Well, well, well. It’s the 30th of March, which means anyone reading this has only week left in which to charter a plane, hop on a train, catch a bus, call a car, hire a camel, or make the trek on foot to Textualities ’23, April 6th in the North Council Room of UCC’s Main Quad.
And with time ticking ever out, what better moment than this to formally introduce the programme and give a brief overview of our panels to come? We say there isn’t one, so…
Things will begin at ten with our first panel, Character and Identity, in which Aidan Burke, Dominic Kjelsen, David John Mackey, and Kaitlyn McNulty will be exploring expressions of character, both internal and external. How are outlandish or otherworldly characters physically represented in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Hound of the Baskervilles? Can the shifting complexities of the internal world be represented on the page, in The Forgotten Waltz, or on-screen in the surreal unrealities of neo-noir film? Will we keep asking rhetorical questions? For the answer to two of these questions, grab a chair on April
6th! For the third, read on…
After breaking at eleven for coffee, we reconvene at noon for our second panel, Woman Scorned: Gender Roles and Expectations, with Michelle Farley, Yuk Yin Chan, Charlotte Troy, and Ellen Hutchinson presenting a diverse series of texts that illustrate woman’s fight to be heard above a culture of suffocating societal norms, misogynistic browbeating, and casual dismissal by male authors. From the late Middle Ages to the modern day, they’ll chart how so much has changed and yet everything has stayed the same; a seemingly fraught state of affairs from which their eloquent discourse will surely uplift us.
At one, we break for a free lunch (they do exist!), but be warned; graspers who scuttle in to grab a free roll and quickly exfiltrate before having to learn anything will be subject to the unending censure of the English department’s viciously pointed tongues!
Re-reconvening at two, things will grow green for our third panel, Nature, Space and Place, a breezy showing fit for the Spring newly-sprung, presented by Robyn Coombes, Aroa del Rio Gabaldón, and Ribin Moni Daniel. This panel will examine the Victorian relationship with both the natural world and the world of concrete, steel, and glass they fashioned about themselves, to say nothing of the way these spaces became inextricably conjoined with their inhabitants.
A brief break will follow at quarter to three, to give us all a chance to spread our branches and prepare for the home stretch!
Turn down the lights and break out the candles, because at three we begin our final panel, Lurking Fear: Traces of the Gothic Throughout History. A palpable darkness will hang over the North Council Room as Francisca Picó Paredes, Robbie Lyons, Ioannis Kaprosioutis, Emily Dollery, and Hanke Kelber present a series of sinister speeches which illustrate that the Gothic is not just for churches anymore. Beginning with ghostly tales past and present, they’ll move onto the grotesqueries of Poe and the undercurrent of incisive depictions mental health that underpin the genre, before finally demonstrating through contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction that the days of Gothic crypts and unknown horrors
may not be behind us after all.
And there you have it, my friends; Textualities ’23 in its entirety! At quarter to five,
they kick us all out and hose down the chairs. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime event, and don’t discount this humble blog, for there are more interviews with our speakers to come. They say twenty-four hours is a long time in politics, so just imagine what we can get up to in a whole week…
