DETAILS
Wednesday 18th March 2026 at 4:00pm (AEDT)
Ellen O’Leary, DPhil candidate, University of Oxford
Claire Keegan’s (Re)past: Appetite, Autonomy and Temporality
ABSTRACT
This paper focalizes provision in Claire Keegan’s fiction. Food transgresses boundaries between the natural and domestic worlds and problematizes comfortable notions of autonomy. Her work establishes a complex nexus of need and desire. I explore how scenes of consumption in Keegan’s short stories reveal economic, social, and moral vulnerabilities. This paper investigates how, through a fundamental preoccupation with desire and control, Keegan situates the dinner table as a space of reconstitution and manipulation. I structure this talk around scenes of hospitality, each of which engage the kitchen as a zone of power. I probe the cultural norms which sustain hospitality and troubled interpersonal borders exposed by sharing a meal. These scenes demonstrate the coercive possibilities of providing, as well as the (dis)empowerment of being a guest at the dinner table. How can these everyday rituals speak to profound cultural and historical narratives? How do these texts distinguish between appetite and hunger, between sustenance and nourishment? The paper concludes with analysis of hospitality as a type of temporality. I meditate on freedom and satiation, examining the means-ends teleology of appetite. Situating the reader evocatively in place but less fixedly in time, Keegan serves as an ambivalent host to the readers of her stories. Through blurred temporalities and unsettled agency, Keegan intermingles inherited legacy, precarious present, and uncertain future.
SPEAKER
Ellen O’Leary is a DPhil candidate in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. Her thesis title is “The Comic Grotesque in 20th Century Irish Literature”.
LOCATION (In-Person and online)
Jabiru Room, Academic Centre, Newman College, University of Melbourne.