American-Irish Literary Relations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record.This chapter examines some key developments in Irish-American literary relations from the middle of the century to the 1980s. It begins by arguing that this was a period when Irish-American literary relations acquired a new complexity – in both the reception of the work of Irish writers in the United States and the emergence of a distinctive and authoritative Irish-American voice. It then goes on to examine the distinctive contribution of Irish and Irish-American writers to the development of the short story as a form in the United States, which was a process mediated and galvanised by the literary magazine The New Yorker, the natural habitat of writers such as John O’Hara and Maeve Brennan and, later, Elizabeth Cullinan. The chapter then discusses the expansion of the Irish-American literary canon from mid-century onwards and explores how key figures such as Edward McSorley, James T. Farrell, Mary McCarthy and Mary Gordon sought to engage with or contest influential Irish and Irish-American literary inheritances. These writers’ commitment to social realism invented a new version of Irish-America during these decades of cultural transition, one that often deliberately set itself apart from previous received scripts and mythmaking

"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

Present at the Destruction? The Liberal Order in the Trump Era

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 sent shock waves across political classes globally and prompted debates about whether his ‘America first’ agenda threatened the liberal international order. During his first year in office, Trump seemed determined to undermine the hallmarks of the liberal international order: democracy, liberal economics and international cooperation. So, are we witnessing the emergence of a “post-liberal” and “post-American” era? Four sources of evidence help frame–if not answer–the question: history, the crisis of liberal democracy, Trump’s world view, and the power of civil society (globally and nationally) to constrain any US President. They yield three main judgements. First, continuity often trumps change in US foreign policy. Second, the liberal international order may have been more fragile pre-Trump than was widely realised. Third, American power must be put at the service of its own democracy if the US is to become the example to the world it used to be

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

Disruptive children: desegregation, student resistance, and the carceral turn in New York city schools

This thesis seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of the carceral turn in American public education. Specifically, it considers how and why New York City came to deploy a vast force of police officers and security personnel, install sophisticated surveillance equipment, and put into place a set of highly punitive disciplinary policies that govern student behavior. Drawing from more than 40 different archives as well as 20 original oral histories, it maintains that school policing and student discipline have historically served as tools of social control and racial dominance, emerging with the very founding of organized education in America, and expanding most rapidly and dramatically as a direct response to the prospect of desegregated schooling and the attendant rupture in American life. In the wake of this conflict, the carceral apparatus was not only linked with, but institutionalized into, the public education system. Opposition to school desegregation, panic over the issue of juvenile delinquency, and white fears of Black criminality were mutually constitutive and jointly reinforcing – coming to a head in the mid-twentieth century and continuing to build upon each other throughout the ensuing decades towards a comprehensive system in the schools of exclusion, punishment, and arrest. On the level of both individual institutions and the education system as a whole, as more Black students enrolled in schools and flipped the demographics from predominantly white to predominantly Black, city and school officials increasingly met even ordinary student problems with carceral responses. City schools instituted sweeping disciplinary policies, forged partnerships with the municipal police department, and created security forces of their own as part of a larger system of student criminalization that both reflected and exacerbated existing social and racial hierarchies, stifled student organizing, and expanded the reach and power of the carceral state.</p