These are courses that are currently offered by the English Department. Note that this list only includes a sampling of those courses that would specifically address Ireland; there are other courses, not only in the English Dept. but also in Peace and Global Studies and History, that provide context and background for the Irish minor, as per the minor requirements (see catalog description, attached).
ENG 366. Irish Renaissance Literature
An exploration of the Celtic and Anglo-Irish traditions and the historical background of modern Irish literature. Emphasis is on Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, and O’Casey.
ENG 367. Yeats
This study of the work of William Butler Yeats places paramount emphasis on the poetry. Some knowledge of the historical and literary context will be required.
ENG 409. Celtic Literature (3).
This course explores ancient and modern Irish and Welsh literary traditions with emphasis on the mythological, historical, and political backgrounds of the literature.
ENG 419. Contemporary Irish Literature and Politics (3).
This class explores the major writers of post-Civil War Irish literature, focusing on the novelists, poets and playwrights who responded to and helped shape an Ireland very different from that of the 1916 Rising. We shall read selectively in the literature of the period, with special attention to the intersection of politics and imagination in contemporary Irish culture.
ENG 340 (PGS 314/GWS 314). Post-Colonial Literature and Theory
This course will introduce students to theories of colonialism through the study of world literatures. What is the impact of colonization on a culture? How do questions of language, race, class and gender impact the experience of colonialism? Students will read novels and short works from a variety of formerly subject nations, including India, Nigeria, Egypt, and Ireland. Short segments of theory will guide and accompany these readings.
EN 314: Irish Drama
This course will take a brief look at drama before the 20th C, but will focus primarily on the Irish Literacy Revival and Contemporary dramatists. In addition to reading plays by some of the writers, including Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Friel, McCarthy, and Barry, we will read a handful of essays and chapters on the political and social resonances of Irish drama towards an understanding of how the drama takes part in constructions of national identity, of "Irishness." The course may include a week to ten days in Dublin, and possibly trips to visit theatres and/or festivals in Belfast and/or Galway, during some semesters. The primary emphasis in such travel would be on seeing performances at the great Dublin houses like the Abbey.
HST 309: Tudor-Stuart Britian & Ireland (3).
This course is designed to introduce students to the "New British History," which emphasizes the importance and interactions of all four nations of the British Isles, namely England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. We will examine the economic and social, political and military, religious and cultural history of these four nations during the Tudor and Stuart periods, approximately 1485 to 1714. Among other areas of interest, we will discuss the impact of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of overseas exploration and settlement, as well as the various attempts of the dominant nation - England - to exert control over its Celtic neighbors and their various responses.
Proposed Courses (some with study abroad component):
Joyce
This class, currently in development, explores one of the most important figures in Irish literature and, indeed, in the European modernist movement more broadly. Joyce's project is an epic project, a comprehensive effort to render a culture and its values: all of his works are set in Dublin for the express purpose of investigating Irish experience in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Because Joyce was arguably the most important Irish writer who ever lived, even if he did not take up Irishness as his main topic of inquiry, he would himself constitute a large part of Irish culture. It might be said that Joyce endowed Dublin with its very value; he invented Dublin. This course will read some of the central works by Joyce and end with a two-three week visit to Ireland.
“Colonial” Ireland?
This course will consider the debated question of whether Ireland “counts” as a colony. By reading literature from various time periods that engages with this question, either to reject or to confirm it, as well as historical texts that debate and argue Ireland’s problematic and sometimes complicit relationship with England, we will explore what it means to be a colony and whether Ireland should rightly be labeled as a former victim of imperialism. Course readings will include work by Burke; Spenser; Swift; Doyle; and Bowen, among others, as well as a guest lecture by historians both for and against the theory of Irish colonialism.
Nineteenth-Century English and Irish Women Writers
This course explores the literatures written by English and Irish women in the nineteenth century, including Emily Lawless, Sydney Owenson, and Somerville and Ross from the Irish tradition and Charlotte Brönte and Jane Austen from the English canon. We will not necessarily seek or define neat parallels or comparisons so much as explore how two cultures so closely aligned could produce such different novels and novelistic practice. This course may end with a two week trip to England and/or Ireland to visit sites that influenced the authors’ composition, such as the Burren in Ireland and Chawton in England.
