HIT IT: Hustling and the Ivory Tower with Max McGuinness

In our latest podcast episode Luke Sheehan interviews his friend, Dr. Max McGuinness.

Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin. His first book, published this Spring by Liverpool University Press, is Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust, which explores how French modernist writers used the press as a forum for literary experimentation. ​

The launcher of this book in Dublin, translator Pierre Guglielmina, gave a speech in The Little Museum of Dublin, in which he managed to nickname the text with the accurate acronym HIT IT – like a piece of modernist wordplay. Pierre described it as a panorama of French literature from the Commune times of 1870 to the Great War (1914), a study that “hit [him]hard”. “The movement of HITIT, from Mallarmé to Proust through Apollinaire…[he said]is a triumphant one, and I have been trying to understand why.”

The second part of Luke’s interview is available to our Patreon followers:

And is also available to subscribers on Apple Podcasts.