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Lecture: Aran Ward Sell, "Streams of Damaged Consciousness in Contemporary Irish Fiction"

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Location: 1050 Jenkins Nanovic Halls

Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute for a lecture by Yeats Fellow in Literature, Dr. Aran Ward Sell. Ward Sell's lecture will be followed by a response by Dr. Liam Lanigan, Associate Professor of English at Governors State University.

In his monograph project, Streams of Damaged Consciousness, Dr. Aran Ward Sell discusses resurgent experimentalism in Irish fiction following the 2008 financial crash. He focuses on the use of modernist techniques of narrative interiority in the novels of Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, Kevin Barry, Anakana Schofield and Anna Burns. These authors develop and renew Joycean and Beckettian modes of stream of consciousness writing with a shared focus on subjectivised portrayals of mental damage: their characters narrate the world through interior monologues damaged by anxiety, trauma, mental illness or grief.
 
This talk comprises a work-in-progress reading from the project, which situates close narratological analyses of these "streams of damaged consciousness" within the socio-political contexts of post-crash Ireland, including the notable role of small presses and literary magazines in catalyzing new Irish experimental writing of this era.

About Aran Ward Sell

Dr Aran Ward Sell is W. B. Yeats postdoctoral fellow in Irish Literature at the university of Notre Dame. His work focuses on contemporary Irish literature and environmental fiction, and has been published in Irish Studies Review, C21 Literature, HJEAS and elsewhere. He has published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, The Irish Literary Supplement and The Scottish Review of Books. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His monograph project, Streams of Damaged Consciousness, is under contract with Syracuse University Press.

Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.