Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Half-Life And Death Of The Irish Catholic Novel : In A Country Renowned For Its Catholicism, It Is Unusual The ‘Catholic Novel’ Never Took Root, Eamon Maher

Articles

In Underground Cathedrals (2010), the Glenstal monk and author Mark Patrick Hederman described artists as the “secret agents” of the Holy Spirit: “Art has the imagination to sketch out the possible. When this happens something entirely new comes into the world. Often it is not recognised for what it is and is rejected or vilified by those who are comfortable with what is already there and afraid of whatever might unsettle the status quo”. Reflecting on this position, one wonders to what extent Irish novelists have fulfilled the important role outlined by Hederman. In the past, they definitely did offer …

Uk Governance: From Overloading To Freeloading, Richard Woodward

Articles

The UK's ongoing political turbulence has prompted a reprise of debates from the 1970s when many concluded the country was ungovernable. Then, the most influential diagnosis conceptualised the UK's governance problem as one of ‘overloading’ caused by the electorate's excessive expectations. This article argues that these accounts overlooked another phenomenon besieging UK governance during this period. This phenomenon was freeloading: the withering of government capacity deriving from the ability of actors to enjoy the benefits of citizenship without altogether contributing to the cost. In the interim, these problems have become endemic, not least because of the unspoken but discernible policy …

A Country Writer Exiled In The City: The Case Of John Mcgahern, Eamon Maher

Articles

No abstract provided.

Perception Of Auditory Objects In Complex Scenes: Factors And Applications, William Coleman

Conference Papers

Over the past twenty years, technological advances have driven the development of media consumption in both home and mobile contexts. While not ubiquitous, multi-channel audio home cinema systems have become more prevalent, as has the consumption of broadcast and gaming media on smartphone and tablet technology via mobile telecommunications networks. This has created new possibilities and poses new challenges for audio content delivery such as how the same content can be presented to greatest effect given that it may be consumed via either a surround-sound home entertainment system or in a mobile context using stereo headphones. This paper outlines research …

Working From Home: A Double-Edged Sword, Kathleen Farrell

Conference papers

Flexible work options can be considered a benefit for many people. One type of flexible work option is working from home. Many businesses do provide some form of flexibility for mothers and parents working outside the home but this is influenced by culture and geographic location e.g. Pakistan is slow to embrace working from home policies while in western cultures or in more developed states, there are people who advocate that work from home policies should become the norm. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how working from home can be optimally managed to achieve greater work/ home …

Writing In The Language Of Reality: Interwar Experiments In Language, Robin Fuller

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, Otto Neurath’s Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems. A non-arbitrary mode of communication was sought, one that represented reality directly without translation through a cultural code.

Patricide Or Mourning The Nation-State In Francis Leclerc’S Looking For Alexander, Sophie Boyer

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article examines two closely connected dimensions of Francis Leclerc’s 2004 film, Looking for Alexander: a psychoanalytical dimension and a political one. Freud’s theories on the murder of the primal violent father in his essay Totem and Taboo provide the framework for a psychoanalytical interpretation of the protagonist’s fate: Alexandre Tourneur, a veterinarian struck by amnesia, embarks on a quest for his lost identity. Facilitated by the totemic figure of the deer, the act of remembering gradually leads to a conscious awakening to the events of an abusive childhood and the crime of patricide he committed as a boy …

Cinomade And The Fight Against Hiv/Aids Pandemic In Burkina Faso, Vincent Bouchard

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article is questioning the validity of educational screenings in a West African context, based on the detail study of Cinomade’s activities to raise awareness of the HIV/Aids pandemic in Burkina Faso. While traditional educational films are characterised by a general discourse prepared for a heterogeneous cultural area and try to convince the participants by imposing an outsider’s opinion, in that case, Cinomade’s team creates a specific video for each projection based on interviews made the same day in the village, in order not to expose the spectator to the point of view of foreigners (governmental employees or …

A Revolt Of The Masses: Culture And Modernity In Early 20th Century Spain: From Bullfights To Football Games, Katrine Helene Andersen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article discusses the consolidation of mass culture in early 20^th century Spain and analyses the discrepancy between the intellectual debate about Spanish culture and public behaviour. Bullfighting has throughout history been a much debated theme amongst intellectuals, and it has been banned by kings and the Church on several occasions. Nevertheless, there has always been an audience. In early 20^th century, football entered the scene of popular culture in Spain and gained very quickly in popularity. The article discusses the presence of the two and analyses the contribution of bullfighting and football to the process of modernisation …

Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Kunst fürs Volk repositions genre painting in nineteenth-century Germany as a form of mass culture, rather than high art, to achieve new insight into the form and function of a rather tired pictorial format. Genre paintings were as commonplace at galleries and large-scale art exhibitions as they were in commercial art, and they were used to illustrate all manner of objects and ephemera. The reiteration of forms within genre paintings had become, in a sense, a ‘massification’ of artistic technique and expression, just as the images and figurative elements themselves were repeated endlessly within different media formats. To the extent …

Projecting Le Temps Des Loisirs: Cycling And Working-Class Identity In French Cinema Of The 1930s, Barry Nevin

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article interprets images of bicycles in two films – Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936) and Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) – whose directors each turned their cameras to the competing ideologies that fractured France over the course of the 1930s. Locating the practice of cycling within its contemporary economic, political and sociological contexts, this analysis proposes that Renoir and Carné’s respective portrayals of cycling chart evolutions in French national identity and express French society’s expectations of the future during the rise and precipitous fall of the Front populaire in the turbulent years preceding the outbreak …

Nikolai Shpanov And The Evolution Of The Soviet Spy Thriller, Duccio Colombo

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

It is a common opinion that Stalinist literature knew no explicitly popular genres, and that, consequently, its whole body can be regarded as popular culture. The case of Nikolai Shpanov is one of the most evident arguments against such an interpretation.

From the late Thirties to the early Fifties, Shpanov's works, centered around the fight with fiendish spies, had huge print runs and conspicuous success among the readers; yet, Soviet critics nearly ignored them. The publishing channels were not those of the officially endorsed "classics" of Socialist Realism, but rather what can be regarded as a Soviet equivalent of a …

When Popular Cultures Are Not So Popular: The Case Of Comics In France, Sylvain Aquatias

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Studies about comics in France have often focused on the process of cultural legitimation. This process is made complex by the composition of the French readership of comics, which consists largely of children, and by the transmedia circulation and expansion of comics, including cartoons and videogames. These factors, and the role of peers’ prescription reduce the impact of cultural legitimacy. By contrast, when adults are concerned, a correlation between education and tastes in comic art can be clearly identified, as evidenced in the preference shown by adult readers with higher instruction level for graphic novels.

Comic art is characterised by …

Queer, Gender And Crime Fiction In French Studies: A Hazardous Scientific Endeavour, Andrea Hynynen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article focuses on the multifaceted challenge faced by academics doing queer and gender studies of French crime fiction. It argues that the French literary arena still entertains a sharp divide between literature and commercialist mass fiction, which hinders the establishment of popular fiction studies. It further discusses the reasons for and the effect of queer theory’s late arrival to France, arguing that France’s strong republican ideal entails a fear of ghettoization that has undermined the development of gender and queer analysis, especially of literature. These phenomena, in combination with France’s centralized, traditionalist academic institutions and linguistic franco-centrism, contribute to …

The Way We Read Now: Middlebrow Fiction In Twenty-First Century Europe, Diana Holmes

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The allocation of a novel to the category ‘middlebrow’ is partly a matter of marketing and shifting attitudes to literary value, but this article argues that it also designates certain stylistic and narrative qualities that are little esteemed by ‘serious’ critics, but appeal consistently to a wider reading public. The article focuses on one sub-category of contemporary middlebrow fiction, feminine crime, through a comparative analysis of novels by Fred Vargas (French) and Kate Atkinson (British). The argument addresses the relationship between popular and middlebrow within the genre of crime writing, and the ways in which a female perspective inflects generic …

Preface, Dominique Jeannerod, Federico Pagello, Michael Pierse

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This second issue of CALL Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language makes available a group of papers selected from the considerably larger body of work that was presented at The Cultures of Popular Culture conference, promoted by the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Modern Languages, Literary and Cultural Studies and held at Queen’s University Belfast on 13 and 14 December, 2013. The conference was the first one entirely devoted by the RIA to a subject that has become increasingly central in the field of Modern Languages as well in numerous other disciplines. If compared to the countless academic …

How Things Grow: Gabriel Orozco’S Samurai Tree: Invariants (2005), Tim Stott

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Contextual Analysis Of Solo Bass Clarinet Music By Irish Composers, Marcella Barz

Research Theses

The investigation of the emergence of solo bass clarinet music in Ireland evolved out of my experience learning Irish contemporary bass clarinet music with Dr Paul Roe. The intention was to discover why there had not been any solo bass clarinet music in Ireland prior to 2000, as well as to determine which events influenced the creation of the repertoire.

Data from interviews was vital to understanding how the bass clarinet repertoire in Ireland has steadily grown since 2000 and a search through The Irish Times archives provided information about bass clarinet activity in Ireland. A list of solo bass …

Design And Planned Obsolescence. Theories And Approaches For Designing Enabling Technologies, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

Articles

We are currently living in a decade where smart objects and Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices are becoming part of daily life in different contexts. This research seeks to investigate and verify, by using a formal literature review methodology, the most visible aspects of technological development, within the Industry 4.0 and IoT scenario, in relation to the theories of the so called “Planned Obsolescence”.

This study covers a defined number of works on Design theories and practices on how to face the issue of built-in obsolescence of devices in the era of the Connected Devices. The majority of the works …

Idiom Type Identification With Smoothed Lexical Features And A Maximum Margin Classifier, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In our work we address limitations in the state-of-the-art in idiom type identification. We investigate different approaches for a lexical fixedness metric, a component of the state-of-the-art model. We also show that our Machine Learning based approach to the idiom type identification task achieves an F1-score of 0.85, an improvement of 11 points over the state-of-the-art.

Mary O’Donnell’S 1992 Debut Retains Its Awesome Word Power 25 Years On The Light Makers Was A Compelling, Beautifully Written Tale Of Relationship Breakdown, Eamon Maher

Articles

In 1992, I remember reading Mary O’Donnell’s debut novel, The Light Makers, with a mixture of awe and excitement: awe that a novel could be this well-written, excitement at what I perceived to be the advent of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. Two other novels followed in the 1990s – Virgin and the Boy (1996) and The Elysium Testament (1999) – that failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. They are both good novels, but they are not nearly as compelling as The Light Makers. We had to wait 15 more years for …

Iot Based Recipes For Enabling Senior Citizens: Stakeholders Views On How Integration Of Iot And Web Services Can Enhance Well-Being And Inclusion Of Older People, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry, John Mcgrory

Conference papers

The main body of research clearly highlights the world’s population is rapidly expanding. When this fact is combined with the increase in life longevity due to medical and social advances it alters the demographic balance in relation to age. Hence, the number of people aged 65 and over is constantly increasing. The potential of Smart Technologies and IoT-based devices to improve health has increased rapidly in the last few years and users are now in a position to contribute to the development of the interaction process and need to be properly trained on benefits of using new technologies. IFTTT (If …

The Evolution Of An Enduring Expertise: Understanding Irish Economists In Irish Public Discourse In The Great Recession, Joe Fitzgerald, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This work focuses on the institutional and social contexts of Irish economists’ prominence in public discourse in Ireland during the Great Recession. While examining performative aspects of experts’ legitimacy is important, understanding the wider societal context of how particular professional expertise is recognised is also vital (Collins & Evans 2007). The economics profession generally is characterised by strong hierarchy and dense integration (Fourcade, 2009; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Pautz, 2014), we explore such phenomena in the Irish context. The Irish context is of interest more generally as a prominent PIIGS country in the Eurozone crisis, as a small peripheral state …

Key Inference From Irish Traditional Music Scores And Recordings, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present techniques and results for identifying the key of Irish traditional music melodies, or tunes. Several corpora are used, consisting of both symbolic and audio representations. Monophonic and heterophonic recordings are present in the audio datasets. Some particularities of Irish traditional music are discussed, notably its modal nature. New key-profiles are defined, that are better suited to Irish music.

“Young Men Of Erin, Our Dead Are Calling”: Death, Immortality And The Otherworld In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

Irish physical-force Republicanism has long been noted for its tendency to promote the tropes of martyrdom and immortality as core tenets of its ideological belief system. This essay sets out to examine the genre of Republican death ballads so as to identify how such essentialist concepts are represented and promoted within the attendant song tradition. Particular attention will be paid to works that deploy overtly supernatural tropes in order to articulate the key Republican concept of heroic immortality. The present research will demonstrate the consistency with which such narrative devices have been retained within the Republican song tradition into the …

Wh-Interrogatives In Early L1 Greek: Comprehension Vs. Production, Evangelia K. Asproudi

The ITB Journal

This paper examines the comprehension and production of wh-interrogatives in early L1 Greek. Specifically, children’s performance is explored at both levels with regard to argument/adjunct extraction and presence/absence of negation. In order to test the predicted lead of comprehension over production, a group of ninety four-to-seven-year old Greek children participated in elicitation tasks that were designed mainly along the methodological principles of Crain and Thornton (1998). On the whole, the results were in line with the initial expectation. That is, the Greek children performed better in question comprehension compared to question production, with individual findings suggesting that children’s economy-based processing …

Report: Visiting Lecture Exchange, Paris May 2017, Diarmuid Cawley

Reports

A report of a lecture on wine and wine language given to French culinary and hospitality students at the Pôle Universitaire de Gastronomie, a subsidiary of Université de Cergy-Pontoise in Paris, 2017.

Delivering Design Fundamentals Using Relevant Learning Theories In The Delivery Of An Interior Design Project At Third Level, Tracey Dalton

Articles

This is a reflection on teaching practice, focussing on design process in a BA Honours in Design – Interior and Furniture, in Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). An intrinsic case study approach (Stake 1995) was taken for this research, which focussed on the use of the learning theories in the delivery of an undergraduate interior design project brief. A third year commercial office design project has been used to assess teaching and learning styles. This article will show that, in terms of delivery, in a typical third level interior design project in DIT, the process incorporates all of the learning …

Gender And Mutation In Irish: A Preliminary Account For Further Investigation, Alessio S. Frenda

The ITB Journal

Standard Irish is the outcome of language planning and as such it significantly diverges from the three main spoken dialects of the language (or traditional Gaeltacht varieties) that provided the basis for its creation. It is also expected to differ, in its codified form, from the way it is actually employed within the small, usually urban communities of bilinguals who employ standard Irish and not some form of Gaeltacht Irish as a second language. The reason why such difference is expected is that the language planners codified as part of the standard many complex structures that had already been abandoned …

In Italiano, As Gaeilge: A Matter Of Metaphorical Semantics, Alessio S. Frenda

The ITB Journal

In the present article the linguistic expression of MATTER will be considered with regards to (a) the prepositions involved and (b) the basic spatial meanings (BSMs) of such prepositions. The analysis will concentrate on Italian and Irish. The motivations for the choice of the preposition(s) will be sought after in the theoretical frame provided by Lakoff’s metaphorical semantics. In other words, we shall assume that the MATTER sense is a motivated extension of the spatial senses that primarily expressed by those prepositions. According to the abovementioned framework, a preposition is chosen to express MATTER when there is a metaphorically (i.e., …