Welcome to CorkBack to top

The Department of French in University College Cork is delighted to be the host to the fifty-ninth annual conference of the Society for French Studies, from 2 to 4 July 2018. We look forward to welcoming you to Cork and to UCC for the conference. The University, which is to the west of the city centre, was founded as Queen’s College, Cork in 1845, and French has been taught here since then.

Cork reputedly owes its foundation to a monastery established by St Find Barr in c. 600. Edmund Spenser wrote in The Faerie Queen of the city’s characteristic topography:

The spreading Lee, that like an island fayre
Encloseth Corke with his divided flood

The original island city, which ran from the north to the south, was surrounded by a marsh (hence the city’s name in Irish, Corcaigh) lying beyond the city walls and enclosed within the two main channels of the river.

Cork in 1690; source: British Library

Cork in 1690; source: British Library

We provide here all of the information you may need to prepare for your visit. Two exhibitions are being held to mark the conference, one on cultural connections between France and Ireland, and one on Claude Pélieu, in partnership with the BnF.

Checking inBack to top

Cork Airport is about ten kilometres from the University, which can be reached by taxi or bus. There is a taxi rank near the arrivals gate and, if you are staying in Victoria Mills, it is best to go there first of all to check in, before making your way to Brookfield to register for the conference.

Taxi bookings can be made in advance through mytaxi.

A bus also departs from near the arrivals gate at the airport for the city centre: this is service 226, and it departs on the hour. Descend at the main bus station in Parnell Place, where you can then take service 208 and descend at Victoria Cross.

If you travel to Cork by train, taxis can also be obtained at Kent Station; the bus service 205 will bring you to the College Road entrance of the Brookfield Campus and you can make your way to Victoria Mills from there.

VenueBack to top

The main conference sessions will take place on the Brookfield campus, with receptions and dinners on the main campus, which is a ten-minute walk away (see also maps of the University).

Brookfield Campus

Brookfield Campus

Delegates will be accommodated in Victoria Mills, which is about five minutes from Brookfield on foot, via the UCC Western Gateway Building. The southern channel of the river makes its way through the campus from west to east. En route to Brookfield, you will cross it twice. There is also a wide range of hotels and guest houses near the University.

Breakfast will be provided in the Western Gateway Building; lunches and other refreshments will be provided in Brookfield.

TechBack to top

All of the rooms in use during the conference are equipped with computers running Windows. Each computer in turn has VGA and HDMI connections; Mac users wishing to connect their own laptops should bring the relevant adapters — as always, fingers crossed.

Claude Pélieu: On All FrequenciesBack to top

j’ai composé ces textes sauvages pour conjurer la fantastique gueule de bois de ma génération — j’ai fait ceci & cela & j’ai eu raison & je me suis trompé — j’étais inabordable.

Claude Pélieu, Jukeboxes, 1972

Claude Pélieu, 1960.  Image — Lu Pélieu

Claude Pélieu, 1960. Image — Lu Pélieu

Claude Pélieu (1934–2002) was a writer, poet, collage artist and translator. Often considered as the only French member of that most American of movements, the Beat Generation, Pélieu is perhaps best understood as a free agent, a poet in exile who set out to document a country and a counterculture that fascinated and at times horrified him.

He spent his youth in Paris, where he was a keen observer of and sometime participant in the capital’s various postwar artistic and literary currents, from lettrism to sound poetry. Following his forced conscription into the army during the Algerian war, he was desperate to leave France, and in 1963, aged twenty-eight, he travelled to the United States where he would spend most of the rest of his life.

Living between San Francisco, in the years before the Summer of Love, and New York, where he set up shop in the Chelsea Hotel, Pélieu offered a tense and highly fragmented vision of his life in America. His extensive experimentation with William Burroughs’s cut-up techniques is reflected in his writing, which is characterized by an extreme urgency and a rapid alteration of words and images.

More than a mere observer of counterculture, Pélieu published and edited a number of magazines that brought together poetry, art and reportage by his friends and contacts, and which serve as snapshots of the turbulent years of the 1960s. His satirical collages crop up throughout the underground press, and were sent by the hundreds to his contacts across the world. Together with his American partner Mary Beach, Pélieu also completed the first French translations of texts by American writers from Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to Bob Kaufman and Ed Sanders.

The exhibition Claude Pélieu: On All Frequencies in the Boole Library looks to offer an overview of the unique trajectory and diverse work of this renegade correspondent, who left a unique legacy in the form of his strange and electrifying texts, collages and translations that crisscrossed the Atlantic like so many dispatches.

European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018

Both Claude Pélieu: On All Frequencies and Matters French: Learning from Libraries form part of Ireland’s programme for the European Year of Cultural Heritage.

Matters French: Learning from LibrariesBack to top

The Old Norman French that William brought to England after 1066 became part of the political and cultural environment of this island a century later — at just the point where Anglo-Norman had become embedded as a literary and administrative medium in England, where the conquering Normans had become proficient in English, and where several of the varieties of medieval French were on the threshold of a period of extraordinary literary innovation. The effects of the arrival of the Anglo-Normans and of Henry II in Ireland were to be as momentous as they were far-reaching, and for one thing they brought the Irish language much more closely into contact with French and with English. The interactions that resulted — variously linguistic, literary, intellectual, confessional, political — endure to the present day, nearly a century after Irish independence.

Thus, the centuries since 1169 witnessed contacts with France and with French that straddled religious and political divisions. Irish scholars and intellectuals took refuge in Paris and Louvain, where Irish-language materials could be printed and where French was to become a medium of antiquarian and historical research that took Ireland as its object. Conversely, the arrival in Ireland of Huguenot exiles created new French-speaking communities, so connecting the island with French humanist writing and publishing, and, in particular, of course, with French-language Protestant thinking. More than a century later, French continued to be widely read in this city and this country, and at decisive moments in the quest for independence the politics of post-Revolutionary France were to be a highly potent — and highly contested — reference-point.

The Huguenot quarter

The Huguenot quarter

This exhibition draws on the rich collections of the Boole Library, and testifies to these and many more of the connections that exist between Ireland, England and especially France to this day.

Hors champBack to top

River Lee, North Channel

River Lee, North Channel

In the words of Lonely Planet, Cork is pubs, shops and waterways; there is also a gallery, a riverside park, an art museum, a covered market, among other ‘endroits exceptionnels’ beyond the city. There is a French community in Cork, whose webpage contains a wealth of information, including some on which we hope you won’t have to draw. Plan ahead and pack an umbrella if only to ward off the showers.

A word of thanks...Back to top

Ambassade de France en Irlande

The conference is benefiting from the generous sponsorship of the Ambassade de France en Irlande.

Bibliothèque nationale de France

Claude Pélieu: On All Frequencies has been organized in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, to which we extend our grateful thanks. We are very grateful also to the staff in the Archives and Special Collections services of the Boole Library, in particular Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Elaine Harrington and Emer Twomey.

Fáilte Ireland

We have also received generous support from Fáilte Ireland.

Cork Convention Bureau

We are grateful too for the support of the Cork Convention Bureau.

ColophonBack to top

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European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018
Meet in Ireland