‘The Art of Grief’: Irish Women Poets’ Explorations of Loss and Healing“ | 19 Maio, 16h | Anf. III FLUL

Data: 19 Maio, 16h00
Local: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa I Anfiteatro III
Organização: CEAUL
Patrocínio: Embaixada da Irlanda em Portugal

O grupo de investigação 4 – Outras Literaturas e Culturas de Expressão Inglesa do CEAUL convida-o/a a assistir à Embassy of Ireland Lecture 2015.

Oradora convidada: Catriona Clutterbuck (University College Dublin)

Título: ‘The Art of Grief’: Irish Women Poets’ Explorations of Loss and Healing“

Abstract 

‘The Art of Grief’: Irish Women Poets’ Explorations of Loss and Healing

Irish Women Poets are justly celebrated for their work in bringing unspoken aspects of human experience from outside to inside history. One of the most important of these is loss arising from bereavement, exile and injustice. Contemporary Irish women poets both follow on from and challenge their predecessor W.B Yeats in exploring the conditions and complications of loss. Their work attends to immediate and personal as well as communal and trans-generational grief, teasing out the tensions and links between these. The intersections between private and public grief are particularly important in a country where the legacies of colonialism and of later social, economic and religious oppression, still cast a shadow. The more recent phenomena of the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, and Ireland’s present focus on austerity, arguably have extended rather than dissipated this shadow. In this regard, Irish women poets’ work on loss communicates the importance of mourning for the unlived or broken lives of Irish people, and of the nation itself. Their work further suggests that such acts of mourning are the seedbeds of vital critical resistance to cultures of life-denial.

This lecture traces women poets’ visitation to underworlds of grief in Irish culture, the silencing of which becomes a form of violence in itself. They explore the possibility of healing from inside that dark experience, suggesting that creative empowerment of self and others arises through facing up to and into loss: in Kerry Hardie’s words, they recognize that “death pushes us deeper into our lives”. This lecture examines the theme of loss in some of the most senior living Irish women poets, including Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon and Kerry Hardie. It explores their awareness of the radical alterity associated with death, and its potential for opening up spaces for new and more response-able thinking in the living.

Nota biográfica

Catriona Clutterbuck é Professora na Escola de Inglês, Drama e Cinema, em University College Dublin. Especialista em poesia e poética, bem como em literatura contemporânea irlandesa em língua inglesa, a sua investigação incide sobre: poesia contemporânea irlandesa, particularmente escrita por mulheres; identidade de género e subjectividade; codificações políticas e éticas no gesto criativo; conceitos e expressões de fé; estética e artifício na literatura moderna; poéticas do luto; e culturas literárias e críticas irlandesas. É autora de ensaios sobre Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Thomas Kinsella, and Vona Groarke, entre outros.

Embassy of Ireland Lectures

Lançadas pelo S. Exª Embaixador James Brennan aquando da sua visita à Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, em Maio de 2008, no âmbito da criação da unidade curricular de Literatura e Cultura Irlandesa, as Embassy of Ireland Lectures têm trazido a Portugal distintos escritores e académicos irlandeses.