2011 marks the centenary year of Brian O'Nolan; born October 5 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, in what is now Northern Ireland. He is most famous, under the penname Flann O'Brien, as the author of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – two works which could easily take a seat alongside Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Ulysses at the head table of comic literature masterpieces.

However, beyond his two most famous and innovative novels, O’Nolan left us a wealth of writing under myriad pseudonyms; from his early student scribblings as Brother Barnabas (such as Scenes in a Novel (probably posthumous), and the short-lived monthly periodical Blather), to his bitingly satirical Gaelic Novel An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) and longstanding “Cruiskeen Lawn” Irish Times newspaper column (as Myles na gCopaleen), and his final series of novels, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive, and the unfinished Slattery’s Sago Saga. Further genres in which O'Nolan wrote include theatre plays (the Faustian satire on Irish local government Faustus Kelly, a Karel Capek adaptation The Insect Play, and Thirst, a one act play of after hours drinking in Mr. Coulihan's Dublin pub), short stories (such as the nightmare-ish Two-in-One), TV dramas (including The Dead Spit of Kelly, Flight, and The Time Freddie Retired), and Radio scripts for RTE’s O’Dea’s Yer Man’. O'Nolan is even said to have written three editions of the popular post-war detective comic series Sexton Blake under the pen-name of Stephen Blakesley.

The occasion of O’Nolan’s centenary year affords us an opportunity to re-assess this deeply underexplored body of multigenre and polyphonic comic texts. Furthermore, it encourages us to take stock of how O’Nolan’s legacy has been shaped – particularly in comparison to his exiled, and significantly more canonised, compatriots Joyce and Beckett – how this legacy might be re-evaluated and re-shaped, and to chart how his cultural purchase has gathered speed throughout the last century, to the point that Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange) might comment that “if we don't cherish the work of Flann O'Brien we are stupid fools who don't deserve to have great men.” That O’Nolan’s work continues to be cherished is evident in the traces of his influence on contemporary works of metafiction, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter's night a traveler, and Patrick McGinley's The Devil's Diary. We also find ourselves at the point at which O’Nolan has finally entered the larger pop culture consciousness, with the appearance of The Third Policeman in the second season premiere of primetime U.S. television series Lost, resulting in a sudden surge in sales—more than 15,000 copies in three weeks, equaling total sales of the previous six years.

As demonstrated by these contemporary adaptations and appropriations of O'Nolan's work, the commonly held view of O'Nolan as a purely local writer is in desperate need of updating. As such, the conference is especially interested in challenging and re-evaluating this view of O'Nolan by considering his work in broader, more international contexts, with the ultimate goal of spearheading a more integrated international community dedicated to this ‘cult’ author.