Search results for ""Author Eugene O'Brien""

Thematically arranged and clearly structured, this book explores the seminal themes in Heaney's writing: aesthetics, politics, language, identity and myth, ethics and notions of Irishness. A central strand of this study is an exploration of Heaney's ethical and political project with respect to issues of Irish identity as outlined in his writings. This work suggests that there are analogies between Heaney's political and ethical thought, and that of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. Each chapter concentrates on a single theme: his sense of the aesthetic, and its role in terms of politics and ethics; his relationship with politics as a contemporary situation; his notion of place, both as a given, and as something that could be reimagined; his enunciation of a sense of visceral identity; his concept of ethics in terms of a relationship between selfhood and alterity; his notion of the many threads which combine to produce a sense of Irishness. Finally, the Nobel lectures of Yeats and Heaney are examined in order to trace the complex relationship between these two writers.

Read more less

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner’s later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney’s early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney’s earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections. The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney’s debts to classical and modern literature—in the original languages and in translations—and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many general readers of Heaney's poetry.

Read more less

I am getting nearer to something. The answer to the question. Who am I? A woman who leaves her husband very suddenly for an old lover and heads to a cottage in Kerry? I needed someone strong. Someone who would sweep me along. Keep me here. In this world. Not allow me to wander down below, and I wanted a child. I dearly wanted a child. Mairead and Mal are struggling to keep their marriage together. Perhaps attending a wedding will help, or it might raise questions that are difficult to answer. Poignant, funny, and beautiful, Heaven is a new play that is full of humanity. It is presented by the Olivier Award-winning Fishamble, and written by Eugene O’Brien (winner of the Rooney Prize for Literature). This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival, followed by an Irish tour, in Autumn 2022.

Read more less

A heartwarming debut that continues the story of the hit RTÉ TV series Pure Mule, which captured the whole world in one small Irish town. Scobie Donoghue was once the king of Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, famous for the craic and the drink. His twenties were spent working on building sites during the Celtic Tiger, making good money and spending it on wild weekends. A lovable rogue, the lads wanted to be him and the girls wanted to be with him. But now, returning from Australia after the break-down of his relationship, Scobie is back in the single bed of his childhood home. About to turn forty, burnt out and depressed, he quickly discovers that life in the small midlands town he thought he had left behind has moved on – but has Scobie? ‘Just like Normal People, Pure Mule captured the zeitgeist at a pivotal time in modern Ireland.’ Roscommon Herald

Read more less

This collection examines the Irish economic phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger and the financial disaster that came in its wake, from a socio-cultural perspective. It focuses on how these financial developments have been reflected in writing, film and culture in order to offer a more rounded analysis of the effects of this momentous period on people’s lives.Employing a wide range of cultural lenses, the book critiques the cultural, political and aesthetic implications of the progression from prosperity to austerity and the impact this has had on the psyche of Irish culture. An eclectic mix of theoretical approaches enables treatment of religion, literature, popular culture, photography, gastronomy, music, gender, immigration and film, as contributors assess how the Celtic Tiger was represented, or misrepresented, in these particular spheres of experience.In addition, the chapters also probe the effects on all of the aforementioned cultural forms, and interrogate how the lives of people have been transformed in ways that go beyond the already well-documented areas of economics and finance.The book will be a valuable resource for academics and students interested in contemporary Ireland and recent Irish history, as well as the general reader anxious to understand the effects of this particular period on the real lives of people as expressed through culture. It features contributions by internationally acknowledged experts in their fields and offers a comprehensive overview of the cultural consequences of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

Read more less

This collection examines the Irish economic phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger and the financial disaster that came in its wake, from a socio-cultural perspective. It focuses on how these financial developments have been reflected in writing, film and culture in order to offer a more rounded analysis of the effects of this momentous period on people’s lives.Employing a wide range of cultural lenses, the book critiques the cultural, political and aesthetic implications of the progression from prosperity to austerity and the impact this has had on the psyche of Irish culture. An eclectic mix of theoretical approaches enables treatment of religion, literature, popular culture, photography, gastronomy, music, gender, immigration and film, as contributors assess how the Celtic Tiger was represented, or misrepresented, in these particular spheres of experience.In addition, the chapters also probe the effects on all of the aforementioned cultural forms, and interrogate how the lives of people have been transformed in ways that go beyond the already well-documented areas of economics and finance.The book will be a valuable resource for academics and students interested in contemporary Ireland and recent Irish history, as well as the general reader anxious to understand the effects of this particular period on the real lives of people as expressed through culture. It features contributions by internationally acknowledged experts in their fields and offers a comprehensive overview of the cultural consequences of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

Read more less

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope’s address in Galway were entertained by two of Ireland’s most charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were subsequently revealed to have been engaged in romantic liaisons at the time.The decades that followed the Pope’s visit were characterised by the increasing secularisation of Irish society. Boasting an impressive array of contributors from various backgrounds and expertise, the essays in the book attempt to trace the exact reasons for the progressive dismantling of the cultural legacy of Catholicism and the consequences this has had on Irish society.

Read more less

This book traces the steady decline in Irish Catholicism from the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 up to the Cloyne report into clerical sex abuse in that diocese in 2011. The young people awaiting the Pope’s address in Galway were entertained by two of Ireland’s most charismatic clerics, Bishop Eamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary, both of whom were subsequently revealed to have been engaged in romantic liaisons at the time.The decades that followed the Pope’s visit were characterised by the increasing secularisation of Irish society. Boasting an impressive array of contributors from various backgrounds and expertise, the essays in the book attempt to trace the exact reasons for the progressive dismantling of the cultural legacy of Catholicism and the consequences this has had on Irish society.

Read more less

Weigh-in-motion (WIM) is a process of measuring the dynamic tire forces of a moving vehicle and estimating the corresponding tire loads of the static vehicle. This collection of lectures from the International Conference on Weigh-in-Motion details applications such as: collection of statistical traffic data, support of commercial vehicle enforcement, roadway and bridge cost allocation, and traffic management.

Read more less