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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will interrogate issues of gender and identity in the work of contemporary Irish language writers. We will examine the ways in which contemporary writers in Irish writing from a constellation of identities, sexual, cultural and linguistic question explore these issues as they articulate them in specific cultural forms. Drawing on recent theoretical work in gender studies and postcolonial studies the course will look at texts which question and analyze essentialist notions of cultural identity. It will explore in particular some of the tensions inherent in the articulation of a cross-cultural sexual identity and the specificity of linguistic and cultural inheritance in contemporary writing in Irish. We will read, among others, texts from writers such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Biddy Jenkinson, Nuala Nà Dhomhnaill, Pearse Hutchinson, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Seán Mac Mathúna and Micheál Ó Conghaile.
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3.00 Credits
How race, particularly as it is understood in an Irish context, is understood in post-colonial times.
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3.00 Credits
Selected topics in Irish literature.
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3.00 Credits
A close critical study of performance theory as it relates to modern and contemporary theater.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of Irish and English literature written between 1890-1920.
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3.00 Credits
Irish literature and its cultural contexts.
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3.00 Credits
The course is organized around a semester long reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. Our first objective will be to read and comprehend and enjoy this work collectively; and all participants will be required, formally and informally,to contribute to our reading. Using Ulysses as our principal referent point, we will then be working through a number of key texts in the following areas: Joyce criticism, cultural studies and postcolonialism. This is intended to be an introduction to these bodies of work, not an exhaustive survey or even representative sampling. We will, accordingly, be reading these texts with constant reference to the ways in which they illuminate Ulysses and, beyond it, the colonial and postcolonial culture of Ireland. Towards the end of semester we will concentrate on discussing both the value of the different kinds of approaches we have encountered and tried to deploy and the ways in which methods we have used here might be applicable in other domains of cultural and literary studies. Since this is a research seminar, students will be expected to follow up their readings and deepen their knowledge of at least one of the domains of secondary material we have addressed (e.g., psychoanalysis, popular culture, postcolonialism etc.) and write a paper using this material to read a chapter or a thematic concern of Ulysses.
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3.00 Credits
This course is a critical examination of the major canonical texts in literary modernism. We consider the cultural, social and political conditions that gave rise to modernism and how urbanization, advertising, war and cinema serve as metaphors for the modernist transformation of form, narrative and style. In addition to drawing on classic accounts of cultural modernity and contemporary scholarship, issues of modernism in music, fashion and the visual arts will also be addressed. While British and French authors will be studied in detail, particular attention will be paid to the Irish experience in both languages. Authors to be studied include James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Bowen, W.B. Yeats, Seán Ó RÃordáin, Eimar O'Duffy, Pádraic Ó Conaire and Austin Clarke.
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3.00 Credits
Yeats famously suggested that "poetry and religion are the same" - and while many might have thought such ideas died with him in 1939, or even much earlier, changing conceptions of what both poetry and religion are (or might be) have recently reopened the debate in rather spectacular ways. My interest is in bringing students into the increasingly busy intersection between these once opposed modes of thinking (and into the site of my own current book project). The course will introduce students to several of the major movements in philosophy and literary theory that most powerfully impacted poetics - among them phenomenology, Wittgensteinian linguistics (or his "philosophy of religion," as some have described it), and deconstruction (which Derrida late in life admitted had been "structured like a religion"); it will also demonstrate the ways in which traditional histories of twentieth-century poetic innovation and development are currently being re-read. Starting with (Lutheran convert) Edmund Husserl and his students Martin Heidegger and St Edith Stein (as well as with Husserl's claim that the whole point of his phenomenological project was to discover a "path back to God"), the course charts collisions between essentially Christian existential phenomenology and, for example, the Jewish thought of its later critics by focusing on how poets on both sides of the Atlantic absorbed and continued to process such ideas. Neo-Thomist thinking as put forward by figures like Jacques and Raïssa Maritain will also be studied, alongside various mystical and Gnostic alternatives. A very small number of poets will be picked for attention and close-reading; major figures like T.S. Eliot will be studied alongside small-press figures like Brian Coffey, and the course will end with living poet-thinkers Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer who have contributed much to our understanding of how all these fields of inquiry fruitfully overlap. Two presentations and two papers (as well as attendance at one or two poetry readings and lectures) will constitute the requirements; students may instead opt to write one longer essay (with an eye towards possible publication) if they so desire.
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3.00 Credits
This course will set itself a number of questions: can we identify the causes which led to the sudden revival in Irish cultural life in the 1890s, how far was it a "revival" (and what exactly was being revived) and how far a new initiative? What was its relationship with history and with contemporary political events and thinking, with developments in comparative mythology, anthropology, and structures of religious belief? How did the Irish literary movement evolve from the 1890s to the beginning of the Second World War, what were its salient features, and which voices and factors were most influential in shaping (or challenging) that evolution? Our procedure will be to engage through the close reading of specific texts with the development of thought and ideas, and to assess the pertinence of cultural and political movements of the time. Yeats's career - the evolution of his style, thinking, and aesthetic, and the action and reaction to his ideas and practices, will be a linking theme. Particular attention will also be given to John Synge, the rise of the Abbey Theatre, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, and early Beckett. . The course will begin with an examination of the work of a cluster of writers in the late 1880s - Yeats, Standish James O'Grady, John O'Leary, Katharine Tynan, and Douglas Hyde - and go on to set their views and ambitions in the context of their nineteenth-century antecedents, paying particular attention to Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders. We shall then look at the cultural situation in Ireland in the 1890s - and examine the impact of the fall and death of Parnell on the period, as well as the influence of the Celtic and the Symbolist Movements on the writings of Yeats, AE (George Russell) and others. We shall analyse the often turbulent achievements and effects of the Irish Theatre Movement on the development of dramatic methodology and national identity, trace the way in which Joyce offered other approaches to the question of a national literature, examine the causes and consequences of Yeats's change of style after 1900, assess the impact of the "Poets' Rebellion" of Easter 1916 and the reactions to its long aftermath in the 1920s. We shall consider Yeats's position, and his poetics, in the 1930s and assess the extent to which it was being challenged by new writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett.
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