ENGL 261 - Literatures of Ireland

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2013/14a: The Twentieth Century. The course will examine Irish poetry, drama, and fiction in the twentieth century, in light of the unstable location of Irish writing in English. After an introduction to Irish orature, we’ll examine the romantic return to Irish myth as a national literary resource in the late nineteenth century. The pastoral “Celtic Revival” engendered stimulated creativity and critique from its inception, fueling Ireland’s “sensational re-entrance” into metropolitan literature, as one critic called it. The first part of the course centers on this late colonial era; the second explores the literature of post-colonial (and Northern still colonial) Ireland. Issues of language, gender, religion, class, culture, race, and national origin figure into our examinations of literary issues and the peculiar position of Ireland as a European colony and of “Irish” literature in the twentieth century as both marginal and central to the British canon. Among the authors we’ll read are Synge, Yeats, Joyce, McGuckian, Heaney, Friel, and O’Brien. This course does not fulfill the Race, Gender, and Ethnicity requirement. Ms. Kane.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101  may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.