Cyril O’Regan, the Huisking Professor of Theology at Notre Dame and a Faculty Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will speak on the novels of John Banville—in particular, The Sea (2005) winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and The Blue Guitar (2015).
In his talk, Professor O’Regan will discuss how these two novels not only display the familiar Banville virtues of superb writing and deep reflection on human fraility, failure, memory and death, but also how they expose Banville’s deep-seated ambivalence towards art, which reflects its structural ambiguity—at once a provider of truth that makes whole and a producer of illusions that wounds belonging and increases fragmentation.
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.