Invitation to join CYCLOPS: a new DCU Research Cluster

Brigitte Le Juez (SALIS) and Michael Hinds (MDI) are delighted to invite colleagues to contribute to the work of a new research cluster, CYCLOPS.

CYCLOPS will build on the existing activities of staff and students currently involved in the work of Comparative Literature within DCU and the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at MDI, creating research and postgraduate possibilities within the context of Incorporation.

In mythology, Cyclops is a monster; in Joyce’s Ulysses, he is a loudmouth blind to ironies that do not suit his world-view. The new Dublin CYCLOPS will not be so myopic; instead, it wants to use the wide lens available to that monstrous eye as a means of signifying the range of imaginative and transformative capabilities that literature presents. Such transformations are in fact what literature has always allowed, from the very beginnings of our poetries, and CYCLOPS will insist upon the radical impact of literature in this regard, resisting the narrowing tendencies of national literary histories and heritage culture, countenancing the vivid change of world and self with a wide — but critical — eye.

The impetus for CYCLOPS is coming from Comparative Literature at SALIS and Poetry Studies at MDI, but it will also extend an immediate invitation to other interested parties within the new DCU, towards literary scholars but also those working in other disciplines (such as film studies, media studies, art history and criticism, music, history, law, geography, philosophy, sociology, psychology, sexuality studies and the sciences). In fact, such intermedial and cross-disciplinary activity is another key aspiration of the wide-lens approach of CYCLOPS.

The first CYCLOPS events will be coming soon, and we hope you will participate and contribute.