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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Shakespeare's plays are not isolated artifacts that exist in a vacuum: as literary scholar and artistic director Kevin Ewert has said, Shakespeare's "creations were not birthed, Athena-like, from his balding pate into this world to stand alone as singular, finished and fully-formed edifices; neither playwright nor play existed or "worked autonomously." The plays were originally produced as popular entertainment and both reflected and constructed the cultural conditions of early modern England. Modern interpretations of the plays - on paper, on stage, on film-likewise engage with their own historical moments: each interpretative act is a socially, politically, theoretically informed, and further generative, response. In this course, we will focus on six of Shakespeare's plays to develop an understanding of the formal, linguistic, and stylistic aspects of the genre. We will examine not only the literariness but also the liveliness of these texts, considering each in terms of performance by viewing contemporary theatrical and cinematic works, including the Actors From the London Stage's production of Much Ado About Nothing here at Notre Dame, Chicago Shakespeare Theater's staging of Macbeth, and various film adaptations. Through reading, discussing, watching, and maybe even performing Shakespeare, students will develop the analytical skills to consider diverse interpretations and make their own informed, critical interventions.
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3.00 Credits
Much of what we consider to be modern first emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our two-party system has its roots in the political upheavals of the seventeenth century, and our paper economy began with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. Trade, consumerism, and advertising grew dramatically during the period, and shopping became a pastime. The scientific revolution unsettled traditional understandings of the world, and the importance of classical learning decreased. These political, economic, and intellectual changes were accompanied by significant shifts in cultural values. The sexual libertinism of many late-seventeenth-century literary works gradually gave way to celebrations of sensibility and domesticity. These new ideals contributed to the development of the conception of marriage as a loving partnership and not an economic contract between two families. This change in ideas about marriage was part of a larger reconsideration of the role of women in society. During this period, women began to make significant public contributions to the arts and society. Women actors appeared on stage for the first time, and women writers made well-regarded contributions to the formerly male-dominated literary marketplace. We will examine how writers of this period (roughly 1660-1780s) engaged with these breaks with the past and what seemed to be the emergence of modernity. In addition to tracing this theme, we will consider how the idea of modernity affected language and literary form. Assignments: A quiz, a group presentation, three short papers, two longer papers, and a final exam. Major texts: "Moll Flanders," Daniel Defoe; "The Battle of the Books" and "Gulliver's Travels," Jonathan Swift; "Humphry Clinker," Tobias Smollett; "The Man of Mode," George Etherege; "The Rover," Aphra Behn; "The Beggar's Opera," John Gay; poems by the Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper.
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3.00 Credits
In this course, we will trace the major developments in the past century of European drama, beginning with the "social problem play" developed by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in the 1880's and ending with the collaborative feminist theatre of Caryl Churchill in the 1980's. We will read plays by playwrights who tried to bring theatre as close to real life as possible, and by playwrights who sought to shatter audience expectations with bizarre innovations in acting, staging, and theatrical language. Along the way, we will ask ourselves some of the questions that modern playwrights and theatre audiences have struggled with: *Should theatre strive merely to entertain, or should it encourage audiences to think about contemporary issues? *Should plays attempt to uncover the truth about difficult issues and human problems, or should they take the position that all reality is illusory, all human life merely a performance? *Should plays make sense? Are traditional plots important or is it better to use surprising, nontraditional - even nonsensical - methods to try to affect audiences emotionally or viscerally? *Should stage sets try to look as much as possible like the places they are trying to represent, or should they reveal that they are stages and props? *Should actors try to "become" their characters, or should they distance themselves from their characters and think analytically about them? As we consider these questions, we will read plays and short essays by influential thinkers about the theatre. Students will write five short response papers. Class participation will be a vital part of this course as students interpret, stage, and act out portions of plays, both as a regular part of class discussion and as a graded group presentation.
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3.00 Credits
On its most basic level, narrative involves an author and character interacting with their world, engaging it in a manner that entails a beginning, middle, and end. How can such a basic model of storytelling, however, fit the wild variety of sights, sounds, and people which greet anyone upon first entering a city? Thinking of our own experience, how can anyone hope to address the vast size and events of cities such as Chicago or New York, and moreover connect the variety of this environment in an integral way to his or her personal life? It is this basic question that I hope we can begin to answer in this class. We'll be looking at writers dealing primarily with London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, asking how they responded to a large metropolis undergoing drastic changes at this time. We'll look at how these writers responded to the vast crowds and new technologies which emerged in this urban space, and how race and gender impacted these authors' art. In order to place the experience of London in comparative perspective, we will also examine some literary treatments of Dublin, and of other cities such as New York and Paris by English writers. In these texts, which span from the end of the eighteenth century up to the 1960s, a number of common themes will emerge: the individual's relationship with massive crowds of strangers, the difference between the country and the city, the close proximity of wealth and poverty, the effects of gender and race on one's experience of the city, the overwhelming novelty of the city's new sensations and technologies, and, ultimately, the place of art in such a setting.
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3.00 Credits
This class will provide a general introduction to Irish poetry from 1700 to the present. We will cover major English-language poets such as Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney, as well as read selections in translation from some of the major Irish-language poets, including Brian Merriman and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Students will be introduced to basic elements of meter and poetic form, as well as poetic genre. We will also focus on how the poems we read address important themes in Irish history and culture. Among these themes are the question of Irish identity, the relationship between Ireland's two languages (English and Irish), and how Irish poets have depicted Ireland's troubled history with neighboring England.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the aesthetic and political aspects of modernist fiction in colonial Britain from 1900-1935.
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3.00 Credits
A study of major Irish writers since World War II.
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3.00 Credits
A study of Irish writers in the North since the Troubles began in the 1960s.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the politics of culture, and the cultures of politics, in the North of Ireland during the 20th century.
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3.00 Credits
Along with the church, the university and the army, the prison is one of the central institutions in Ireland, and literature has traditionally been the way prisoners protest, resist, and critique their harrowing experiences. In this course we will examine work written by men and women during and after their incarceration, including major literary figures (Brendan Behan and Oscar Wilde), key figures in Irish history (Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke), and revolutionary women (Maude Gonne and Kathleen Clarke). Course requirements include response papers, presentations and a research paper.
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