Dublin, Literature and Place-Thinning
Pearse Street Library: Tuesday, 27 August at 6.30pm
As one of the earliest UNESCO Cities of Literature, Dublin is saturated with a literary sense of place. Almost every street in the city core is haunted by figures from the works of authors as diverse as Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett or Sally Rooney. At times it seems as if the city’s fictional inhabitants out-number the living. And yet, Dublin, no less than any other 21st-century city, has been subject to what the philosopher Edward Casey has called the “continual and unavoidable […] threat of place becoming thinned-out and turning into non-place and even anti-place.”
Chris Morash, author of Dublin: A Writer’s City (2023) looks at how the Dublin’s literature shapes the ways in which we inhabit the city, and at the challenges to this continuing into the future.
This event is organised in collaboration with the International Geographical Congress 2024 (IGC2024) which takes place in Dublin from August 24-29th. The congress organisers and Dublin City Council are delighted to present this event together as part of the congress public engagement programme. More than 2500 geographers from around the world will participate in the congress, which will address a range of pressing societal issues including those relating to cities, place identity and the challenges of urban living both now and in the future.
Prof. Chris Morash, FTCD, MRIA is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City maps the city’s literary memory. He has also published Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place [with Shaun Richards] (2013), a book on Yeats’s theatre, histories of Irish media and Irish theatre, and a study of Irish Famine literature. He delivers the annual UNESCO City of Literature Lecture for Dublin City Libraries, and is currently working on projects on Irish literary salons and the trans-Atlantic telegraph.