Feasting with cubs: Wilde at Berneval
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1995 is the centenary of Oscar Wilde's trials. The man and the work have been honoured this year by a plaque in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. In this same year, Irish homosexuals were refused permission to march down the streets of Manhattan in the St. Patrick's Day parade. This clash of register - the high redress by the reigning culture after a century, and the nous, in both senses of the word, of the street - is germane to Wilde. His name signifies a disturbance in a way that no other name in literature does, partly because of this clash between the academy and the street. |
IASIL conference Kyoto 1995 & Journal of Irish Studies| Full Story |
Ready to catch us should we fall: a memoir of Paris
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In 1979 I received a small bursary of £1000 from the Irish Arts Council to finish a novel. I had just returned from a year in Algeria and was living in Paris, in a large, run-down apartment in Boulogne-Billancourt, a working-class district to the southwest of the city. The apartment’s big, French windows faced a reception hostel for African immigrants and students. It was down the street from the Renault car factory, and a pervasive smell of metal and vulcanisation hung in the air. |
IASIL conference Tokyo 1994 & Journal of Irish Studies | Full Story |
The same mind under changed skies: the global nomad
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The term 'global nomad' has the popularity of a received idea in the international school community, while 'global' is a catchphrase on everybody's lips. Does the term correspond to a widespread reality or to one that has been manufactured by a new knowledge monopoly? Does the catchphrase merely veneer with glamour a social class on the move? To what extent is globalism just the emperor's new clothes? |
IB World May 2001| Full Story |
Look, we have come through!
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It must have been Easter 1984, on a day trip to the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain - how quickly political language becomes obsolete! We were an exchange group from an international school in Paris, guests of our Bruderschule in Hamelin: African diplomats' kids from the French sphere of influence; Iranian refugees from the Shah, the Ayatollah and the Iran-Iraq war; the sons and daughters of sundry international carpetbaggers. |
IB World May 2001| Full Story |