Michael O’Sullivan

Bowen: The Unspeakable Loneliness of the Anglo-Irish Expat

This chapter reads the work of Elisabeth Bowen in light of contemporary accounts of loneliness and the experiences of colonial English expat communities. For Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish community, the feeling of being a resident expatriate was enduring and it produced a unique kind of “ascendancy” loneliness that for critics such as Frank O’Connor was unspeakable or unrepresentable. Bowen’s collection of essays People, Places, Things offers new insights into her motivations as a writer. The later essays possess a warmth and philosophical empathy her critics rarely assign to her characters and fictional worldviews. Bowen can be regarded as transposing the emotion of this unspeakable loneliness onto the aesthetics of space that is so central to her fiction and that transforms furniture and “imperturbable things” into objects that have an inordinate influence on the events of the narratives.

Yeats: The Expat Buys Property ‘Back Home’

This chapter reads Yeats through his desire to buy property “back home”, what is also a widely held desire among the present generation of Irish migrants and expats. Yeats writes of his desire to find a secluded home in nature back in Ireland as early as his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” written when he was an expat in London at the age of 24. This interest in buying property back home develops into his later obsession with his “Tower” at Ballylee, a property he later bought from Lady Gregory. In the end, Yeats could only spend eight summers at Ballylee as the environment and the house itself proved too damp. This chapter therefore examines how this interest in buying property “back home” evolved in Yeats’s poetry and how it relates to his understanding of his own Anglo-Irish identity.

Goldsmith: The Irish Expat in London as Chinese Philosopher

This chapter examines the work of Oliver Goldsmith in the context of Irish expatriatism and the problem of English. Goldsmith was something of a nomad in his early career until he came to lodge in somewhat impoverished surroundings in London. However, he recognised early on that there would be no career for him in Letters if he stayed in Ireland. Working from his garret in London, Goldsmith became a master of role-playing and ventriloquism, assuming the voice of an English country gentleman in “The Deserted Village” and of a “Chinaman” in The Citizen of the World. This chapter examines Goldsmith’s masks in the context of the eighteenth-century interest in chinoiserie, while also interrogating recent Asian readings of his orientalism that completely overlook Goldsmith’s Irishness.

Irish Expat Empire Builders in China and Hong Kong: Robert Hart and John Pope Hennessy

This chapter examines the lives and work of two of the most important diplomats from the island of Ireland in the nineteenth century. Both Robert Hart and John Pope-Hennessy worked for the British Empire and Robert Hart also worked for the Qing Dynasty of China. This chapter examines their careers as Irish expats and the nature of their work for the British and Chinese Empires. It also examines how their Irishness might have influenced their work for the British Empire. The chapter also publishes for the first time an illuminating and enlightening letter from Robert Hart to Hennessy from 1880 on the future commercial landscape of China and the Greater China Region. It also publishes for the first time a somewhat harrowing account of John Pope Hennessy’s first-hand experience of the Irish Famine.

Social Network Expatriatism and New Departures in John Boyne, Anne Enright, and Donal Ryan

This chapter examines how the recent explosion of Irish national broadcaster social media initiatives and Irish newspaper social media projects for Irish expats has revolutionised how the Irish community at home and abroad conceives of Irish migration. The chapter examines how many of such programmes and media initiatives as Abroad, “Better Off Abroad”, and Generation Emigration have offered Irish expats opportunities to share their stories and their concerns about migration. The chapter also gives readings of some of the individual accounts of the expat experience on these sites and examines comments and reactions to these stories. The chapter also reads these contemporary stories and narratives as sharing some of the concerns of the earlier Irish expats examined earlier such as Joyce and Yeats. The chapter ends with a reading of some new Irish narratives on migration and travel abroad in such writers as Donal Ryan, Anne Enright and John Boyne.

Boland: Can the Expat Find a “Home” in Language?

Eavan Boland’s work explores in detail the means through which the music, rhythms, and structures of poetic language can form a kind of contemplative and homely space of creation for the expat and particularly for the expat woman writer. Eavan Boland is the only writer examined in the book who is also a professor and academic at an Ivy League university. Therefore, her professional position as English professor also serves to speak for the range of professions and occupations that so many Irish expatriates have gained through their proficiency in English and, for some, through their command and mastery of English as a creative resource. This chapter also explores how Boland has found her way into poetry through her research into somewhat overlooked woman writers in the Irish tradition such as Jane Wilde (“Speranza”) and Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. The chapter also gives a reading of Boland’s own reading of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”.

Meritocracy and Individualism: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Humanities Values in a Politicised Hong Kong Context

The humanities may have as many faces as there are nationalities (Shumway 1998). However, in recent years an educational debate has emerged in Hong Kong, one that has travelled to China and Taiwan, that is committed to speaking for, and elaborating, what one contributor in this collection calls an Asian humanities (Lee in Keynote speech for the eighth annual meeting of the Asian New Humanities Net (ANHN). The Chinese University, Hong Kong, 2010). This is not a new discipline by any means but the fact that there has been a new call for an Asian humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong suggests that what is being imagined is something quite different from such “Asian Humanities” courses that presently take place in such universities as Columbia University (de Bary in The Great civilized conversation: education for a world community. Columbia University Press, New York, p. 51, 2015). However, this new call for an Asian humanities has emerged in the Hong Kong academic context, a region whose world-class universities embody its cross-cultural humanities history. This chapter explores some of the key values that are negotiated on a daily basis in this academic community. The aim for such cross-cultural educational practices has always been to sustain and nurture what Wm. Theodore de Bary calls a “great civilized conversation” between multifaceted traditions, an aim that might seem difficult to maintain today when barbarism is so virulent and academic freedoms are being eroded (O’Sullivan in Academic barbarism, universities, and inequality. Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2016; Williams in Academic freedom in an age of conformity: confronting the fear of knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016). The chapter will begin by examining how different notions of meritocracy and individualism inform educational debates in contemporary Chinese contexts and it will then look at the politicisation of humanities courses in Hong Kong and examine student responses to an undergraduate course entitled “Literature and Politics” that I taught in Hong Kong in 2016.

Academic Barbarism: Practice and Transmission

The concept of barbarism has received much attention in recent years and in the process it has undergone an important critical reappraisal.1 The sense of barbarism that is integral to what I am calling academic barbarism is informed chiefly by Michel Henry’s and Walter Benjamin’s theories of barbarism and also by what has recently been described as “weak barbarism.” For Radu Vasile Chialda, “strong barbarism” refers to the “classic” definition of barbarism that invokes the ancient Greek distinction between Greeks and barbarians, which enables us to maintain a supposedly clearly demarcated barbarism/civilization dichotomy.2 However, today the limits between barbarism and civilization are, for Chialda, so “transparent and permeable” that the character of these terms and what relates to them “weakens” (Chialda 2011, 228). Weak barbarism speaks for the “uncivilized character of human individuals” and it stresses the distinction between “weak barbarism” and “strong barbarism” (225). Weak barbarism describes our society’s “tendency to decay,” which illustrates a “symptomatic dehumanization of society” (228). Chialda argues that “its forms of manifestation are so violently not contrary to the principles of humanity [my emphasis]” that it works in a far more indirect way than “strong barbarism” by acting through the “normative inadequacies” of policy or law that societies allow to develop.

Notes towards an Educational Transformation

So ends 18-year-old Hal Incandenza’s response to the selection committee at the University of Arizona where he is being interviewed by three Deans, of Admissions, Academic Affairs, and Athletic, the university’s Director of Composition, its varsity tennis coach, and its Academy prorector. He is a shy athlete of “substantial promise” being considered for the “University’s varsity tennis program.” Unfortunately Hal has some “subnormal” test scores and he is too nervous to explain them to the Admissions Committee. He greets their “expectant silence” with his “silent response” (2014, 125). His Uncle Charles does all the talking. Finally, infuriated by both Hal’s silence and his uncle’s unwillingness to stop talking, one of the Deans comes clean: “Look here, Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn’t be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won’t speak up for himself” (130). Hal finally explodes into a stream of verbiage that ends with the above monologue. Appalled by what they have heard, the Deans pinion his arms and legs and wrestle him to the floor. He is dragged through the Administration offices to an “old-fashioned men’s room” and “rolled over supine on the geometric tile” (133).

Academic Barbarism and the Literature of Concealment: Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald

If there are any writers who describe the experiences of graduate students, adjuncts, early career academics, and soon-to-be-retired academics working on the fringes of the academy as forms of academic barbarism, they are W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano. No author’s work has more literary critics than the work of Roberto Bolano and no writer’s protagonists are as caught up in research as those of W. G. Sebald. The researchers and academics of Bolano’s and Sebald’s novels display a devotion to the literary search, the archive, and the intertext that often sees them promoting a literature of concealment through a form of academic barbarism that conceals “the book that really matters” [“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)]. Their modes of enquiry into their cultural and literary histories focus our attention on their authors’ different renderings of the Information Age’s institutionalization of the archive as fortress of knowledge or as pastiche of literary formalism and academic hubris. Their protagonists are either left stranded, like Sebald’s Austerlitz, in the new Grande Bibliotheque, “Schatzhaus unseres gesamten Schrifterbes” [the treasure-house of our entire literary heritage], feeling like “einen potentiellen Feind” (A 404) [a potential enemy (A1 398)], or, like Bolano’s academics, they are left in a site of barbarism unaware of how their academic work conceals the literature that really matters—[“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)], the “magic flower of winter!” (2666E 786) [“la flor magica de invierno!” (2666S 983)].