Emergency Aesthetics - Seamus Deane's Small World

 In 1988 or 1989, I attended a one day conference on 'theory and teaching' at University College Dublin.  A group of TCD friends and I, all of us galvanised by our experience of 'literary theory' and also by a particularly approachable and enthusiastic teacher, went to the Arts Building in Belfield, and watched a gallery of notable Irish or Ireland-based scholars - Declan Kiberd, Ciaran Cosgrove, Thomas Docherty among them - exploring the implications of bringing theoretical discussions into their pedagogy.   

Towards the end of the day, sessions were collapsed into one large plenary, in one of those vertiginous and steep-sided theatres on the main Arts Building concourse.    The participants did not fill the theatre so we were encouraged to come down to the front rows of seating.    At some point, I became aware of a speaker who was still seated in the upper levels of the theatre.   The voice was quiet, confident, Northern.    I did not know who the speaker was, and I admit that I can't remember what he was saying, but what was instantly noticeable was that no-one else in the room - not even the star guest of the day, Terry Eagleton - was listened to with the same rapt attention.   It was a stunning performance.   The speaker, I later learned, was Seamus Deane.

I subsequently got to know Seamus a little when I took a Master's degree in English at UCD, under his tutelage and that of Kiberd, Docherty, Michael Paul Gallagher and Brian Cosgrove.   It was a year that decided my career.   I went on to write about his work extensively.   I am still learning from it and from his example.

Seamus Deane died on May 12 last.   I did not know him well, but I felt a great loss at his departure.   Seamus could be remote, he could be intimidating, he could be genial, and he could be hilarious.   But there was no other intellectual in Ireland quite like him - massive range, penetrating insight, and a hint of steel in his sense of the politics of ideas.   During my MA year I wrote an essay for him on Foucault and Habermas.  I was on tenterhooks as I went to discuss the essay draft one day, and I was certainly nervous seated across the table from him in his office, even as I was electrified at the seriousness with which he took the work.   But at the end of the session, he smiled at me and said quietly, 'I think this essay is very promising'.  I floated out of the room on a wave of confidence and pleasure.

At the point of his death, Seamus was about to publish a large retrospective collection of his essays, which he had assembled with the aid of my colleague Joe Cleary.   Sadly, Seamus did not live to see his book published.   His death was greeted by his friends and former students with a great run of memories of his dazzling lectures, and his uncompromising valorisation of critique as such.

I have just published a review of the book, Small World: Ireland 1798 - 2018 at the Los Angeles Review of Books.   The LARB is a splendid journal, younger than the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books, but much more radical and more open to new writers and new ideas.   I am indebted to David Lloyd, Tom Lutz, Boris Dralyuk, Rob Latham and Cord Brookes for making this review possible.   Special thanks to Rob for his editorial skills and his patience. 

Conor  

Relentless Erudition: On Seamus Deane’s “Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018”

The final collection of essays from a great Irish scholar....

NOV 29

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CONOR MCCARTHY

Edward Said as Activist - an essay in Jacobin

 Edward Said was and remains famous as a major American (and indeed, global) intellectual - a scholar-academic who stepped outside of his professional expertise in comparative literature to intervene in important discussions about Palestine, the wider Middle East, Islam, Zionism and Israel, American foreign policy, imperialism, justice and democracy.   His books most often split his academic concerns from his political ones, though a couple - most famously Orientalism - brought those interests together.   But in the early 1970s, Said could still describe himself as a kind of split personality, a Homo Duplex as Conrad called himself, who did everyday academic things in his workplace but who had all sorts of complex and controversial Middle Eastern connections.   

Timothy Brennan's recent biography of Said,  Places of Mind, tells us something rather different.   Said was, from the late 1960s on, an inveterate activist, organiser, facilitator, agitator, networker, on Palestinian and Arab issues in the United States and also in the Middle East.   Not merely this, but the activist work was not at all a contradiction or a mere sideline to the scholarly work - rather the academic work found one of its most important roots in his activism.   Writing and reading, the production and reception of texts - be those texts a policy statement or newspaper op-ed, or the most refined and arcane works of literature or philosophy - was to be understood, Said argued, as a 'worldly', streetwise, consequential activity.   

I have just published an essay on this theme in Jacobin, America's best leftwing magazine.    Warm thanks are due to Daniel Finn for inviting me to do this work, and for his support and patience in its production.   

Edward Said Showed Intellectuals How to Bring Politics to Their Work

Conor