Kevin Barry

Life
[1950- ]; ed. UCD and Cambridge U (18th c. Philosophy); appt Prof. of English at Galway/NUI, 1991; served as Dean of Arts, 2005-09; author of Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (1987); also ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, in Irish Studies Review (Spring 1996), pp.2-11, and The Dead (2001); he had edited the Political, Critical and Occasional Writings of James Joyce (2000), updating and enlarging the existing Critical Writings (Viking 1964 & edns.); lectured at PGIL Monaco on a famous murder story involving the Irish tennis champion Vere St. Leger Goold and his French wife in that principality, in 1907. FDA

[ top ]

Bibliographical details
Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge UP 1987): a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries [which] lays emphasis on the visual analogy (comparing poetry with painting rather than with music). Coleridge believed that music was 'the rhythm of the soul's movements' and declared himself to be 'in a state of Spirit much more akin' to Mozart's or Beethoven's than to that of any painter. Dr Barry examines in detail the ways of thinking about poetry, music and language (in its broadest sense) during the period that preceded Coleridge, referring to the work of philosophers and poets such as Hume, Berkeley, Rousseau, Collins, Blake, Cowper and Wordsworth, but also to lesser-known theorists such as James Usher, Thomas Twining, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart and de Gerando. (See notice in COPAC - online.)

Traces of Peter Rice (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2012), 135pp. CONTENTS: Jennifer Greitschus, Preface and acknowledgements; / Maurice Rice - Peter Rice, engineer / Jack Kunz - Cameo I / Amanda Levete - Renzo Piano in conversation / Kevin Barry, Jennifer Greitschus - Peter Rice, lighting engineer / Andy Sedgwick - Cameo II / Henry Bardsley - Richard Rodgers in conversation / Jonathan Glancey - An engineer imagined / Kevin Barry - Cameo III / Ed Clark - The Peter Rice I knew / Ian Ritchie - Working with Peter Rice and Frank Stella / Martin Francis - Camei IV / Vivienne Roche - Commodius vicus of recirculation / Seán Ó Laoire - Cameo V / Barbara Campbell-Lange - Listening to the idea / Sophie Le Bourva - Cameo VI / Peter Heppel - Cameo VII / Hugh Dutton - On first looking into Rice's engineering notebooks / J. Philip O'Kane - Select projects - Select publications - Notes on contributors.

Crime and Punishment: Vere & Marie Goold - the culprits in a famous murder case involving a rich Swedish widow as victim committed by Vere Good - who sported the St. Leger name associated with a renowned and somewhat infamous Anglo-Irish family - and his wife Marie [nee] Giraudin, a couturier in London whom he married in 1891 when his tennis career was over and he had descended into a life of drink and drugs. Their attempts to make a living took them to Montreal and and Liverpool where they failed to make a success based on her clothing skills and in 1907 they travelled to Monaco to try out her gambling system masquerading as Sir and Lady Goold. They attached themselves to one Emma Levin, the wife of a Swedish stockbroker, and when she came to collect a debt before quitting Monaco after a public fracas involving them and another follower of hers at the Casino. The dissected remains of Madame Levin were later discovered in a trunk which they took with them to Marseilles. Although Vere confessed the crime, the court found sentenced Marie to death in view of her dominant character, later reducing the sentene to life imprisonment. Vere Goold died by suicide on Devil&7146;s Island two years later, in 1909. The dramatic tale has been made the subject of a TG4 documentary drama entitled Dhá Chúirt [Two Courts] dir. by Cathal Watters. (See Wikipedia - online.)

[ top ]

Criticism
Helen Meany, notice of summarises ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, in Ireland of the Welcomes (Sept. 1996), p.38 [see extract].

[ top ]

Commentary
Helen Meany: Meany summarises ‘Critical Notes on Post-Colonial Aesthetics’, a keynote lecture delivered by Barry at the James Joyce Summer School in 1995: ‘[Barry] rejected post-colonial criticism’s correlations between aesthetics and politics: for example, the notion that there is an aesthetic of the oppressed, favouring literary devices such as allegory, versus an aesthetic of the powerful, which tends to employ symbol and metaphor. This polarised scheme, he argued, gives rise to “powerless misreadings” of complex literary texts. “Despite their advocacy of plurality ... these critics reduce texts to binary oppositions’ and eliminate diversity. “Post colonial theory goes seriously wrong in the case of Joyce, when it seeks to discover a conflict between England and Ireland”. This insistence “runs entirely contrary to Joyce’s work”.’ (Ireland of the Welcomes, Sept. 1996, p.38.)

[ top ]

Notes
Which book? Asked by the paper which single book he - among 10 other writers - would give as a gift, Kevin Barry answered: Collected Poems by Philip Larkin (‘No matter how bad you are feeling, Philip Larkin is feeling worse [...].’). (See Irish Times, 5 March 2011, Weekend, p.7.)

Namesake: Kevin Barry (aetat. 59), an London-Irish artist lwith three one-man exhibitions to his credit, issued Kilty-boy (2011), a memoir of childhood in Notting Hill and Chelsea, and his second publication.

[ top ]