Pre-Conference Event 2022

LitSIG Pre-Conference Event (PCE) 16 May 2022

Literature and the Arts in Northern Ireland

Our day was structured to privilege both input and interaction: four experts in their various fields gave talks, each followed by workshops – ideal moments for discussion among the participants – guided and commented on by our speakers. 

Let’s now introduce our four expert speakers: Frank Ferguson of Ulster University and John Gray of University College London will be our literary experts; Hania Bociek from the University of Zurich will explore the visual arts, and, Michelle Zirkel of the University of Bamberg will guide us through traditional and contemporary songs. 

• Frank Ferguson focused on three writers. After an evaluation of how much Seamus Heaney’s poetry is affected by his roots in the North, he will move on to Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018), which captures the experience of living through The Troubles. Frank then introduced us to Dara McAnulty’s Diary of A Young Naturalist (2020), a memoir of the author’s fascination with nature and the difficulties of growing up as a young autistic man, and show how it ‘speaks back to’ Heaney’s collection of poems Death of a Naturalist.
  
  

• John Gray explored the queer gaze of three contemporary Northern writers: Cherry Smyth on the events of The Famine in her collection of poems Famished (2019); Paul McVeigh in his novel The Good Son (2015), an account of growing up queer in a working-class republican area of Belfast in the early days of The Troubles; Jarlath Gregory in What Love Looks Like (2021), a happy-ending novel for young adults set in Dublin in the aftermath of the same-sex marriage referendum of 2015.
  
  

• Hania Bociek took us on an exploration of the work of several artists from Northern Ireland, both those working today and those from the past. Taking us from landscapes and nature to politics and protest, Hania showed us how pictures paint a thousand words about Northern Ireland.
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• Michelle Zirkel provided an overview of both contemporary and traditional songs about the history and culture of Northern Ireland as well as popular songs by Northern Irish singers, songwriters and bands such as Van Morrison, Two Door Cinema Club, Ash, Jun Tzu, and Phil Coulter, to name just a few. She gave several concrete examples of how to exploit Northern Irish songs in the EFL classroom.

This PCE introduced participants to a variety of ‘texts’ which – be they literary, visual or in the form of song – deal with the burning issues of place, identity and conflict, and which are relevant to us wherever we come from.