"A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design": Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning, and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.This work began as a conversation with Neil Sammells about Irish women's writing and self-fashioning, and his encouragement and insightful responses to ideas in development were invaluable to the progress of the research. I am also very grateful to Maureen O'Connor and Caitríona Clear, whose work on the Irish woman writer and dandyism, and women and magazine culture, lays an all-important foundation for the arguments developed here. Archival research for the article was made possible by a Fulbright Scholarship in the Humanities (September 2012—January 2013), and I am most grateful to my host institution, Fordham University in New York. I would like to thank the literary estate of Maeve Brennan for kind permission to cite from Maeve Brennan's letters and unpublished material held in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware and the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The work was completed with the assistance of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2015, which provided a valuable opportunity to present work in progress as part of the seminar series hosted by the Centre for Irish Studies. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors at Women: A Cultural Review for their thorough and expert responses to the article

Resurrection ::the struggle for a new Russia /

Resurrection plunges the reader directly into the thick of events so that one all but feels Yeltsin's breath upon one's face - he is drunk one day, in command the next, as volatile as the fragmented country he tries to lead. Remnick's new Russia springs to life through vivid portraits of its players: the half-Jewish anti-Semite Zhirinovsky, "a hater, a crank, a nut"; the young (and purged) economist Yegor Gaidar, champion of "shock therapy" and market reform; Vladimir Gusinsky, Russia's Citizen Kane ("a first-generation capitalist living in a jungle world with few rules or restraints"); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who returned from a twenty-year exile to find a country freed from communism but still steeped in misery - and nostalgia. These portraits emerge against a background dominated by the war in Chechnya, which Remnick visits in a bloody and unforgettable chapter, and a Moscow in turbulent transition

King of the world : Muhammad Ali and the rise of an American hero/ Remnick

xvii, 326 hal. : ill. ; 20 c

The bridge ::the life and rise of Barack Obama /

Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick demonstrates how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, then as a Harvard Law School graduate, and finally as President of the United States. "By looking at Obama's political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of ... heroes of the civil rights movement who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorties of a new generation of African-American leaders. The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obama's quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives."--From publisher description

Interview with Philip Levine

University of Michigan.Vol. 1, no. 2- issued as the University of Michigan official publication, v. 63, no. 74-Electronic serial mode of access: World Wide Web.Michigan quarterly revie