Irish Studies’ Seminar Series, 2018-19

Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction’-Dr Teresa Caneda, University of Vigo, Spain.

A chairde,

You are invited to attend our forthcoming seminar as part of the Irish Studies’ Seminar Series, Semester 2, 2018-19. We are delighted to welcome Dr Teresa Caneda from the University of Vigo, Spain to NUI Galway this year.

She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction” funded by Spanish Agency for Research (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Dr Vigo will deliver her seminar entitled, ‘Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction’at 4pm on Thursday 4 April, Seminar Room, Centre for Irish Studies. Further details are included below.

Beidh fáilte roimh chách!

Le gach dea-ghuí,

Abstract:

In contemporary Ireland many forms of abuse, kept secret for a long time, have recently aroused public opinion on an international scale. In this social context, the theme of silence has been extremely relevant to the Irish literary imagination with the topic of “the unspoken”, both as subject and style, being foregrounded by some of the most representative contemporary writers. Counter-hegemonic narrative impulses articulated through linguistic gaps, displacements, ironies and ambivalences have become essential discursive elements through which Irish artists question and resist social constructions and cultural practices attached to notions of silence. Drawing on the concept that silence is not only a space beyond words but a form of speaking the unspeakable, the talk will reflect on how authors have concentrated on breaking the conspiracy of silence thus  denouncing the private and public dysfunctions of a society in which shocking anomalies have long remained buried and unacknowledged.

Biography:
Teresa Caneda is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Vigo (Spain), she has recently been awarded a Scholarship for Senior researchers from the Ministry of Culture and Education and is currently on a research stay as a visiting fellow at UCD School of English, Drama and Film. She is the author of La estética modernista como práctica de resistencia en A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a re-evaluation of the ideological implications of modernist aesthetics in the context of Joyce’s early fiction (University of Vigo:2002) and the editor of Vigorous Joyce: Atlantic Readings of James Joyce (University of Vigo: 2010). She organized the 19^th Conference of the Spanish James Joyce Society and currently sits on the Editorial Board of European Joyce Studies. Her work has appeared in journals such as the James Joyce Quarterly, Papers on Joyce, Interventions, Translation Studies Translation and Literature and Estudios Irlandeses. An important part of her research has concentrated on translation as a form of negotiation between cultures and in relation to socio-political and intellectual frameworks vis-à-vis the concept of cultural mobility with a focus on the role of translation in processes of identity formation across the Atlantic (“Translation as a Revisitation of Joyce’s Irish Modernism” in Irish Modernism and The Global Primitive. McGarrity and Culleton (eds) Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; “Trans/atlantic Mobilities: Translating Narratives of Irish Resistance” in Towards 2016: 1916 in Irish Literature, Culture & Society. Crosson, Seán and W. Huber (eds) Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015). More recently she has been interested in exploring issues such as transnationalism, foreignness and mobility in relation to Contemporary Irish Fiction. Last year she co-edited, a special issue of the journal Atlantic Studies (2018) on “Atlantic Communities: Translation, Mobility, Hospitality” and contributed with a chapter on Joyce and the aesthetics of silence to the volume James Joyce’s Silences (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Since January 2018 she is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction” funded by Spanish Agency for Research (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).