College Radio Sadie Loughman asks whether college radio is the revival of a dying medium, as Trinity FM continues to offer a platform to showcase exciting and eclectic music.
REVIEW
PREVIEW
“Opera is not for the faint of heart”, writes Saskia McDonogh Mooney as she reviews the Gaiety’s opera version of Faust page 9»
As the Sarah Purser exhibition arrives at the National Gallery, Elly Christopher explores the woman behind the canvas page 10»
Faust
Private Worlds
universitytimes.ie/radius
Volume XV, Issue II
Monday 16th October, 2023
Sarah Browne LITERATURE EDITOR
A
A Record of Trinity’s Mind
mind can be changed by literature – so, too, can a university. The make-up of Trinity’s campus monumentalises much of its literary heritage. At Front Gate, two bronze statues emerge from the wildflowers. One of these depicts a man whose body lies in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Along the cobbled stones of Front Square, the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) leans into your periphery. The society this houses takes its name from the prolific Bram Stoker. Passing the terracotta eaves of the Rubrics and Library Square, there lies a theatre, the eponym of which is Samuel Beckett. If you stray as far as the Hamilton, you’re met with Wilde’s name printed in black and white on the ground floor. Trinity’s literary heritage exists in bronze, limestone, oak and plastic but also, fundamentally, in paper. The magna opera of writers associated with College were, for the most part, written sometime after they were students at Trinity. But those writers were writing while they were students – just as students today are. So, where did that work go? In those nascent pieces lies a snapshot, not of what alumni went on to create but of what they were creating within the fences of the grounds. As Robert Yelverton Tyrrell considered it, that work exists as a “record of the mind of Trinity College Dublin”. Tyrrell understood that, in the anglophone world, literary journals are often the first step a writer takes in their long ascent towards a career in print. Journals provide a smaller stage, a platform for promotion and experimentation. They are an opportunity to rub shoulders with established writers by sharing the same papered spine. Tyrrell himself set up one of Trinity’s most important creative writing journals, Kottabos. Named after the Greek game which involves flinging splashes of wine at certain targets, Kottabos was formed in 1869 as a journal for translations of Greek and Latin verse as well as select pieces of poetry and prose in English. Between the year of its establishment and 1895, it produced fifty volumes before being discontinued. The magazine is said to have awoken
CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 »
Inside:
Radius Reads page 8 »
/
Your Week Ahead page 3 »
/
In Our Radius: The Complete Trinity and Dublin Events Guide page 14 »