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The voice of the immigrant in Western societies is being heard in the first person in contemporary literature. Therefore, the experience of emigration is no longer or, at least, not necessarily told from the privileged perspective of the white man or woman. And the short story is being a recurrent favourite genre for sharing with readers the diverse causes that force a man or a woman to abandon his/her native land, as well as the conflicts that emerge in the countries of reception. Collections such as The Things I Would Tell You (2017) by Sabrina Mahfouz, or This Hostel Life (2018) by Melatu Uche Okorie, among many others, are offering interesting examples of transcultural renderings of the experience of migration. The purpose of the present contribution is to focus on the use of irony and humour as ethically committed strategies for deploying the possibilities as well as the limits of conviviality in contemporary societies. I study the representative examples of two stories, Melatu Uche Okorie’s “This Hostel Life” (included in the homonymous collection by the author), and Fadia Faqir’s “Under the Cypress Tree”, published in Mahfouz’s collective volume. These two stories are aesthetically brilliant instances of the ethical potential of humour when offering a transcultural view of contemporary migrations that overcomes the limitations of traditional multicultural and intercultural treatments of the topic.

Many of the most outstanding contemporary Irish writers have paid homage to James Joyce’s figure and work in their fiction. This paper examines the extent of Joyce’s influence on a selection of contemporary Irish writers both at a thematic and at an aesthetic level. It is my contention that their humanist reading of the Irish genius has only recently been paralleled by Joycean critics such as Declan Kiberd whose Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (2009) recuperates the humanist writer that authors such as Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Dermot Bolger or Joseph O’Connor have been vindicating in their works. Therefore, their appreciation of the Irish genius contrasts with mainstream critical focus on the aesthetic and technical virtuoso Joyce, more frequently perceived by Joycean scholars and by writers such as Samuel Beckett or Flann O’Brien. My work on the influence of Joyce’s work in the literary career of some of the most relevant contemporary Irish writers is also a revision of the general tendency among Joycean critics who have traditionally centered their efforts on tracing the impact of his work on European and English authors (Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Philip Roth, John Barthes, Salman Rushdie, etc.).

Keeping in mind the European context of the final two decades of the twentieth century, this paper addresses the social, cultural and artistic relevance of the British writer and intellectual, John Berger (b. London, 1926). I intend to analyse the socio-political and artistic approaches adopted by Berger in the trilogy Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1983) and Lilac and Flag (1990), published in a single volume in 1992 under the title Into Their Labours. The author presents in this trilogy the coexistence in time of two cultures: on the one hand, a ‘culture of survival’, the peasant one, which he considers to be a traditional, exploited minority culture in decline. On the other hand, Berger refers to a capitalist ‘culture of progress,’ generated by modernisation, technological advances and the processes of globalisation, which threaten to make the former culture disappear. We will have the opportunity to explain how the peasant culture of survival conceives the future as a series of repetitive acts, in contrast with the cultures of progress that see the future as the possibility of expansion. As I attempt to demonstrate in this paper, both cultures can be identified and analysed in two distinct, though contemporary, spatial-temporal contexts; two forms of culture, and their different and singular relationships with time.