Though many Irish films have aspects of the Gothic, their structures generally adhered in a programmatic fashion to the guidelines of Classic Hollywood Cinema, and in this way they are similar to generic motion picture structures that could come from international studios in any part of the world. A select few films have produced uniquely Irish Gothic narratives, that is to say motion pictures that echoed the post-Modern tendencies of German Expressionists with unapologetically fragmented cultural contexts. To underscore these contrasts, this essay offers a sampling of the more conventional approaches and then take a closer look at these truly innovative forms. The construction of the Gothic films touched on underscores the oscillating perspectives of homegrown filmmakers presenting motion pictures contextualized in an environment of evolving characteristics of Irishness. In the twenty-first century, Irish cinema, like all of Irish society, struggles to discern a cultural identity. The Celtic Tiger did much to make Ireland more European, and even after the economic bubble burst those sentiments remain strong. It seems most likely that future Irish Gothic films will increasingly put their national character in brackets and move towards a more post-Modern sensibility.

Catholic Influence on Concepts of Death and Dying in Joyce's Writings Michael Patrick Gillespie Although this article will look chiefly at the ways in which Joyce's experiences with religion shaped his treatment of the end of life, like most issues related to his works a full understanding can come only through consideration of a broader cultural context. Catholicism played an integral part in almost every aspect of the Irish ethos at the time that James Joyce was growing to manhood in Dublin. To catch the flavor of his world, he fills his narratives with references to all aspects of Catholic belief, and he readily draws on its prayers, liturgies, dogma, and traditions for a rich source of metaphor. With that in mind, one states the obvious in saying that any thorough study of his fiction must include attentiveness to how Joyce understood Irish Catholicism and how he represented its diverse aspects throughout his fiction. Such an analysis needs to emphasize, not conventional Catholic teachings, but Joyce's subjective impressions of them: Joyce, like any other human being, constructed his environment based on his personal understanding of everything he encountered in the world. As such, a discussion of his views on Catholicism would be markedly distinct from any objective review of the church's influence in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. To be sure, one of the specters that has troubled countless discussions of Joyce's relationship to the church is that of positing an essentialist, reductive understanding of Catholicism. Doing so can easily construct a straw-man argument; many such arguments reflect a view that overlays personal animosity toward aspects of the church, almost as if settling old scores. As a result, one's appreciation of the Catholic culture of Joyce's fiction will not be materially enhanced by objective, social scientific efforts more fittingly employed by historians—for instance, gathering data on attendance at mass from 1880 to 1900. In fact, such information could very well mislead one's comprehension of Joyce's representations. Instead, the thoughtful literary critic must emphasize attentiveness to the subjective instincts of an artist endeavoring to capture a particular tone and perspective of a specific societal cross-section—lower middle class, Catholic, and urban—that he wishes to inculcate into his [End Page 114] writings to enhance a reader's sense of the way particular characters saw and reacted to their world. The key to such an approach is the acknowledgement of Joyce's sophisticated sense of the range of feelings informing the attitudes toward the Catholic church that were held by even the most ordinary citizens whom he depicted in his fiction. Only a few of Joyce's Dubliners, for instance, seem inclined to participate in the Devotional Revolution—the surge in public piety in the latter part of the nineteenth century effected largely through the work of Cardinal Cullen—or to submit to the ecclesiastic tyranny that sought to regulate every aspect of their lives. A clear example of the impulse to resist such efforts at control comes when Simon Dedalus, in a fit of anger during the Christmas Dinner scene in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, famously invokes what has now become the shopworn cliché characterizing the Ireland as "an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter."1 Many of Joyce's characters showed, time and again, a relationship with Catholicism, far removed from the supposed lockstep conformity to church dictates that stereotypical portrayals of Catholic Ireland present as an oversimplified donnée. In fact, many were openly antagonistic. A few sentences after the passage quoted above, Simon Dedalus brags about a grandfather, saying "he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them to put his two feet under his mahogany" (P 33).2 Examples of this of sort of energetic anticlericalism abound, often mixed with sardonic humor. One of the most forceful and amusing appears in Ulysses when Ned Lambert's recollection of a rough-and tumble clash of church and state gives a perfect sense of the offhanded undermining of episcopal...

Bien qu’au cours de sa vie, Oscar Wilde ait été entouré par un certain nombre de personnages flamboyants, il se démarqua de ceux-ci en raison du grand talent dont il fit preuve quand il s’est agi de se forger une image de marque. Cette démarche va bien au-delà de la simple mise en scène de soi, et elle a de bien plus larges implications en termes de rapports à la société. C’est grâce à la création de cette image de marque que Wilde se distingua d’une génération d’excentriques, grâce à l’habileté dont il fit preuve dans l’élaboration d’une image publique singulière, image qui parvint à frapper les esprits tout en échappant aux foudres de la censure. Cette image était celle d’un artiste apparemment sans inhibition mais qui, en réalité, savait parfaitement susciter le frisson sans pour autant provoquer de la révulsion. Entre ses années d’étudiant à Oxford et les procès de 1895, la « marque Wilde » protégea sa vanité et accrut sa réputation, à travers sa capacité à changer de registre et à s’adapter à des environnements différents. Comprendre le fonctionnement de cette image de marque et l’engagement de Wilde envers cette dernière au gré des situations, permet d’offrir un aperçu de l’évolution de sa carrière d’écrivain et de saisir au mieux les perspectives changeantes dont les lecteurs doivent avoir conscience afin de comprendre son œuvre.

Despite the work of John MacNicholas and other diligent scholars, Exiles , Joyce’s only extant play, has been a source of embarrassment, indifference, or bewilderment for many, myself included. Reading it was, for me, excruciating, and live performances did nothing to convince me that it was little more than time wasted between the completion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the initiation of Ulysses . It was only when I began to study the impact of the exilic experience on Joyce’s writing that I came to see elements in the work that I had previously overlooked. The essay that appears here reflects my efforts to understand how the nostalgia and rancor that shaped Joyce’s recollections of Ireland played transformational roles in writing this play.

Many readers dismiss James Joyce’s final novel as impossible to wade through, with its multilingual puns, songs, jokes, portmanteau words, allusions, scientific references, myths and legends. Given the kinetic elements of any reading experience, features particularly evident in Finnegans Wake, reading inevitably becomes synonymous with interpretation. To that end, this article focuses on the use of Enquiry-Based Learning, or EBL, by one upper-division English literature module, as an opportune methodology with which to encourage students to explore the myriad possible readings which the Wake could support. Joyce created by invention, by collection, and by accident, all of which underscore the value of working together. Particularly because EBL moves away from traditional styles of lecturing and into the realm of deeper, autonomous learning, fostered by collaboration above individual ownership, and motivation above accumulation, it works well with the fluid and amazingly complex and associative constructs inherent in Joyce’s text.

Reviewed by: Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classical Hollywood Cinema Michael Patrick Gillespie Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classical Hollywood Cinema, by Christopher Shannon, pp. 255. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2010. $25. The dustcover of Christopher Shannon’s new book on Irish-American involvement in Hollywood from the 1920s to the late 1950s carries an enthusiastic endorsement from Ruth Barton, an esteemed critic of the Irish cinema. The praise from Barton is particularly apt, for Shannon’s book nicely complements her own recent study, Acting Irish in Hollywood: from Fitzgerald to Farrell (2006). Barton chronicles the careers of indigenous Irish actors who—by migrating to the United States or commuting between it and Ireland—exerted and continue to exert a profound influence on films made in Hollywood. Shannon’s focus, by contrast, is on representations of the Irish-American ethos in classic Hollywood cinema at the height of the studio system, and he offers original and perceptive insights into the impact that these films had on Hollywood and on motion picture audiences. An historian by training, Shannon sets very clear goals in this study, and he has produced a book that will become in effect a reference work for anyone working in the field of Irish-American cinema. Because the title can be misread or at least create expectations that the author does not intend to address, it is important to clarify what Shannon’s study does and does not do. Shannon writes at length about the roles undertaken by Irish-American actors like Pat O’Brien or James Cagney, but this is not a study of their careers. Nor does he examine in any detail the work of directors like Leo McCarey or John Ford. Bowery to Broadway is emphatically History and not Film Studies. In meticulous detail and with wonderfully accessible prose, Shannon presents accounts of essential, and in some cases not-so-essential, films that represent key elements of Irish-American life—at least as it was perceived by Hollywood producers, directors, and screen writers. Bowery to Broadway offers a popular account of a distinct social phenomenon, Hollywood’s interest in an ethnic group that often seemed quite different from both the Norman Rockwell version of America enforced by covers of the Saturday Evening Post and from the equally ethnic world of the Hollywood studio system. Shannon emphasizes chronicling over interpretation, though the latter is tantalizingly present throughout. As such, he does not attempt the wide ranging analyses of a work of Film Studies, nor does he undertake a complex sociological assessment of the forces shaping Hollywood’s interest in Irish- American themed films over three decades. Instead, Shannon presents a carefully organized account of a phenomenon of which many readers interested in film, in Irish Studies, and in Irish America may be only vaguely aware. In this, Shannon’s project on film might be compared to what William H. A. Williams [End Page 148] did for sheet music in ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream (1996)—that is, retrieve and thoughtfully interpret a large body of ethnic material that had previously been ignored. Shannon begins with a thumbnail sketch of the political career of Al Smith, the unsuccessful Irish-American Catholic presidential candidate of 1928. He emphasizes Smith’s ethnicity as a defining feature of both the candidate and the campaign, and without belaboring the point, shows how these traits ensured Smith’s defeat. Shannon ends with a brief reference to John F. Kennedy, whose 1960 success came about in no small part from the transformation of his identity from an ethnic to an indigenous candidate. Between these two stories is a meticulous rendering of a series of Irish-American films covering a variety of categories and dominated by ethnicity. Shannon organizes his engagement with Hollywood cinema according to genres, starting with the one most recognizable to readers and the one most analyzed by film critics: gangster films. Despite the familiarity of this ethnic-dominated category, Shannon makes excellent points about the contrasting features of films with Irish-American gangsters and those featuring Italian Americans. The very nature of these ethnic representations raises the danger of biased, even offensive, commentary, but...

This chapter contains sections titled: Life Writing References and Further Reading

The Odyssey of Adam and Paul:A Twenty-First-Century Irish Film Michael Patrick Gillespie James Joyce's Ulysses encapsulates the tempo of life in early twentieth-century Dublin through the straightforward device of tracing the peregrinations of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom around the city on June 16, 1904. In chronicling the experiences of Bloom and Stephen interacting with Dubliners as they move—first separately and then together—across the metropolitan area, the narrative of Ulysses offers insights into the dysfunctional elements of Irish home life, the fractious consequences of Ireland's political upheavals, the chaotic layout of Dublin's typography, the alternately exhilarating and suffocating elements of Roman Catholic beliefs and rituals, and a host of other topics of local and, ultimately, of universal interest. With its freewheeling referentiality to Dublin's individuals, places, and events, Joyce's work stands as an unmistakably Irish novel. It uses heavily allusive snapshot encounters to convey a strong sense of how middle- and lower middle-class individuals lived in Dublin at the beginning of the last century. Its very specificity has a wide-ranging appeal that has engaged readers around the world. In depicting these idiosyncratic lives, Joyce articulates a unique environment that is nonetheless imaginatively accessible to a wide audience. Joyce himself acknowledged this phenomenon in a comment to his friend Arthur Power: "I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world."1 Readers agreed, immediately proclaiming Joyce's work a monumental achievement. At a time in literary history when the rise of Modernism and the trauma of the First World War challenged the efficacy of the novel, Ulysses presented a unique way of seeing the world. With its resolute detail, Joyce's novel revitalized conventional perceptions and came to dominate the consciousness of the twentieth-century literary scene. Its eclectic thematic concerns, from the erotic to the emetic, established new parameters for narrative discourse. Its wide-ranging stylistic approaches—which reflected a consciousness of literary [End Page 41] forebears, yet asserted an attitude uninhibited by the restrictions of cause-and-effect logic or the tradition of linear construction—presented a form of fiction unlike anything since Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The cultural effect of Ulysses, a distinctly Irish novel with near universal appeal, proved to be immediate, profound, and lasting. In our time, the achievement of articulating a uniquely Irish experience with widespread imaginative resonance has become more and more difficult for artists to replicate. The nature of being Irish, particularly among the middle class, has lost much of the distinctiveness it enjoyed as recently as a generation ago. Simple dichotomies that for generations had been commonly and comfortably applied to articulate the features of Irishness—religious versus secular, provincial versus metropolitan, republican versus Unionist, and numerous other polarities—no longer provide a stable foundation for understanding the parameters within which the national identity exists. The concept of an overarching, defining public character has become anachronistic. David McWilliams, in discussing the contemporary Irish adults whom he calls "the Pope's Children," probes the ways in which economic and social growth over the past few decades—particularly in an expanding middle class—have radically transformed traditional reference points. At present, the qualities that the Irish middle class privileges seem hardly distinguishable from the identifying features of middle-class communities across Europe and North America. McWilliams hammers home this point in a series of contrasting images of the old and new aspirations of the middle class in Ireland: The Old Irish Dream—which was mother's milk to their parents and previous generations—was of Catholicism, nationalism, community, chastity, the Brits, the six counties, the Irish language, the famine, the underdog, getting a good job in the bank and the glamour of Grace Kelly. Things were offered up, sacrificed in this life for fulfillment in the next. This has been replaced by a New Irish Dream. The New Irish Dream can be best summed up by 'I wanna trade up'. I want the biggest fridge, the best holiday, the newest car, the loudest sound system, the healthiest food, the best yoga...

In households across the United States, the mere mention of John Ford's 1952 film The Quiet Man can have an unnerving effect upon an individual's equanimity. This is particularly true for many Irish Americans of the baby boom era who remember growing up under its influence. Quite simply, that movie has become the embodiment of all that was maudlin, manipulative, and embarrassing about the culture of their forebears, both in this country and in Ireland. At first glance, one can find ample evidence in scene after scene of The Quiet Man to reinforce this view. Like other Ford films from the era, it calls to mind the swaggering optimism of a culture still proud of the part that it played in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and still free of any trace of self-doubt that might have curbed the arrogance of an unquestioned belief in the American way of doing things. More particularly, and with far more serious consequences, for the casual viewer The Quiet Man seems to play upon all of the simplistic images of Irish life and character that xenophobic Yankee isolationists and sentimental expatriates had alternately disdained and celebrated in print, on the stage, and ultimately, in electronic media from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

In the mid-1950s James Joyce was still a figure that intimidated most academics. The Dublin about which he wrote obsessively seemed as distant and foreign as Tolstoy's St. Petersburg. Dubliners had a gritty edge that directly challenged post-World War II optimism. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made stylistic leaps and presented thematic challenges that disrupted the normal course of reading. Ulysses was a book that far more scholars owned than read. And neither New Criticism nor old Historicism seemed suited to illuminate what, if anything, was going on in Finnegans Wake. All that changed with the publication of Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce. With energy, humor, and erudition, Kenner offered incisive views of each of Joyce's works, and made a convincing argument that they could not only be read but enjoyed by a wide range of individuals. Kenner's writing irrevocably changed the way we read the canon of James Joyce. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate, nearly fifty years after the book's appearance, to inquire into its continuing critical worth.