Note: Reflections on the First Decade of the International Flann O’Brien Society

2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of both the International Flann O’Brien Society and its peer-reviewed journal The Parish Review. The work that has been undertaken by the society and its members in this decade has significantly expanded the scope and profile of Flann O’Brien studies, but also changed how we understand the author Brian O’Nolan and his works in their historical, social, political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts, as well as their legacy to contemporary letters and theory.This note uses the occasion of this anniversary to take stock of these changes and to consider what avenues lie open to the future of the field.

Theoretical Perspectives on the Theme of Distance: Report on 110 Myles: Flann O’Brien at a Distance, An Online Symposium, 26‒28 July 2021

Report on the 110 Myles: Flann O’Brien at a Distance online Symposium, 26‒28 July 2021.

‘I was listening … but did not succeed in hearing you’: Flann O’Brien, Ralph Cusack, and the Absurdities of Silent Musical Experience

The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he ‘hears’ and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as ‘postcolonial’.

Lenguaje y comunicación de insectos en Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green de Myles na gCopaleen

Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green fue escrita por Myles na gCopaleen, también conocido como Flann O’Brien o Brian O’Nolan. Este texto dramático es una adaptación de la obra de los hermanos Čapek: života hmyzu (1921) y, aunque le debe la estructura episódica y el concepto general a su fuente checa, se caracteriza por su uso del lenguaje y su relación con el regionalismo irlandés. Específicamente, la relación de los insectos con su espacialidad y en cómo la oralidad proporciona un tipo específico de identidad como en el caso de los escarabajos de Dublín y los grillos de Cork, entre otros. La producción literaria de Myles na gCopaleen es conocida por cuestionar el significado y el uso del lenguaje humano y, en particular, en Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green explora la posibilidad de un lenguaje animal y su relación con la sociedad irlandesa. Si el único límite entre el hombre y el animal podría ser trazado por el lenguaje y la capacidad nominal de la palabra, ¿cómo es que el uso particular del lenguaje por parte de estos insectos cuestiona el significado y el desempeño de las interacciones orales junto con su correspondencia identitaria?

Review of the Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien

Review of the Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien

Theories on Distance: Report on 110 Myles: Flann O’Brien at a Distance, An Online Symposium, 26‒28 July 2021

Report on Conference, without abstract.

Review of 'Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority' (2017), edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt

Review of Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority', edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt (Cork University Press, 2017)

Brian O’Nolan’s “Tales from Corkadorky” and Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh

This essay addresses a relatively untouched topic in the field of Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien studies: the Irish-language “Tales from Corkadorky” vignettes published during 1941–42 in the “Cruiskeen Lawn” column O’Nolan wrote as Myles na gCopaleen for the Irish Times. This essay builds on the brief existing critical remarks about this series of columns by exploring, in unprecedented detail, Breandán Ó Conaire’s suggestion that the “Tales from Corkadorky” are modelled on the Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh (Munterloney Folktales) collected by Professor Éamonn Ó Tuathail and published in 1933. After summarising existing criticism, the essay presents the wider context of folklore collection for O’Nolan’s work in Irish, the background linking him to Ó Tuathail’s Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh, and proceeds to conduct a comparative reading of O’Nolan’s use of dialect features and themes from this source material in the “Tales from Corkadorky”. Facilitated by its analysis of the first tale to appear, the essay traces the origin and development of the tale format as it interacts with other recurring elements in “Cruiskeen Lawn”.