moore: Literature and the Arts". The conference is under the auspices of UCC's English Department but proceedings will not be confined to the lingua franca of that department!

In addition to keynote addresses from eminent literary specialists, and many papers in English, there will be a lecture in French and a special session entirely in Irish - with simultaneous translation provided, thanks to the invaluable cooperation of Ionad na Gaeilge Labhartha in UCC. The three languages are those in which George Moore was first published and about which he had very definite views.

Just who is this George Moore (1852-1933) whose work is so popular now in universities in France and Spain in particular? The Mayo-born landlord and Irish writer played an important part in the development of the English novel at the end of the nineteenth century.  His portrait was painted by Manet, Degas, John Yeats, Walter Sickert and others and his art criticism is credited with popularising the Impressionist painters in Britain and in Ireland.

The keynote addresses (on March 18th, 19th and 20th), by Professor Munira Mutran (Sao Paolo), Dr Adrian Frazier (NUIG) and Professor Lucy McDiarmid (Northwestern University/Villanova University), will range widely, from Confessions of a Young Man to Hail and Farewell. 

The conference opens with UCC's Annual Yeats Lecture on Yeats and Love Poetry (to be given by Dr Bernard O'Donoghue, Oxford). Given the Moore-Yeats interactions, this first item on the agenda could aptly be called the split, and their relationship will be the theme of Adrian Frazier's keynote address, 'I no longer underrate him: The Question of Moore's Value'.

The conference, organized by Dr Mary Pierse, Department of English, UCC, takes place on 18-20 March next at University College Cork (programme attached). See conference website www.ucc.ie/georgemoore  (in Irish and in English). The Conference organizer gratefully acknowledges the sponsorship of the Faculty of Arts, English Department,  UCC, Foras na Gaeilgem, Fáilte Ireland and other generous donors.

GEORGE MOORE
A brief account of George Moore - the man who provided the template for Joyce's Dubliners - cannot possibly do justice to his varied writings between the 1870s and 1930, to his wide interests from horseracing to opera, to his connections with the Irish Literary Theatre, to his fights against literary censorship, to his friendships with Michael Davitt and AE, to the multiple controversies with Zola, Whistler, Hardy and major figures of the period. Recent re-evaluations of Moore's prose - in particular the lively biography of Moore by keynote speaker, Dr Adrian Frazier - have contributed to a renewed interest in, and appreciation of, the wealth and depth of his accomplishments as a writer.

Moore's literary output is diverse: A Mummer's Wife (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886), Esther Waters, (in print since its first edition in 1894, dramatised and filmed), and the short stories of The Untilled Field (1903), are moderately well-known; his ground-breaking, autobiographical Hail and Farewell (1914) created significant aftershocks in Dublin social and literary circles, and so irritated W.B.Yeats that he saved his retaliation until after Moore's death twenty years later. The variety extends to the 1916 biblical story of The Brook Kerith - a text that will be considered by Professor Peter Christensen (Milwaukee) at the conference - and to The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloë, Moore's 1924 version of the classical tale by Longus that will be examined by Dr Konstantin Doulamis of the Department of Ancient Classics, UCC.

031MMcS