By reading each of the novels of Kate O’Brien’s oeuvre as ‘a travel story’, just as we read Balzac’s Père Goriot, it becomes necessary to read them as ‘a spatial practice’, a narrative that locates itself in and responds to a specific space. The specific geography of Kate O’Brien’s Parisian novels of development, Without My Cloak (1931), The…[Read more]

Lecture/class notes on Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

This article argues for an overlapping notion of indigeneity in Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down articulated using critical Aboriginal Studies while exploring the materialist emergence of identity. The key tension, then, is not between both authors’ progressive politics nor the real differences b…[Read more]

My intention is to reorient Stephen Hero’s position in Joyce’s oeuvre, viewing it not simply as a precursor to A Portrait but instead as a first attempt at the kind of expansive narrative Joyce would undertake in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. What I wish to narrate is not primarily the story of Stephen Hero’s failure, but instead the story of how J…[Read more]