Moore Institute Visiting Fellow Seminar: Maria McGarrity (Long Island University) ‘Exhibiting Ireland: Immigrants and Visual Culture in Derek Walcott’s Joycean New World Epic’ – Jack Fennell (University of Limerick) ‘Thrasymachus versus Calib

Moore Institute Seminar

Maria McGarrity

(Long Island University and Moore Institute)

‰Û÷Exhibiting Ireland:

Immigrants and Visual Culture in Derek Walcott’s Joycean New World Epic’

Jack Fennell

(University of Limerick and Moore Institute)

‰Û÷Thrasymachus versus Caliban: Monstrosity and the Limits of Expansion’

“Exhibiting Ireland: Immigrants and Visual Culture in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, a Joycean New World Epic”

The John C. Messenger manuscript in the Hardiman library details folklore and ethnography on Montserrat, “the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean,” in the mid twentieth century. Such a vibrant catalog of the Caribbean Irish frames Derek Walcott’s Irish textual exhibit, a highly organized and illustrated collection of Irish characters in his transatlantic epic Omeros: Major Plunkett, Maud Plunkett, and Lawrence. These characters have cultural associations not simply to Ireland but to a specific collection of historical figures that helped shape Dublin museum culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This network of allusion, inspired by the “the keeper of the Kildare street museum” that Joyce mocks in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses becomes reframed and reimagined on St. Lucia in the mid twentieth century. Walcott’s imaginary museum of the book includes several dominant cultural and political figures from Ireland, from radically different social registers and affiliations, and re-locates them to the West Indies. Walcott’s catalogue becomes a Joycean museum.

Maria McGarrity is Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She works on island geographies, primitivism, and transnational modernism in Irish and Caribbean literatures. Her two new books are just out this month: Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide to Derek Walcott’s Masterpiece (University of Florida Press, 2015) and a co-edited collection, Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (University of the West Indies Press, 2015). Caution: the ink may not yet be dry.