Our 2024 Contributors
“A Female-Centric Counternarrative: Analysing Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women as a Post-Western”
Mia Tobin Power
Mia Tobin Power is currently studying for an MA in Modernities at UCC, having graduated with a BA in English last year. She wrote this essay for a seminar about Montana literature and film. She is interested in counternarratives in literature, especially feminist ones, and thought that Kelly Reichardt’s film Certain Women was fascinating in how it provides a feminist counternarrative to the traditional western genre through a depiction of the West as defined by female desire and yearning rather than that of men. There hasn’t been much critical literature on this film so far, but Mia found it a very rich text, deserving of analysis. In her spare time, she writes even more about film and TV, for the University Express.
“Ventriloquising Venus: Representing the Feminine in Seamus Heaney’s North”
Hannah Fitzgerald
Hannah Fitzgerald, is a third year student of English and French, currently
on exchange at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle where she is studying general and comparative
literature. My essay “Ventriloquising Venus” was birthed as the product of two particularly
formative modules she had the pleasure of taking last year; a seminar class led by Dr Adam
Hanna on ‘Northern Irish literature and the Troubles’, and a course on feminist literary
criticism and women’s writing offered by Dr Heather Laird. In encountering the literary
sphere of the Troubles, Hannah was intimately struck by a disturbing and reductive sexual politics in what is often presented as a poetics of ‘resolution’. This was particularly unnerving in the case of Séamus Heaney, as childhood familiarity with the poet tends to cast him as an almost grandfather-figure in the cultural imagination. Inspired by the study of critical feminist theory
under Dr Laird, which equipped her with the necessary perception and language to precipitate
her reading, Hannah thus felt propelled to critique Heaney’s modernist project in North, which she argues as consolidating Catholic racial identity upon a ‘silenced spectre of the female body’. Though it weighed heavily to dissect the misogynistic machinations at work in the literature of such a dauntingly canonical and intimately beloved poet, she found immense indemnity in the voices of contemporary Irish women writers she encountered more intimately through the writing of this piece, particularly Medbh McGuckian, Patricia Coughlan and Edna Longley, whose work motivated and inspired her endlessly.
“An Exploration of the Effect of Class on Queer Identity in Detransition, Baby and Stone Butch Blues”
Emily McCullagh
Emily Evans McCullagh completed her undergraduate degree in English and German. She has now gone on to study my masters in Women’s Studies here in UCC. Throughout her degree, she found herself drawn to writing about the intersections between class and relationships which led her to explore this topic in her essay "An exploration of the effect of class on queer identity in Detransition, Baby and Stone Butch Blues". She has continued to explore her interest in queer literature by volunteering with the Cork LGBT archive and her dissertation “An investigation into the interdependent nature of literature and media within Irish society in relation to depictions of queer female sexuality between 1990 and 2023".
“Medbh McGuckian and the Curious Case of Arranging Words”
Fionn O'Mahony
Fionn O’Mahony is a recent graduate of Film and Screen Media (International). He chose to write this essay after attending a fascinating lecture from Dr. Adam Hanna on the poet Medbh McGuckian, where he was exposed to her unique style and approach to writing poetry. McGuckian’s methods, particularly her homages to other literary works, reminded him of techniques that many filmmakers adopt when drawing inspiration from other films, and the perpetual search for definite meaning in her works by some critics brought certain aspects of the modern artworks that he adores to mind.
“Lady Mary as a Dandiacal Figure”
Vinca Albert Hernandez
Vinca Albert Hernàndez is a final-year English student graduating in 2024. She is passionate about fashion and history and how they relate to literature and art, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Therefore, she chose to write about the character of Lady Mary Crawley from the TV series Downton Abbey. She fell in love with period dramas sneaking into the living room while my mother was watching BBC adaptations of Jane Austen or the first seasons of Downton Abbey when they came out on DVD in the mid-2010s. After learning about the characteristics of the dandy and the existence of female dandies she put it side by side with Lady Mary, her favourite character from the show, and decided to analyse
her as a dandiacal figure. And so, Vinca was able to combine my love for period dramas
with my interest in women-related topics. When she am not rewatching Downton Abbey, you will find her reading Victorian novels and historical fiction in the Mediterranean sun or endlessly arguing, with whoever wants to listen, that Wuthering Heights is much more than a love story.
“The Collective, Subjective Perspectives of Paula Meehan’s Poetry”
Luke Condon
Luke Condon is in his final year of the BA English programme at UCC. Last year, he took part in a seminar that centred around the study of working-class literature in Ireland, which is an emerging but somewhat underdeveloped field, due to his interest in both Materialist literary criticism and Irish literature. Although Luke usually finds himself drawn to prose rather than poetry, Paula Meehan's work really resonated with him - he thought her poems were written with a sincere authenticity and lack of pretentiousness, and he appreciated the rich social commentary and themes within. He was particularly impressed with how Meehan reconciles the often individualistic perspectives found in personal poetry with the more collective voices of her past and community, and decided to write this essay in order to further explore this topic.
Working on this essay allowed Luke to broaden his perspective and realise how much he enjoys academic writing. When he’s not writing on topics like this you can find him reading novels, drinking coffee or playing video games. Sometimes all at the same time.
“‘A Brand Stamped in Blood’: Dostoevskian Guilt and Christ-like Redemption in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal”
Luca Cavallo
Luca Cavallo is a final-year English student. He chose to write on Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, Cal, as part of a seminar on Northern Irish literature. During the seminar, he was immediately drawn to the intensity of writers working throughout the ‘Troubles,’ and MacLaverty was no exception to this. As a fan of Dostoevsky in his ‘edgy’ teenage years, he was also fascinated by the intertextual connections between Cal and Crime and Punishment.
When he’s not hunting for my next intertextual fix, he is either writing for UCC Express, examining singular pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, or defending One Piece.
“‘What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?’: Dehumanisation, Performance and Second-Wave Feminism in The Stepford Wives and ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’"
Kelly Meaney
Kelly Meany commenced her studies in UCC with a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a joint major in English and Geography. She is currently enrolled in in the prestigious Professional Master of Education (PME) program at UCC where she am studying to become a secondary school teacher. Her interests at Undergraduate level included the intersectional nature of second-wave feminist literature which also inspired her to write her piece entitled: “What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?”: Dehumanisation, Performance and Second-Wave Feminism in The Stepford Wives and “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”.
“The Containment of Female Rebellion in Renaissance Drama” and “An Exploration of Female Sovereignty and Genre Containment in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”
Anna Fitzgerald
Anna Fitzgerald is undergoing a one-year Master’s programme in medieval literature. She decided to explore the topic of female rebellion in Renaissance drama after having spent three years of her undergraduate degree focusing on the depiction of femininity in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. This academic experience informed her understanding that female divergency is the defining narrative characteristic of Thomas Middleton & Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, John Lyly’s Galatea, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and that the 16th and 17th century cultural context of regressive gender ideology is prevalent throughout all of these texts. The underlying themes of shame and desire are present in all three works involving female characters struggling to attain their political, sexual, and romantic emancipation whilst engaging in ideologically disruptive activities within the context of their shared Elizabethan and Jacobean time period.
“Evoking and Ejecting the Abject in Alien and Aliens”
Ciara O’Connor
Ciara O’Connor and recently graduated from UCC with a BA in English. Throughout her studies, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject cropped up multiple times in different classes, and Ciara always found herself fascinated by it. She was delighted to write this essay on its presence in the Alien franchise for her final year seminar taught by Dr. Miranda Corcoran. As she has an interest in feminist criticism, she found the abject’s relation to reproduction and motherhood throughout both films particularly interesting. Outside of academics, Ciara spends her time reading as many books as she can across all genres, writing short stories, and listening to comedy podcasts.
“The Mythical Method in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land” and “‘Swim out on your own’: Evolution of the Sea-Space in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”
Janne Borgaes
Janne Borgaes is a graduate of the BA English programme at UCC and currently studying for an MA in Western Literature at KU Leuven, Belgium. She is interested in modern poetry, with a particular focus on Irish poetry and concepts of ecocriticism, the blue humanities (which is what she chose to focus her dissertation on), and European literature and transnationalism, topics she has grand delusions of possible research careers in. She is also an avid mead brewer.
“‘Narrative enjoyment’ or ‘awareness of the artefact’? Breaking the Fourth Wall in Film”
Leah Mulcahy
Leah Mulcahy wrote “All Her Attackers” as the last chapter of her undergraduate dissertation for BA English. She wrote on the subject of breaking the fourth wall because her primary academic interest seems to gravitate towards perceptions - both perceptions taking place within a text itself and our perceptions of the text as individuals. Another enduring interest of hers is the inexplicable connection between the creator of a work and the work’s recipient, a connection that somehow transcends space and time. How is it that we can feel and understand so intensely the emotions of someone we have never met, of someone long dead? In her free time she is still pretty immersed in all media forms - literature, film, music. She has a totally normal and not all-consuming interest in video games for example.