Modernist Studies Ireland’s Works in Progress guest lecture by Dr Tamara Radak on ‘“To Infinity…and Beyond?”: ‘Endgames’ in the Novels of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien’

It is our great pleasure to welcome Dr Tamara Radak (University of Vienna), who is currently a Visiting Fellow at NUI Galway’s Moore Institute. Tamara’s lecture is aligned with her doctoral research on the (non)sense of an ending – and, judging from the sparkling poster, we’re in for a galactic treat! The lecture takes as its point of departure a staple of critical literature on modernism: that modernist novels lack closure as a rule. Tamara’s book project, “No Sense of an Ending? Modernist Aporias of Closure”, complicates this idea, arguing that modernist novels do not display a lack of closure so much as an irresolvable yet productive tension, or aporia, between openness and closedness. When taking a closer look at representative examples (in this lecture, the works of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien), the often-neglected complex interplay between closure and what Barbara Herrnstein Smith terms “anti-closure” in modernist novels becomes apparent. Drawing on recent work in new modernist studies by Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao, Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers and others, the lecture investigates how thinking through modernist “aporias of closure” – a phrase coined by J. Hillis Miller in a more general context – can help us to critically re-investigate modernism as a concept. There will be wine, cheese, and nibbles to keep us sustained on more than art and modernism! For more information on the event, our speaker, and MSI more generally, please see our website at https://modstudiesireland.wordpress.com/ or get in touch at modstudiesireland@gmail.com.