Yeats & the Arts

ECHO is proud to present an international interdiscipliary conference on W.B. Yeats & the Arts, funded with help from the NUI Galway Millennium Fund and the  ‘1916 and after’ project, at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway. Only €50 (€40) for two days – and free to all members of NUI Galway.

for further details contact adrianpaterson@yahoo.com

Yeats & the Arts

‘The arts have failed’, wrote W.B.Yeats, ‘fewer people are interested in them in every generation.’  Fortunately, however, this gloom over the fate of ‘ingenious lovely things’ only spurred him on to ever greater artistic engagement. His poetry, prose, and drama repeatedly address and incorporate music, dance and visual art, while his publications self-consciously deploy design and iconography. Yet Yeats was not only a author; he was also a cultural entrepreneur. He changed Irish public life by helping to found institutions such as Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the Abbey Theatre, and the Abbey School of Ballet. In collaboration with his sisters, Lilly and Lolly, he set up a printing press as a forum for Irish design and illustration. Together with his wife, George, he renovated the tower at Ballylee using local craftsmen. He took to the concert platform and later the airwaves to promote poetry spoken with music. Moreover, as a theatre director, journalist, public speaker and politician, he inspired numerous other cultural productions in Ireland and beyond.

This two-day international symposium seeks to promote research on all aspects of Yeats’s interactions with the arts, from storytelling to stained-glass windows. It is presented by ECHO, NUI Galway’s Humanities Research Forum, and funded by the NUI Galway Millennium Fund and as part of the international research project ‘1916 and After’, offering a forum for discussing different historical, methodological and theoretical approaches, crossing disciplines to bring together critics of literature and drama, musicologists, and historians of dance and the visual arts. It thus features panels on Yeats and Music, Yeats and Dance, Yeats and the Visual Arts, Yeats and Drama, Yeats and the Book, and Yeats and the Wider Arts, presented by the finest scholars in the field. 

As well as addressing key issues within Yeats’s work, it looks to wider debates in Irish studies, and cultural history and theory. It  considers questions about the value and relationship of the arts,Ireland’s role in European modernism, and the links between late-Victorian and modernist culture. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and politics, it also reflects on the political operation of centres of cultural production and the role played by art in political radicalism inIrelandin the period, leading up to the 1916 uprising and the revolutionary conflicts that followed. Through a focus on Yeats’s work and career, it seeks to encourage further a growing body of cultural history and criticism based on genuinely interdisciplinary research.

We are delighted to welcome as our keynote lecturer Daniel Albright of Harvard University. Our panels of Yeatsians and other scholars from across many disciplines include such distinguished speakers as Nicholas Allen, Brian Arkins, Richard Rupert Arrowsmith, Nicola Gordon Bowe, Terence Brown, Adrian Frazier, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Sue Jones, Stoddard Martin, Emilie Morin, Aidan Thomson and Deirdre Toomey. There will be a conference dinner and an evening’s entertainment of Joycean and Yeatsian songs. 

The two-day symposium is free to all from NUI Galway, €50 (€40) otherwise. All are hugely welcome. Proceedings begin at 12 noon on Friday 26th, and close at 4pm on Saturday 27th August. All sessions take place in the Moore Institute Seminar Room.

For more information do please contact the organisers:  

Dr Adrian Paterson, National University of Ireland, Galway adrianpaterson@yahoo.com

Dr Tom Walker, University of Oxford/Trinity College Dublin thomas.walker@ell.ox.ac.uk

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~ by echoforum on July 20, 2011.