Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates...
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Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to understand O'Brien's nationally sensitive achievement as the work of an internationalist whose preoccupations reflect glo
Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgements; Contributors; Introduction; Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O'Brien; Fiction and sin; Character and creation; Narration and guilt; It must be complete; Chapter 2 Mythomaniac Modernism: Lying and Bullshit in Flann O'Brien; Chapter 3 'The Outward Accidents of Illusion': O'Brien and the Theatrical; Chapter 4 The Ghost of 'Poor Jimmy Joyce': A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist; Drunken poets; On board; The diffidence of the author; Joyce is not dead at all; Remember me!; No laughing matter; Unsuspected common loyalties
An ironic modernismO'Brien, unabashed, in the tunnel; Chapter 5 'Do You Know What I'm Going to Tell You?': Flann O'Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence; Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name; Translation and the name; Chapter 7 Ploughmen without Land: Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh; Two Northerners; Ploughmen and potatoes; Counter-pastoral; Bards; Human comedy; Chapter 8 Flann O'Brien's Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind; Joyce and Bloom's books; Flann O'Brien's copy of Joyce's Ulysses; Samuel Beckett's L'Innommable
Conclusion and coda: The parallax Joyce-Beckett-O'BrienChapter 9 'Truth is an Odd Number': Flann O'Brien and Infinite Imperfection; Chapter 10 'An Astonishing Parade of Nullity': Nihilism in The Third Policeman; Chapter 11 Flann O'Brien and Modern Character; Chapter 12 'No Unauthorized Boozing': Flann O'Brien and the Thirsty Muse; Chapter 13 Soft Drink, Hard Drink and Literary (Re)production in Flann O'Brien and Frank Moorhouse; 'You and your book and your porter'; 'The author class'; Writer as worker; The character as worker; Frank Moorhouse and the 'Business-Man Artist'
Self-authorship and mass productionThe joy of standardization; Chapter 14 Flann O'Brien's Aestho-Autogamy; Modernism, solitude, masturbation; Haptic palm of the invisible hand; Lonerism to onanism; Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen; Proliferating wheels; Locomotion and modernism; The Third Policeman; Conclusion; Index
