UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Thursday, 1 September 2011 at 10.30 a.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR ANNE FOGARTY, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 1 September 2011, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on EMMA DONOGHUE
President, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen
Emma Donoghue is one of the most versatile and boldly original creative talents to have emerged in Ireland in recent decades. As the author of a dazzlingly varied body of fictional work, she has consistently invented beguiling characters and scenarios and pitched her readers into a wide array of imagined worlds. Her fictions - which include coming of age tales, lesbian romances, postmodern fairy tales, evocative historical novels, and wryly observant modernist short stories - are not just hugely absorbing but also challenging in that they urge her readers to open up their horizons. Her work makes ethical claims on us and urges us to consider other viewpoints and to embrace difference.
Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, attended school locally, and graduated from UCD in 1990 with a First Class Honours BA in English and French. She then moved to the UK and Cambridge University where she was awarded a doctorate for her dissertation on friendships between women in eighteenth-century literature. Remarkably, during her period as a doctoral student, Emma Donoghue established herself not only as an academic and literary historian but also as a writer. Her first novel Stir Fry appeared in 1994 and was followed in close succession by six further novels which have been translated into over forty languages and garnered numerous prizes. In particular Room, her most recent novel, published in 2010, has been internationally celebrated; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and won the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Libris Award (for Fiction Book and Author of the Year).
In addition to her remarkable achievements as a novelist Emma Donoghue has proven her virtuosity in several other genres; she has produced three collections of short stories, four plays, and several radio plays and film scripts. A further play on the life of the Irish writer Maeve Brennan is being work-shopped at the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. Emma Donoghue’s output as a literary historian has been equally prodigious: she has published a ground-breaking study of British lesbian culture between 1668 and 1880; she has written a monograph on girl-girl plots in Western literature; she has composed the biography of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Victorian poets and lovers who co-wrote under the pseudonym of Michael Field; and she has edited two anthologies, one of lesbian short stories and the other of poetry between women.
Touchy Subjects, the title of one of Emma Donoghue’s collections of short stories, is a phrase that aptly captures the spirit that animates all of her varied literary creations. The subjects that she chooses to explore in her fictions are touchy in several different senses. Her novels, plays, and short stories often broach taboo, problematic, or censored stories while also being visceral, emotionally involving, and genuinely transporting. Touchy subjects in Emma Donoghue’s hands turn out always to be intractable but deeply involving. Her first novel Stir Fry was an assured and witty contribution to that daunting genre, the UCD coming of age novel. It includes works of the stature of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds. Emma Donoghue’s Stir Fry revolutionised this tradition by rendering it edgy, contemporary, and feminine. Her novel readily sits alongside those of Joyce and Flann O’Brien to the degree that it gives a provocative twist to themes instantly recognisable to anyone who has been a student or indeed a young adult, those of tortured sexuality, of dangerous liaisons that hover between gay and straight and nothing at all, and of seemingly pointless but hugely significant friendships.
Emma Donoghue has an extraordinary facility to plunge her readers into worlds beyond their ken and even ones that they would rather not enter. I defy anyone to read Slammerkin, the history of the teenager, Mary Saunders, an eighteenth-century streetwalker who was accused of theft and murder and hanged in her native Monmouth, “The Story of the Shoe”, the reconfigured fairy tale in which Cinderella runs off with the Fairy God-Mother and not the Prince, or Room, the story of five-year old Jack who has been incarcerated in a locked space all of his life with his beloved Ma by her sadistic and sexually controlling father, and not feel that they have been emotionally, intellectually, and morally enriched and that they understand the world better. These novels and stories, like all of Emma Donoghue’s work, make demands on us as readers while rewarding us with their linguistic fertility, their wit, their expansiveness, their imaginative brio, and their wisdom.
In a letter to Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka declared that “we should only read books that bite and stab us…a book should be an axe to break up the frozen seas within us”. Emma Donoghue’s work meets Kafka’s stringent but entirely valid demands. Her novels, short stories, and plays do indeed grab hold of us with their touchy subjects and break up the frozen seas inside us. We salute Emma Donoghue today, alumna of UCD, BA year of 1990, for her prodigal creative talents, her imaginative verve, her historical insight, and her intellectual and ethical generosity. In a world in which economics ruthlessly dominates even everyday conversation especially in Ireland, Emma Donoghue through the literary legacy that she has gifted to us has proven that true richness resides elsewhere: in the imagination and linguistic invention and in the capacity to project ourselves into the viewpoints of others.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.