Word: irishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hanover was "a great place for walking. And it was a good time to be in school if you had no money, because in 1935 no one had any money to speak of." Supporting himself by waiting on tables and putting out fires, Kelleher soon discovered his passion, Irish literature and history. "It just plain fascinated me. You could almost say I had a mania for it," he declares. For three years he followed a normal undergraduate course; in his fourth, he was chosen as one of a select few senior fellows and allowed to pursue independent work. "I spent...
...crew of senior fellows that included Alfred North Whitehead and Samuel Eliot Morison. He spent long weekends tramping through the country with Henry Lee Shattuck '01, a philanthropically-minded graduate who became so interested in Kelleher's work that he helped find the money for a chair in Irish Studies...
...early love of things Irish has never left him. The small nation has produced so many great writers because "there was a sufficiently different life and culture"--the old Irish histories, myths, and lifestyles--close by, he says. "Irish writers could write with the sense of another culture; there are long roots in the past, and that vertical dimension compensated for the narrowness of the horizontal dimension," Kelleher says. He adds, however, that those days are ending: "It seems to me that Irish literature is caught up in a real problem. The more Ireland becomes a modern western country...
Ireland's entrance into the modern world has come simultaneously with another phenomenon Kelleher says is changing the nation's literature--the loosening grip of the Catholic Church. "The change in the church has made a lot of (Irish writing) obsolete. When I was first teaching at Harvard, Catholic students could understand what much of Irish literature was about in its reaction to an old and authoritarian church. Now that church is gone, and it is hard even for Catholic students to figure out why writers reacted so strongly against the overwhelming power of the church." Reactions against the church...
...think, frankly, that the troubles in the North are largely a creation of television. If we could somehow get every camera and every reporter out of the North, and somehow we could keep them out no matter what horror the Irish Republican Army or the (unionist) Ulster Defense Association staged to get them back, I think violence would decrease by 90 percent," he says. The outlook for a long term settlement is not good, he admits, adding that those who live in the Republic are scared of any hasty unification of the island. "They realize that if they were suddenly...