Dr. Magdalena Kay
Position
Contact
Credentials
BA (Harvard), PhD (UC Berkley)
Area of expertise
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century British poetry; Irish poetry; Polish poetry; comparative literature; poetics
Education
Magdalena Kay received a B.A. (magna cum laude) in English from Harvard University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007. This same year, she started teaching at the University of Victoria in the Department of English. Her research specializes in contemporary poetry from Britain and Ireland, though she has also published work on Eastern European (particularly Polish) poetry and is interested in the complex effect of early twentieth-century poetry (Modernist and non-Modernist) on later poets.
Teaching
Kay’s teaching focuses on twentieth and twenty-first-century British and Irish literature. Recent undergraduate teaching includes courses on modern poetry (ENSH 369), contemporary British and Irish literature (ENSH 372), Irish literature (ENSH 373), and modern women’s fiction (ENGL 471). Recent graduate teaching includes courses on Irish literature (ENSH 532) and modern and contemporary British poetry (ENGL 560). Other courses taught include modern British fiction (ENGL 434A), Modernism (ENGL 201), contemporary British and Irish poetry (ENGL 434B), an undergraduate seminar on practical criticism (ENGL 310), a graduate seminar on the poetry of the ‘60s generation in Ireland (ENGL 561), an undergraduate special topic course called “The Poetry of Ideas” (ENGL 391), and a graduate seminar on Seamus Heaney (ENGL 561).
Selected Faculty Publications
Books
Poetry Against the World
Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain
Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britainbrings together two major poets, who espouse opposite aesthetic ambitions, yet are both taken as paragons of Englishness, in order to ask how they pitch their poetry against an inhospitable world. This book explores how these two representative poets seek to redress an "age of demolition" through their poetry, and how their audiences react to the types of redress they propose.
In Gratitude for All the Gifts
University of Toronto Press, 2012
In Gratitude for All the Gifts explores the literary and cultural links between the bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the preeminent Eastern European poets of the twentieth century, including fellow Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Magdalena Kay opens new ground in comparative literary studies with her close analysis of Heaney's poetic work from the perspective of the English-speaking West's attraction, and especially Heaney's own attraction, to Eastern European poetry.
While placing Milosz and Herbert in their cultural contexts and keeping an eye on the poems in their original Polish, this innovative and energetic study focuses on how Heaney encountered their work in translation. In Gratitude for All the Gifts thus allows us to see what happens when poetic forms, histories, and themes travel between countries and encourages us to understand cultural crossing not just thematically, but also in terms of form, voice, and aesthetic intent.
Knowing One's Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry
Continuum, 2012
Are we allowed to choose where we belong? What pressures make us feel that we should belong somewhere? This book brings together four major poets--Heaney, Mahon, Zagajewski, and Hartwig--who ask themselves these questions throughout their lives. They start by assuming that we can choose not to belong, but know this is easier said than done. Something in them is awry, leading them to travel, emigrate, and return dissatisfied with all forms of belonging.
Writer after writer has suggested that Polish and Irish literature bear some uncanny similarities, particularly in the twentieth century, but few have explored these similarities in depth. Ireland and Poland, with their tangled histories of colonization, place a large premium upon knowing one's place. What happens, though, when a poet makes a career out of refusing to know her place in the way her culture expects? This book explores the consequences of this refusal, allowing these poets to answer such questions through their own poems, leading to surprising conclusions about the connection of knowledge and belonging, roots and identity.
Selected Articles, Essays, and Book Chapters
“The Limits of Redress: Heaney’s Aesthetics of Grace Confronts Larkin’s Struggle with Gravity.” The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose. Eds. Ian Hickey and Eugene O’Brien. Routledge, 2024.
“Self-Elegy from Afar.” Seamus Heaney's Mythmaking. Eds. Ian Hickey and Ellen Howley. Routledge, 2023.
“The Moment in the Rose Garden.” Dublin Review of Books 151 (June 2023). https://drb.ie/articles/the-moment-in-the-rose-garden/ .
“Czesław Miłosz in the World: The Will to Transcendence.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature. Ed. Ken Seigneurie. Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.
“Derek Mahon, the poet.” Dublin Review of Books 127 (Oct. 2020). https://drb.ie/derek-mahon-the-poet/ .
“Death and Everyman: Imagining a ‘Not Unwelcoming Emptiness.’” “The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances”: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Ed. Eugene O’Brien. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017.
“Descent into Darkness.” Dublin Review of Books 85 (Jan. 2017). Reprinted online in Poetry Daily (Jan. 23, 2017). https://drb.ie/articles/descent-into-darkness/ .
“Visions and Revisions: Seamus Heaney, ‘Foreign’ Poetry, and the Problem of Assimilation.” Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 5 (2015).
“Ted Hughes and Charles Tomlinson: An Unlikely Friendship.” Notes and Queries 260, No. 3 (Sept. 2015).
“Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Moral Imperative.” Comparative Literature Studies 50.2 (2013).
“A New Course: Universities Face Problems that Christopher Lasch Identified 30 Years Ago. Has the Time Come to Fix Them?” The American Scholar, Spring 2013. https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-course/#.VbqFK3igFE4 .
“Dialogues Across the Continent: The Influence of Czesław Miłosz upon Seamus Heaney.” Comparative Literature 63.3 (Spring 2011).
“Assessing the Anglo-American Legacy of Czesław Miłosz.” Polish Review 56.4 (Winter 2011-12).
“Belonging as Mastery: Selfhood and Otherness in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney.” New Hibernia Review: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies 14.1 (Spring 2010).
“Transcending History in the ‘Bright Nowhere’ of Poetry: Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 35.2 (Fall 2010).