69 min listen
Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, "The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable" (Indiana UP, 2020)
Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, "The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable" (Indiana UP, 2020)
ratings:
Length:
89 minutes
Released:
Nov 3, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history.
Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College.
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Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Nov 3, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916” (Oxford UP, 2010): Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916.... by New Books in Irish Studies