Dear speakers, readers, artists, performers & attendees at 100 Myles,

We would like to thank you all sincerely for your generous contributions to 100 Myles: The International Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference. We had a wonderful time and were really invigorated and excited by the high standard of the papers and discussion, and we are indebted to you for making the conference such a successful event. We hope you had an enjoyable and rewarding time in Vienna. As suggested by some at the conference, we intend to keep going in the conference's aftermath by starting the International Flann O'Brien Society, and for the time being, this website will serve as its home. We hope you will all be part of its future.

We look forward to meeting you all again on the Flann circuit,                                                           roll on Trinity in October!

Press for 100 Myles

To follow the Irish Times' coverage of 100 Myles Vienna please follow the links below:

An Irishman's Diary (Thursday July 21, 2011)
Vienna conference on Flann O'Brien (Monday July 25, 2011)
Flann on a Vienna roll as centenary celebrated (Wednesday July 27, 2011)
Brian, Myles and Flann - your only man in Vienna (Friday July 29, 2011)


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100 Myles: The International

Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference
Vienna, July 24 - 27

On behalf of The Department of English Studies at the University of Vienna and the Irish Embassy in Austria, we invite you to 100 Myles: The International Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference from July 24-27, 2011.

For all the latest news on the conference and its aftermath, you can also follow us on our Twitter feed or Facebook page.

We are also honoured to announce that keynote addresses will be given at the conference by esteemed Irish poet and author Anthony Cronin (author of the O'Nolan biography No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien), Keith Hopper (author of Flann O'Brien: a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist), Frank McNally (Irish Times columnist of "An Irishman's Diary"), Austrian filmmaker Kurt Palm (director of In Schwimmen-zwei-Vögel, a film adaptation of At Swim-Two-Birds), and Harry Rowohlt (German performer and translator of O'Nolan's works).

Vienna provides a beautiful, and surprisingly fitting, location for such an event – and not only through a de-Selbyesque understanding of geography. The Austrian capital has a rich tradition of adapting the work of Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien, offering numerous theatrical adaptations (such as “Der Pooka MacPhellimey, ein Angehöriger der teuflischen Zunft”), and, with Kurt Palm's In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel, the only film adaptation of O’Nolan’s novels to date. In this picturesque setting, the conference also boasts a rich and varied 'Fringe Flann' arts programme, with flann-related film screenings ("The Martyr's Crown," "John Duffy's Brother," "Babble"), performances ("The Science of Flann O'Brien," "Extracts from The Brother"), readings (Julian Gough, Roger Boylan, Eamon Morrissey) and much, much more in the offing!

Vienna University, founded in 1365 by Duke Rudolph IV, is itself the oldest university in the German-speaking world, and with 86,000 students one of Europe's largest universities. Its English Department has a strong tradition of Irish Studies. This has culminated in an agreement between the Irish Embassy and the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies to support the creation of an Irish Studies Centre and the instalment of two Visiting Professorships in Irish Studies between 2009-2011.

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.