This article retraces the trajectory of Irish Studies in Brazil from its early beginnings in the 1970s to its present consolidation within national and transnational academic networks. Drawing on personal and institutional recollections, it examines the establishment of the W. B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies at the University of São Paulo and the foundational role of the Brazilian Association of Irish Studies (ABEI). The essay reflects on the creation and transformation of a field that has evolved through imagination, dialogue, and collaborative crossings. It discusses how Latin American scholars have contributed to decolonizing Irish Studies, internationalizing higher education and forging interdisciplinary bridges between the Humanities and other fields. The article concludes by proposing different strategies for sustainable institutionalization and reciprocal global exchanges that promote a comprehensive internationalization of Irish Studies in the twenty-first century.

Introduction the ABEI Journal number 26 volume 2.

This paper aims to perform a comparative study of the representation of hunger in Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937) and Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas Secas (1938). The first novel, published in Ireland, takes place during the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852), in which about one million people died. The second novel, published in Brazil, is set in an undetermined Brazilian region where drought induces hunger and rural exodus. The works, although published in different countries, present similarities and differences in the representation of hunger, especially the period of publication, the narrators’ position, and the abjection of the hungry body (Kristeva, 1982). While Vidas Secas adopts an objective narrative, highlighting the protagonists’ lack of communication and rusticity, Famine takes an engaged perspective, holding governmental and religious entities responsible for the tragedy. Both works underscore the vulnerability of the poor in the face of repressive forces from dominant classes, emphasizing resistance as the only weapon of the underprivileged. Beyond physical hunger, the novels emphasize the need for political, social, and cultural nourishment for the disadvantaged, illustrating that oppression not only results in material deprivations but also in a social exclusion that silences and disempowers the less fortunate.

Pettitt, Lance. The Last Bohemian: Brian Desmond Hurst, Irish and British Cinema. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023. P. 312. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0815637295.

Building upon the concept of the “good enough” facilitating environment developed by pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, this article aims to analyze the family relationships depicted in the novel Normal People by Sally Rooney. Through the contrast of experiences, the author develops two distinct family environments — for Connell Waldron, the space is nurturing, while for Marianne Sheridan, it is marked by violence. This narrative choice allows for reflections on the impacts of these spaces on the emancipation process of the protagonists. They initiate a romantic relationship in their final year of high school and, amidst ups and downs, remain intertwined in each other's lives until the end of college, when they must navigate separate paths. Through the dialogues between the protagonists and the information provided by the third-person narrator, which alternates between the two points of view, this article aims to analyze how the family dynamics of each character influence their self-perception and the choices they make over the four-year period covered in the novel.

This essay seeks to weave together an analysis of women’s citizenship and its dependency on certain silences, and the exploration of this tension in two recent productions by Belfast- based Kabosh Theatre Company. Kabosh, and company Artistic Director Paula McFetridge, stage work that examines the realities of the region in the post-conflict era. In constructing the theoretical frame for the analysis, the concept of “silence” and “silencing” draws from Kristie Dotson (2015), and from work on violence such as Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “epistemic violence” and a wide range of sources on the performance of violence in theatre. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic democracy shapes the discussion of the Northern Irish state, and Wendy Brown and Joane Butler are the key scholars for the consideration of citizenship and nation.

With a highlight on the challenges and exciting possibilities of James Joyce’s texts, this article explores the illustrations of Jun-Pierre Shiozawa for Ulysses, a series of eighteen watercolours produced for each episode of the work in 2014 and composing one of the digital galleries on the artist’s website. The focus of the investigation is to show that the (apparent) simplicity posited by watercolour as a pleasing medium (with its fragile shapes smoothly contrasting light and dark hues in fine delicate textures) reveals a complex network of connotations and cohesive layers of meaning, constructed especially by means of the scenes selected for illustration, the point of view from which each one is presented and their association with Joyce’s text, captioned in short extracts below each image. The article is structured in one section and, in the analysis proper, I examine the main compositional resources employed in each illustration, the effects evoked by them and the relationships of image and text implied in the captions. Based on art and image studies, I also discuss in which sense the term “simplicity” is being used in the article, which adds a dimension to Shiozawa’s art.

A full version of Finnegans Wake’s Book 1, Chapter 1, in Portuguese.

In his monumental autobiographical series of novels My Struggle, acclaimed Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard devotes a considerable number of pages to discuss James Joyce’s fictional works. In the last volume of the series – The End –, practically the entire body of Joyce’s fiction – from early works such as Stephen Hero and Dubliners to the modernist masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – is included in a discussion on the Irish novelist’s literature. Only one among Joyce’s major works is not tackled by Knausgaard in The End: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nonetheless, it is precisely Knausgaard who writes the preface to a celebrated Centennial edition of Joyce’s first novel in which, amidst other topics, he ponders over what he understands to be “the very essence of literature.” The article aims at highlighting some key aspects of Knausgaard’s take on Joyce’s fictional output and provide enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the Norwegian writer’s conceptualization of the literary phenomenon, including Joyce’s work, is based upon questionable essentialist premises.

The issue of geographical escape permeates the texts of Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce and Em busca de Curitiba perdida (1992) by Dalton Trevisan. In both works we come across characters who try to run away from a reality marked by frustration, decadence and paralysis. The impossibility of being able to leave the physical space of the city invariably leads them to sublimate this need through other types of evasion, such as the dream or daydream; the idealization of exotic and distant places; the temporal flight – by valuing the past at the expense of the present time; vices – mostly, drinking; superficial and fleeting relationships and, in the extreme, death as the ultimate solution to the hardships of which they are victims. Thus, Joyce’s Dublin and Trevisan’s Curitiba are not idealized, much less understood as places of protection and warmth – characteristics generally associated with the idea of hometown. In the fictional context in which they are presented, these cities function not only as settings, but as a large and stifling persona that imprisons its inhabitants and inexorably outlines their destinies.