Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism ed. by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng (review)

Until relatively recently, scholarship on Irish modernism, science, and technology has often focused on W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and, above all, James Joyce. This is certainly understandable, given the international circulation and impact of their writing and the outsized role they still play in literature and theater programs. Indeed, the international circulation and international orientation of an author such as Joyce make an approach to Joyce and science necessarily international. But all too little research has addressed—in more than a passing or general bio-critical way—the specifically Irish contexts of modernist literary engagements with science and technology or moved much beyond simply annotating literary allusions to science. While producing insightful readings, the narrow focus on a handful of modernist writers, often under a methodology unlikely to provide much complexity or nuance to the inter-relationships between Irish modernism and science, has tended to overlook the larger cultural, social, and political roles of science in twentieth-century Ireland. Exploring that history in relationship to Irish modernism could offer important insights into Ireland’s postcolonial narrative and provide a richer understanding of both Irish Revival literature and Irish modernism. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng have done just that in their thought-provoking collection Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism.

This collection’s range of approaches and points of entry into its subject are a major strength. The editors divide the fifteen essays into five parts—“Revival Dynamics,” “Machine Fever,” “Sounds Modern,” “Body Trouble,” and “Strange Experiments”—to give shape to the terrain the essays cover, and there are outstanding interventions in all of these areas. Seán Hewitt’s “Natural History and the Irish Revival” explores the Irish “craze for amateur naturalist study” at the end of the nineteenth century, arguing that “there were a number of [Irish Revival] writers engaged in naturalist study who attempted to harness the discourses of natural science into narratives of spiritual resurgence” (19). Focusing on Emily Lawless, J. M. Synge, and Seumas O’Sullivan, Hewitt makes a strong case for “a migration of the spiritual or sublime to being seen as within, rather than beyond, physical nature” (21). Other chapters focus on machines and technology with excellent essays that should be of special interest to readers of the JJQ. Conrad’s “Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce” addresses Greer’s A Modern Dædalus in the context of military technologies and modern media developments to explore “the possibility that weapons technologies did not just mature alongside or make use of print” but instead “provided an alternative medium of expression, a different form of address, to the same public, and in so doing, shaped the public to which they were addressed and the ‘mental map’ that they shared” (82).¹ And Damien Keane’s “His Remastered Voice: Joyce for Vinyl” traces the implications of institutional and technological change in the history of Joyce’s 1924 recording of a brief passage from “Aeolus.”

The collection concludes with a strong set of three essays that demonstrates the breadth of approach and interpretation. Katherine Ebury’s “Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett” uses a literature and science interpretive framework to draw together the science of relativity, Yeats’s occult preoccupations, and new stage-lighting technologies and experimental lighting techniques in Yeats and Beckett to undermine (or at least complicate) the not uncommon understanding of Yeats as antiscientific and to hint at a Beckett more related to Yeats’s occult interests than one might otherwise have understood. Andrew Kalaidjian’s “The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism: Flann O’Brien and Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin” explores scientific concepts of uncertainty in ways that sometimes make direct connections between the writings of Brian O’Nolan (as both Flann O’Brien and Myles...