2005 Press Releases

11 Mar 2005

Ó Faoláin Letters Launched at University College Cork (UCC)


New insights into one of Ireland's most important writers will be revealed on March 18th next  at the George Moore Conference at UCC when Brazilian scholar, Professor Munira Mutran, of the Universidade de Sao Paolo, will present a collection of Seán Ó Faoláin letters "Letters to Brazil".  The letters to Professor Mutran - one of the keynote speakers at the Conference - were written in the period 1973 to 1987 revealing Ó Faoláin's concern with his work, his views about Ireland and the world, his evaluation of Irish writers as Joyce, O'Casey, Yeats, Goldsmith and others and the process of ageing and
 
On Ireland, and the world, and about the Irish, in the past and in his own day, he was, as always, very objective - as he was about his literary achievement and in evaluating his first three novels. However, he has, sometimes, a self-deprecatory modesty as in his dedication of And Again - as "My last and least good novel". Previously he had written at length in one of the letters about the 1979 novel, stating that it pleased him very much.

Professor Mutran graduated at University of São Paulo (USP) in English and German.  Her MA was on a comparative study of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Graciliano Ramos' Vidas Secas and her PhD on Seán O'Faolain's short stories. She started a Programme of Irish Studies at USP in 1980 and has supervised 11 PhDs and 8 MAs in that field.  She is President of ABEI, the Brazilian Association of Irish Studies. Professor Mutran's enormous contribution to Irish studies has been recognized in the State Visits to USP by President Mary Robinson (1995),  Taoiseach Bertie Ahern (2001) and President Mary Mac Aleese (2004).

Her publications include:  Mutran, Munira and Laura Izarra. Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland. São Paulo: Humanitas, 2003.  Munira Mutran. Guirlanda de Histórias (an anthology of Irish Short Stories). Munira Mutran.Album de Retratos (about autobiographies of Yeats, Wilde and Moore).

The collection of letters will be launched by Professor Colbert Kearney on March 18th next at 7.15 pm, Department of English, University College Cork.


032MMcS 


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