Catherine Flynn
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW
I’m a modernist with a degree in Comparative Literature from Yale University (2009). I’m interested in opening up the timeframe and categories in which we think about modernist texts.
James Joyce, Walter Benjamin and the Matter of Modernity
My current project is the first book-length discussion of two major figures of modernism, James Joyce and Walter Benjamin. In Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and The Arcades Project, Joyce and Benjamin address the nature of experience in the early twentieth century through a radical rejection of the conventions of fiction and theory. My book explores the materiality of their depicted worlds and of the texts themselves. It reads Joyce and Benjamin's depiction of physical things in a larger context of British and European writing, from Krook’s rag and bone shop in Bleak House to the 40,050 babies the husband produces in a single day in Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias.
My proposal for James Joyce, Walter Benjamin and the Matter of Modernity is currently under review at Cambridge University Press.
Here’s a short essay on their fragmentary writing styles that’s available online at Berfrois. It’s excerpted from a talk I gave at this summer’s North American James Joyce Conference at the Huntingdon Museum. Both Joyce and Benjamin moved to Paris in the nineteen twenties and composed much of their most important work there until they fled the city—Joyce in 1939, Benjamin in 1940. While they shared important friends, such as Adrienne Monnier and Léon-Paul Fargue, they never met.
Novel Forms: Innovation in Modernist Literature and Architecture
Drawing on my training and experience as an architect, my second book project examines formal innovation in modernist literature and architecture. The project considers writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bowen alongside architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Eileen Gray. The project examines their reworking of the relation between public and private, their exploration of an aesthetic that is divided between classical reference and everyday expression. “Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it,” writes the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. By considering architecture and literature together, this project seeks to make visible in a new way the radical forms of the early twentieth century.
Flann O’Brien and the Second World War: The Cruiskeen Lawn, 1940-1945
I’m also collaborating with David Wheatley on a scholarly edition of Flann O’Brien’s satiric journalistic writing during the Second World War. Selections from O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn column have been anthologized but this edition will provide all the wartime installments in chronological order with historical notes and translations of the Irish Gaelic, European and classical passages in the column. This collaboration began this summer at the Flann O’Brien Centennial Conference in Vienna. David Wheatley presented on O’Brien’s satires of “politico-linguistic extremism” in 1940s Ireland; I spoke about O’Brien’s use of Irish in the early Cruiskeen Lawn to undermine official public discourse and to register the violence of war-time bombing. O’Brien began the column for the Irish Times one month after the first German Blitz on London. My talk was drawn from an article (currently under consideration) that discusses the early Cruiskeen Lawn as an absurdist avant-garde project that undermines the boundaries of literary writing and of national identity and recalls Dadaist works during the First World War.
Upcoming
I’m planning a panel with Richard Brown and Jonathan Eburne on Joyce and the avant-garde at this summer’s James Joyce Symposium in Dublin. My review of Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr’s collection of essays entitled Joyce and the Nineteenth Century French Novel (Rodopi, 2011) is forthcoming in the James Joyce Broadsheet. I’m also working on an essay on “Marxist Modernisms” for Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Handbook for Modernist Studies, forthcoming with Wiley-Blackwell.