Lecture by Fintan O’Toole on “Open Secrets: Ulysses at 100″

Fintan O’Toole, Princeton University’s Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters, delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

fintan with greying hair and serious gaze wears glasses and white collar shirt with blazer — Photo courtesy Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole, Princeton University’s Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters, delivers the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on “Open Secrets: Ulysses at 100″ as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series.

James Joyce’s revolutionary novel Ulysses was published 100 years ago in February 1922. In its initial review of the book, The New York Times declared Ulysses “the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century.” Through a stream of consciousness writing style, Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus, a 22-year-old aspiring poet and teacher, and Leopold Bloom, a 38-year-old Jewish advertising agent, as they go about nineteen hours of daily life in Dublin, Ireland. Both men grapple with themes of religion, philosophy, remorse, and mortality. In his lecture, O’Toole asks why the book still matters today. It is, he suggests, one of the best explorations we have of the way the local is also universal; of the fluidity of identity; of the fusion of body and mind; and of the possibility of living beyond tragedy.

Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg ’53 visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the best sellers Ship of Fools and Enough is Enough. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, and Journalist of the Year in 2010, the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize. O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. His most recent book is Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS, published by the Royal Irish Academy, and he has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.

Tickets & Details

The virtual lecture, presented via Zoom Webinar, is free and open to the public; registration required. Register for the lecture on Zoom Webinar

A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

The event will include live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect to the captioned event through StreamText. Attendees in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

Lecture by Poet James Longenbach on W.B. Yeats

Poet and literary critic James Longenbach, author of Forever and The Lyric Now, lectures on W.B. Yeats’ poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Longenbach will discuss how the poem assumed the shape it does, and, more importantly, the influence of that shape on subsequent long poems written throughout the 20th century and beyond. Part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. FREE; open to all. registration required.

james longenbach with forward gaze, dark shaggy hair and black sweater — Photo by Adam Fenster

Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies presents a lecture by James Longenbach on W.B. Yeats and his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” on Friday, January 28, the 83rd anniversary of Yeats’ death, at 4:30 p.m. via Zoom Webinar. Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Co-chair of the Fund for Irish Studies Paul Muldoon will provide a welcome and introduction. The event is part of the 2021-2022 lecture series, which will continue virtually for the next few events.

Longenbach will give an account of William Butler Yeats’ (1865-1939) poem, discussing how it assumed its shape, and, more importantly, the influence of that shape on subsequent long poems written throughout the 20th century. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was part of his first collection of poems published after the Nobel Prize: The Tower (1928). The Tower contains other long poems that contemplate the state of politics in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, the mortality of man, and the temporariness of the world, such as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” and “The Tower.” Like many of the poems in the collection, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is divided into six parts of unequal length with differing meters and rhyme schemes in each part. Titled after and written about the first year of the Irish War of Independence, the poem grasps at the idealism and nostalgia for “law”, “habits”, and “public opinion” destroyed by war and violence.

Longenbach, a poet and literary critic who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His most recent poetry collections include Forever (W.W. Norton, 2021) and The Lyric Now (University of Chicago, 2020). Longenbach has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Mellon Fellow.

Tickets & Details

Please note that this first event of the spring series will remain virtual via Zoom webinar.

The virtual lecture is free and open to the public; registration required. Register for the Zoom webinar

A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

Accessibility

The event includes live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect to the captioned event through StreamText. Attendees in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.

“History of Ireland in 100 (and More) Words” with Máire ní Mhaonaigh and Sharon Arbuthnot

Authors Máire ní Mhaonaigh and Sharon Arbuthnot present on “A History of Ireland in 100 (and More) Words,” with an introduction by Professor Paul Muldoon, as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. FREE and open to public; register and join via Zoom Webinar.

Maire smiling with chin length auburn hair — Photo courtesy Maire Ni Mhaonaigh

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh is Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and a Fellow of St John’s College. She works at the interface of history and literature, her research focusing on medieval constructions of the past. She has published widely on medieval Irish literature and history and on Ireland’s place in the wider world. She has contributed chapters to the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and to the recent multi-volume Cambridge History of Ireland. Among other recent publications are a co-authored volume, Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World (with Colmán Etchingham, Jón Vidar Sigurðsson and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, 2019), exploring the cultural and political connections between Norse and Gaelic speakers in the high Middle Ages; and A History of Ireland in 100 Words (co-written with Sharon Arbuthnot and Greg Toner, 2019) illuminating aspects of Ireland’s past through the development of words. She co-led a project on the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language which resulted in a revised and augmented version of that resource, eDIL 2019; and she is currently directing research on the landscape history of medieval Ireland, ‘Mapping the Medieval Mind: Ireland’s Literary Landscapes in a Global Space’, illuminating medieval dinnshenchas, a literature of place (a Leverhulme Trust project 2020-2025). She chairs the board of the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and serves on many other bodies, including the editorial board of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures and the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (Hamburg).

JOIN THE EVENT

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register and join the lecture via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

ACCESSIBILITY

The event includes live closed captions in English. Patrons can join the Webinar and connect directly to the captioned event through StreamText. Reference these instructions for using StreamText (PDF).

If you are in need of other access accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of the event date.

The Fund for Irish Studies affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The series is produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2021-22 edition of the series is organized by Paul Muldoon and Fintan O’Toole.

The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan, Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.

Conversation with Roddy Doyle and Fintan O’Toole

Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter Roddy Doyle joins in conversation with scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole. Professor Paul Muldoon opens the virtual event with an introduction. FREE and open to public; register and join via Zoom webinar.

Irish novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter Roddy Doyle joins in conversation with scholar and critic Fintan O’Toole. Professor Paul Muldoon opens the virtual event with an introduction.

JOIN THE EVENT

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Register and join the lecture via Zoom Webinar.

NOTE: A recording will not be available to share with the public following the event.

ACCESSIBILITY

The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan, Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.