Inaug.-Diss.--Münster. / At head of title: Englische Philogie. Vita. Bibliography: p. [189]-197.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

This project is a comparative study of Irish and Latin American modernisms and the literary responses to the advent of recorded sound. It focuses particularly on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, Leopoldo Lugones's short stories "La fuerza omega" and "Yzur," and Jaime Torres Bodet's novel Proserpina rescatada. It examines how each author grapples with the dislocation of the human voice from the body made possible through new recording technology. This selection of texts displays a range of engagements with this new technology, from a critique of rising positivism and machines in the early twentieth century, to experiments with aural metaphors in the wake of sounded film, and finally to the 1930s, when sound recording becomes an arm of government surveillance against its citizens. In each instance, the circulation of sound technology causes a shift in modes of representation that require new definitions of what it means to be human in an increasingly mechanized world.

For nearly twenty-six years, Brian O’Nolan wrote “Cruiskeen Lawn” in the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. The column has often been regarded as a distraction for O’Nolan—one that kept him from writing more novels or plays. Yet characteristics of his work across genres and stages of his life (such as his use of pseudonyms) began in his experiments within newspapers. As a student at University College, Dublin, he wrote for the student publication Comhthrom Féinn, and later began his own satirical paper, Blather. Our study and understanding of “Cruiskeen Lawn” is fundamental to our understanding of O’Nolan as an author across literary forms, topics, and periods.   The translation of “Cruiskeen Lawn” from the expanse of a newspaper page to an edition or to a dissertation is itself a form of editorial emendation. This dissertation, bound with its own set of constraints and rules, cannot fix this. Yet it will aim to consider the gains and losses of how we collect O’Nolan’s column. This dissertation has four chapters. The first relates the story of how O’Nolan came to writing through newspapers, how he came to write in the Irish Times, and how his relationship with the paper changed over time. A chronology includes the events in O’Nolan’s own life that pertain to his newspaper writing and work under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. It gives readers a holistic sense of the columns by placing them in the broader context of his life and includes end notes with references to his papers. The catalogue accounts for every “Cruiskeen Lawn” article O’Nolan published and it serves as the first document that consolidates this information. The edition comprises forty “Cruiskeen Lawn” articles. Annotations focus on tracing O’Nolan’s references to other articles and papers in order to open investigative pathways toward those sources and to show how richly the column borrowed from other media. / 2019-08-09T00:00:00Z

Nous proposons dans ce travail de retracer le chemin parcouru depuis la lecture du roman de Flann O’Brien At Swim-Two-Birds jusqu’à sa traduction afin de croiser théorie et pratique d’écriture. La difficulté de traduire ce texte bilingue écrit en anglais et en irlandais nous conduit à chercher dans les singularités tant linguistiques que culturelles de ces deux langues des ressorts littéraires qui mêlent les notions de littéralité et de créativité, communément présentées en opposition. L’étrangeté de la langue irlandaise dans At Swim-Two-Birds nous invite à revisiter la notion d’intraduisibilité. Elle nous engage également dans une réflexion sur les opérations de transposition qu’implique la traduction de deux langues. Afin d’écarter un rapport au texte et à sa traduction trop polarisé, en particulier dans le cas des textes bilingues, la traduction est envisagée dans un spectre élargi à toutes les langues, dans un mouvement d’écriture créative « en-langues ». Traduire (en) plus d’une langue ouvre ainsi la voie à des perspectives traductologiques nouvelles. / In this work we propose to trace a path leading from a reading of Flann O’Brien’s novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, to its translation. In so doing we carry out two intersecting trajectories crossing at the point where theory and practice meet. The difficulty of translating this bilingual work written in both English and Irish, enjoins the necessity of delving into both the linguistic and cultural singularities present in these two languages, as well as into literary reflections that blur the line between literality and creativity.The foreign presence of the Irish language in At Swim-Two-Birds calls for a reexamination of the notion of untranslatability. It likewise sets in motion a reflection on the operations of transposition that come into play when translating two languages at once. The approach presented here distinguishes itself from binary, polarized approaches to text and translation, in particular with regard to bilingual texts. Translation is thought within the scope of an expansive spectrum, « in-language ». Translating in/t(w)o languages thus opens onto new approaches in traductology.

Irish author Brian O'Nolan's (1911-1966) later career involves multi-media works that in a variety of ways challenge Ireland to be more open to the complications of modernity. These controversial works have too often been dismissed as pedestrian and unsophisticated, though they offer themselves as experiments in different media, involving technologies that were recent developments in Ireland. Looking at his later fiction, journalism, and television writings reveals that O'Nolan continued his commitment to complexity throughout his entire career. O'Nolan's experiments take many forms, including the fragmented identities of Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, portraying an author who embraces modernity when many in the country advocated provincial lore. He is open to modernity because he seeks positions among Ireland's emerging modern and nascent provincial voices in multiple narratives. These multiple positions are located in verbal and visual forms, multiple personas, and multiple genres--including new media--where he crosses boundaries of artistic media by including visual representations in his written experiments published and broadcast in new media. I combine Cultural and New Modernist Studies in an approach that labels O'Nolan a "bad" modernist because his multi-media and multi-genre works are precise and premeditated experiments in cosmopolitan as well as regional modernity. Moreover, I contend this "bad" modernist's later works can be reexamined as one form of Ireland's modernist culture, helping to bridge the transition from colony to emerging global power. Chapter one starts with persona Flann O'Brien's last novel, Slattery's Sago Saga (1965-1966), which is an appropriate beginning because its multiple narratives are extended to a broader, transatlantic audience, that of America. The novel also adopts an ambivalent female character that reappears, almost simultaneously, as a straightforward, confident female voice in the multi-episode television series, Th'Oul Lad of Kilsalaher (1965). Since O'Brien's works can be troubled by misogynistic tendencies, studying a later novel that complicates preconceived patterns about women helps readdress criticisms of the writer. Two interchapters also depict O'Brien's diverse experiments and positions in both well-known and obscure locales, anticipating shifts in more refined writings. The first of these analyzes O'Brien's early experiments in visual form, such as cartoons in childhood and college endeavors and doodles in the unpublished, first manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. In chapter two, the Cruiskeen Lawn columns, written under the Myles persona, mark a new form of journalism that uses intersections of verbal monologue and found illustrations to form its jokes. This word and image debate is made humorous by old trade magazine illustrations being recycled as new etchings, and this compounds the literary forgery evident throughout O'Nolan's career. Additionally, Myles' new journalism can be considered public art because The Irish Times where the columns are circulated is a natural arena of debate. A second interchapter hints at O'Nolan's part in shaping public thinking while offering his talents for pay. These experimental sketches show the "bad" modernist in O'Nolan when he tries to sell his Myles identity to Irish businesses like the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes, Guinness, and Whiskey Distilleries as a viable brand (a satirist who combines visual material with current and historical events) in the commercial market, even when the archives remain ambiguous. Finally, chapter three focuses on Myles' writings in television, and it is in Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher that a confident, modern female voice first emerges in his writing career. I compare his early, full-length television plays, which are often formulaic and transferable to other modern nations, to the multi-episode series, O'Dea's Yer Man and Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher, in part to reveal his pioneering role in developing a new form of modernity for Ireland; that he wants them to remain open to independent ideas rather than forcing on them a prevalent and predominant form of modernism. In the epilogue, I compare O'Nolan's modernist experiments to Anne Enright's parallel and contemporary work The Wig My Father Wore (1995).

This dissertation explores Irish and English fiction before, during, and shortly after the Second World War, a period of complex change in the relations between England and Ireland as British imperial control in Ireland ended. Ireland's neutrality in response to England's declaration of war intensified the nations' apparent differences, yet as my study brings to light, the War also fostered new affinities between England and Ireland, despite each country's inclination to define itself against the other by contrast. Each country's tendency toward xenophobic self-definition gave rise to policies and perspectives that resemble thinking and life in a fascist state. The fiction that I discuss responds to those tendencies by revealing possibilities for collectives that are more dynamically constituted around forms of vision and engagement involving shared responsibility and individual freedom. Chapter 1 reads Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts (1941) as a working through of contrasting responses to dictators from a 1938 diary entry and her manifesto Three Guineas, published the same year. I argue that character interactions and self-reflection in response to a play performed in the novel allow characters to recognize fascist tendencies in their own thinking and discover collective visions contrary to the total allegiance prized in Nazi spectacle and English propaganda. Against the mostly ahistorical critical treatments of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written 1939-1940, published 1966), Chapter 2 traces affinities between the narrator's deluded belief in his own superiority in a milieu of suppressed violence and the psychological environment Irish neutrality created. Focusing on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Heat of the Day (1948) and wartime short fiction, Chapter 3 argues that her characters' behavior challenges stereotypes about English and Irish residents promoted by the other country. Rather than offering the escape from the War that some English visitors desire, Ireland provides a vantage point for seeing their London lives in new ways. Chapter 4 takes Nazi narratives of German history as reference points for interpreting Samuel Beckett's Watt (written 1942-1945, published 1953) and Molloy (1955), in particular the narrators' attempts to hide their control over the narratives they shape and the collectives that surround them.

This thesis examines the ways in which the Celtic aesthetic emerges in case studies of four writers from the last century: Brian O'Nolan (under the pseudonyms Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), David Jones, George Mackay Brown, and John McGahern. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay, and poetry, but privileges prose and fiction. This study undertakes a formal analysis of these texts using a conceptual, thematic, and critically biographical approach. The archival methodology informing such an approach brings new scholarship into focus that either aligns these authors for the first time or reevaluates their relationships. O'Nolan, Jones, Brown, and McGahern are united here because they put forward their own theories of the Celtic aesthetic and modernized these differing representational strategies when they applied them in their fictional practices. My analysis of each writer begins with a definition of the "Celtic Aesthetic" then draws out how the Celtic is represented in his literary work, showing what we gain from reading the work within a modernist Celtic aesthetic. O'Nolan proposes a Celtic realism within a modernist understanding of the unity between form and content. He writes within a collaborative framework, retrieving modes of thought and literary effects from medieval Irish sources and scholarly texts. He and his peers were concerned with making an Irish-Celtic contribution to modern literature. David Jones develops a visual aesthetic in an Anglo-Welsh context, arguing that the Celtic enhances the potential for metamorphosis through a combination of contraries. Jones establishes a connection between the First World War and ancient Welsh tradition to symbolically pattern the experience of fighting in the trenches. George Mackay Brown shares this idea about Celtic metamorphosis and war. He claims the Celtic is a decorative aesthetic, one that is bound up with Roman Catholic theology and his understanding of Eucharistic anamnesis. Writing almost exclusively about the Orkney islands, Brown portrays the Celtic as an aspect of the Orkney's archipelagic modernism, informed by his own Scottish Gaelic linguistic heritage but also connected by sea to Wales and Ireland. John McGahern implies his theory about Celtic style in his discussions of Gaelic linguistic inheritance and the effect this produces on his English writing. McGahern also shares Brown's mysticism and O'Nolan's practice of depicting eternity in the West of Ireland. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor strain in modernist literature animate this set of literary works? Second, how do those characteristics inform our understanding of what the term "Celtic" means in a twentieth-century context and for contemporary readers? And third, what does this contribute to the current field of modernist studies? The Celtic for these writers is transnational, hybrid, decorative, and the means through which their questions about violence and despoliation could find expression in twentieth-century literature.