Modernism and the Making of Contemporary Europe is a new lecture and podcast series at MoLI which will explore the ways in which modernist literature, art and culture has been rewritten, repurposed and revalued in twenty-first century Europe.
Featuring presentations and conversations with commentators, critics and scholars from around the globe, this series will engage the ways in which modernism has become significant to contemporary European aesthetics, heritage and identity.
Barry Sheils is Professor of English Literary Studies at Durham University, where he also co-directs the Centre for Culture and Ecology. Sheils has published widely on modern and contemporary literature. He is the author of W. B. Yeats and World Literature, and many journal articles on Irish literature, literary theory, eco-criticism and psychoanalysis. His current research focuses on two themes: the link between linguistic complexity and the future; and the modern history of literary style. He has two books forthcoming: Weather Book: Modern Literature, Meteorology and the Language of the Future; and (with Richard Robinson) The Disciplines of Style: Voice, Sentence, Description and Translation.
This talk tells the story of the literary sentence as a modern European technology. It begins with W. B. Yeats’s astonishment at hearing Oscar Wilde speak in perfect sentences, ‘as if he had written them overnight.’ It then shows how the sentence became central to James Joyce’s work as an inheritance from Gustave Flaubert's scrupulous French. Joyce felt Flaubert's sentences could be innovated upon in Irish and Anglophone contexts. Contemporary writers including Colm Toíbín, Ali Smith, Anna Burns and Mike McCormack have continued Joyce's broadly European project of modernist innovation, yet their experiments with the sentence must now be read alongside the global ascent of large language models. The talk ends by asking: what is the cost of losing our astonishment in a world of perfect sentences written by machines?
The series is presented by Dr John Greaney, School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, and supported by the project Contemporary Modernisms, funded by Taighde Éireann / Research Ireland.
