Graham Price
NUI Maynooth, English, Adjunct
- Contemporary Irish Drama, Critical Theory, Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, john McGahern, Irish Modernism, and 31 moreFrank McGuinness, James Joyce, Irish Drama, Literary Theory, Popular Culture, Irish Studies, Queer Theory, Judith Butler, Thomas Kilroy, Memory Studies, Narratology, Graphic Novels, Gothic Literature, Brendan Behan, Gender Studies, Leo Bersani, Irish literature in English, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Contemporary Irish Poetry, Jacques Derrida, History of Sexuality, Irish History, Irish Literature, Samuel Beckett, John D. Caputo, World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, Disability Studies, and Slavoj Zizekedit
- I am a teaching assistant and occasional lecturer in the English and Media departments at NUI Maynooth and Universit... moreI am a teaching assistant and occasional lecturer in the English and Media departments at NUI Maynooth and University College Dublin. I tutor and lecture on modules relating to Contemporary Irish Writing, Literature and Crisis, and Performance and the Everyday.
I lectured on modern Irish and British Literature at the University of Limerick from 2015-2018 during which time I taught courses on Romanticism, Irish Gothic Literature, Augustan Literature, Victorian Literature, Literary Theory and Contemporary Irish and British Literature.
I supervised undergraduate and postgraduate theses that related to film studies, queer theory and Irish drama. From 2007 until 2015 I was a lecturer in the English department at University College Dublin where I specialized in lecturing on Irish Studies.
I have published several articles relating to both Irish drama and Queer Theory. My monograph titled "Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama" was published in 2018. My which I wrote with Darragh Greene titled Film Directors and Emotion: An Affective Turn in Contemporary American Cinema was published in May 2020. My textbook, Beginning Irish Studies, will be published in 2026 by Manchester University Press.edit
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This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar... more
This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a 'verbal theatre' has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness.
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This article examines the ever-growing popularity of the so-called ‘campus novel’ or ‘academic novel’ in Irish literature ever since the first decade of the 21st Century. Of primary interest shall be how these texts offer varying,... more
This article examines the ever-growing popularity of the so-called ‘campus novel’ or ‘academic novel’ in Irish literature ever since the first decade of the 21st Century. Of primary interest shall be how these texts offer varying, aestheticised representations of Dublin university campuses, Irish students, Irish rurality and urbanity. The representative works of four young Irish authors shall be focused on in particular: Barry McCrea’s The First Verse (2005), Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Black Rock (2008), Belinda McKeon’s Solace (2011), and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018). These novels have been chosen because of their investment in the issues outlined and also because of how influential they have become in the evolving canon of contemporary Irish novels. (Claire Kilroy’s All Names Have Been Changed, a campus novel that shares many of the features and concerns of the chosen texts, is not one of the chosen works because it is set in the late 20th Century as opposed to the 21st Century which is the temporal period of central concern to this article). I shall consider some of the reasons why this genre has become so prevalent in Ireland at this particular time in her history and how the university campus and the Irish student have replaced rural Ireland and the Irish peasantry as the dominant focus of the Irish novel in this new century.
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This article analyses the connecting threads between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze—as they appear in his 1968 text Difference and Repetition, which is one of Deleuze’s major solo works (along with The Logic of Sense) prior to his... more
This article analyses the connecting threads between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze—as they appear in his 1968 text Difference and Repetition, which is one of Deleuze’s major solo works (along with The Logic of Sense) prior to his famous, anti-Oedipal collaborations with Felix Guattari—and the final novel written by John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). It shall be argued that Deleuze’s conceptualisations of temporality and humanity’s relationship with its physical surroundings find their perfect literary realisations in the pages of McGahern’s That They May Face as he attempts to provide a vision of contemporary Ireland’s transcending of James Joyce’s nightmare of history and the deadening habit of what Samuel Beckett’s character Pozzo calls “accursed time”. Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett are the three literary authors who most unite Deleuze and McGahern in shared enthusiasm and they shall be considered as mediating presences between McGahern and Deleuze throughout the course of the article. It shall be argued that a Deleuzian vision lies at the heart of contemporary Irish literature and that That They May Face the Rising Sun represents a primary textual example of this literary strand.
Key Words: Contemporary Irish Literature, Irish Studies, Continental Philosophy, Cultural Theory, Gilles Deleuze, John McGahern, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Eco-Criticism.
Key Words: Contemporary Irish Literature, Irish Studies, Continental Philosophy, Cultural Theory, Gilles Deleuze, John McGahern, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Eco-Criticism.
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This chapter shall perform a reading of Brian Friel's Faith Healer (a perfect example of what Hilton Edwards once termed the 'Theatre Theatrical') through the lens of the Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's theories... more
This chapter shall perform a reading of Brian Friel's Faith Healer (a perfect example of what Hilton Edwards once termed the 'Theatre Theatrical') through the lens of the Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger's theories concerning the self-fragilizing interaction between art, the artist, and those who engage with aesthetic objects (be they literary or visual). 2 The theorising of such moments are explored and developed by Ettinger in works such as her celebrated book The Matrixial Borderspace and her essay 'Uncanny Awe, Uncanny Compassion and Matrixial Transjectivity beyond Uncanny Anxiety'. I will argue that the conclusion of Faith Healer stages the process of self-fragilization between a character onstage and the audience who are witnessing the event. I shall conclude with a consideration of how an Ettingerian reading of Faith Healer has been partially enabled for me by the Gate Theatre's 2009 production of the play and particularly by the casting and performance of Owen Roe as Frank Hardy.
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Any attempt to give an account (albeit a selective one) of the life and work of Brian Friel will inevitably risk incurring the wrath of the spectre of Friel‚ who declared in his 1971 radio broadcast talk, titled ‘Self-Portrait’, that he... more
Any attempt to give an account (albeit a selective one) of the life and work of Brian Friel will inevitably risk incurring the wrath of the spectre of Friel‚ who declared in his 1971 radio broadcast talk, titled ‘Self-Portrait’, that he disliked the illusion of ‘tidiness’ that a recitation of facts about a person’s life can impose upon that individual’s identity. Friel declared that facts in the context of an autobiography, and presumably in a biography also, ‘can be pure fiction and be no less reliable for that’. (Friel 1999, p. 38) For this reason, my account of Friel’s personal and artistic life shall endeavour to weave the verifiable parts of Friel’s biography into a critical account of his artistic oeuvre and, by so doing, I shall offer some version of the ‘truth’ concerning the existence and legacy of this giant of Irish and world theatre. The portrait that I shall paint will be one in which the life illuminates the art and vice versa.
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Presented on the 10th October 2014 at the Subrealism conference in Maynooth (orgainised by Tina Kinsella, Michael O'Rourke and Moynagh Sullivan). The conference was dedicated to exploring the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha... more
Presented on the 10th October 2014 at the Subrealism conference in Maynooth (orgainised by Tina Kinsella, Michael O'Rourke and Moynagh Sullivan). The conference was dedicated to exploring the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.
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Lance Pettitt's The Last Bohemian is an important and timely contribution to Irish and British Film Studies. It is a critical biography of Belfast born filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst (1895-1986). One of the reasons this study is valuable... more
Lance Pettitt's The Last Bohemian is an important and timely contribution to Irish and British Film Studies. It is a critical biography of Belfast born filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst (1895-1986). One of the reasons this study is valuable because it is the first significant examination of the career of this often overlooked director. Probably the most famous film that Hurst directed, Scrooge (1951), is most remembered for the performance of Alistair with many of its viewers being unable to name its director should they be asked. As Pettitt asserts, all the other major directors of Hurst's era, such as Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Georg Pabst, have all been the subject of sustained critical examination in the form of book length studies and Pettitt has now done the same for Hurst. When one remembers Pettitt's significant text, Screening Ireland (2000), one cannot doubt his suitability to write this academic text.
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Research Interests: Cinema and Irish cinema
This article examines the importance of James Joyce’s artistic interest in, and engagement with, the life and works of Oscar Wilde—especially Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Salome (1891) and, in a slightly different manner,... more
This article examines the importance of James Joyce’s artistic interest in, and engagement with, the life and works of Oscar Wilde—especially Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Salome (1891) and, in a slightly different manner, his mock Gothic drama, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—to the development of a literary Modernism that owes much, especially in the case of Ulysses, to late-Victorian/fin de siècle Gothic literature. Via a specific, although not exclusive, focus on the ‘Circe’ episode, this article shall argue that Joyce uses both the Gothicism and mock-Gothicism in Wilde’s texts in an innovative fashion that is very much in keeping with modernism’s creative and innovative attitude towards literary traditions. An examination of Wilde’s Gothic and mock-Gothic influences on Joyce’s archetypally modernist texts also enables a more general recognition of the Gothic strand that exists in many other authors’ works of modernism; even in texts written by modernist writers who do not share Wilde’s and Joyce’s colonial and postcolonial Irish background. The Irishness of both Wilde and Joyce shall be considered as an important factor in the development of their specific form of Gothicism and modernism.
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IASIL Conference, Trinity College Dublin, 2019