We are happy to report that Salford is well-represented at this year’s American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), held at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick on 17 – 21 June. The theme of the conference is ‘Embracing Change, Navigating Uncertainty: Ireland and New Beginnings’. Caroline Magennis will be presenting a plenary talk entitled ‘Writing the Body and “Body Work” in new writing from the North of Ireland’ and Katie Barnes will present a paper on the topic of ‘Writing Neurodivergence in the Contemporary Irish Women’s Novel’. Please find the abstracts of these papers below:
Caroline Magennis: This paper seeks to reflect on the representational history of the body in writing from the North, with a focus on contemporary texts which take embodied experiences as their narrative catalysts. It will also reflect on the physical work of writing in our discipline, and particularly in writing which borders on life writing and autoethnography. Irish feminist thought has, for decades, thought meticulously through the symbolic potential and representational lacunae that beset Irish ‘body texts’ — I want to claim kinship with this rich lineage and draw attention to the bright future of emerging scholars in this field. We will think about the ways in which twenty-first century texts have offered a more expansive approach both to the representation of the body and also what it means to be a writing body that attends to this work, particularly in the age of the unequal academic workplace. For this, I want to draw on writerly bodies critical, creative and hybrid to consider the work of putting the embodied self back into writing and the potentials and vulnerabilities of a complex, embodied ontology. It will reflect on my own relationship to this ‘body work’, following Judith Butler: ‘I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations.’ I will use examples from recent fiction, including Louise Kennedy and Michael Magee, alongside my own creative-critical practice to think through how we might bring our bodies with us instead of pretending they don’t exist.
Katie Barnes: Robert Rozema notes that fiction has ‘thus far known only one child with autism: the high-functioning, hyper-verbal savant’ (Rozema, 2014). As an attempt to push further debate about autistic representation, this paper examines Emilie Pine’s portrayal of autism in her 2022 novel Ruth and Pen as explored through how protagonist, Pen, interacts with the world and those around her. I will theorise Pine’s use of form and language to analyse the suitability of the novel form for representing neurodivergent narratives, suggesting that Pine’s innovative use of the chapter structure to intertwine two stories enables a deeper understanding of Pen’s character. In line with the themes of the text, I will also examine Pen’s uncertain relationship with the idea of motherhood, looking in particular at the relationship between maternal instinct and the physical body. This will lead on to an analysis into the representation of neurodivergent attitudes towards motherhood, seeking to locate Pen as a challenge to traditional ideals of Irish motherhood by analysing her identity as a queer, autistic teenager in a pro-natal society. This paper will ultimately explore Pine’s text as a new beginning in the way autism is represented in the contemporary Irish literary canon.
You can find out more about the conference here.