Contested boundaries and uncharted entanglements in Evelyn Conlon’s Moving About the Place (2023)
This seminar is a discussion of four stories from Evelyn Conlon's short story collection Moving About the Place (2021). Conlon was born in Ireland in 1952 and since 1987 has published four novels and four short story collections. Evelyn Conlon went to Australia in 1972 by ship and stayed there for a period of three years. She did a lot of travelling around the country and all sorts of jobs, experiencing what Arianna Dagnino calls “cultural dislocation” (2012: 1). Conlon questions the limits of the local and the global in ways that affect herself and her own creative practice. She is interested in travel and in how new settings, foreign to one’s original birthplace, have an effect on one’s perspectives. Her literary production bears witness of her concern towards the topic as well. In her short story collection Moving About the Place (2021), she creates characters living and setting up relationships in countries in which she has had a longstanding interest: Australia, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, Monaco and South Africa.
This collection of eleven stories distils a transcultural turn not only because its shifting viewpoints address “experiences associated with the fashioning of a new self as the result of travelling to far-flung places” (Caneda-Cabrera, 2023: 54), but also because it shows how people’s movement and, more concretely, women’s movement can make themselves, and others too, experience progressive material and emotional transformations. Underlying these ideas is Conlon’s determination to contest binary oppositions so that “centre” and “periphery” become recurrent sites of contestation and their interstices turn the object of attention.
Considering transculturality a method that addresses culture as a dynamic category and debunks ideological dichotomies, Conlon’s transcultural lens is a natural methodological companion to the restless feminist and activist that she is, always eager for mobility, always reaching beyond her place and beyond the accepted canon. The aim of this discussion is to show Conlon’s ability to expresses a newly emergent transcultural sensibility in four selected stories included in Moving About the Place (2023).
Melania Terrazas
is Senior Lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of La Rioja (Spain). She is the author of Relational Structures in Wyndham Lewis’s Fiction: Complexity and Value (Lincom, 2005). She is Head of the Centre of Irish Studies Banna/Bond (EFACIS). She was editor of Journal of English Studies. She also guest edited Gender Issues in Contemporary Irish Literature (vol. 13.2. 2018) for Estudios Irlandeses, edited Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture (Peter Lang, 2020) and co-authored a Spanish translation of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (2022). Her recent essays on Irish poetry, fiction, theatre and film have been published in international journals, such as Irish Studies Review, English Studies and Life Writing. Her latest book chapters appear in edited collections by Cambridge UP, Routledge and Brill, among others. Currently, she is a member of the Research Project: ‘Posthuman Intersections in Irish and Galician Literatures’ (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the ERDF (PID2022-136251NB-I00)).