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Irish and Irish
Immigration Studies
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The
courses listed below are courses that have been offered in Irish and
Irish Immigration Studies in the recent past, several of the courses
are routinely offered on a rotating basis in order to provide students
with a solid background in Irish culture and literature at both the
undergraduate and graduate level. For a listing of courses currently
offered in Irish and Irish Immigration Studies, click here.
English UHON 351 i/o/u: Ireland's Golden Age, AD 400-800 Professor Fanning
English
393: Special Topics in Irish Literature
Professor Fanning
No
poet has been more important to
the Irish than Robert Frost. His versions of pastoral early and late
have
provided for three generations of Irish poets examples of ways in which
their
own rural/agrarian backgrounds could be used fruitfully in "modern"
verse. This seminar will first evaluate for our time Frost's body of
work, and
then explore what twentieth-century Irish nature and pastoral poetry
owes to
Frost's example. The Irish poets will be Patrick Kavanagh, John
Montague,
Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon. History
405: History of
Ireland since 1600
Professor Fanning A
survey of the history of Ireland and the Irish diaspora
since 1600. Coverage of the major events and themes in the
history of
Ireland in the modern period, with special attention to the experiences
of
emigration and immigrant destination.
English
448: Survey of Irish Literature from 400 AD
Professor Dougherty A
survey of literature of Ireland
from the present day to the early Christian era. Beginning with
contemporary
Irish poetry, short stories, and drama and extending backwards to 400,
we will
read works by such authors as Seamus Heaney, William Trevor, and Brian
Friel;
Edna O'Brien and Elizabeth Bowen; Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Synge and
O'Casey;
Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Moore; and Swift, Sheridan and Goldsmith. We
will
conclude with an examination of early Irish literature in translation.
English
448: Irish Literature of the Nineteenth Century
Professor Dougherty
Course
description: In this
course we will examine British and Irish writing of the nineteenth
century
purporting to represent Ireland and the Irish. Course
Books:
Edgeworth/Owenson, Two Irish National Tales: Castle
Rackrent/The Wild Irish Girl. ISBN:
0618084878
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.
Cary,
NC: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN:
0192835920 Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critics. Bedford Books, 2001. ISBN: 0312241704 Norman Jeffares and Peter van de Kamp. Irish Literature Nineteenth Century, volumes 1-3. Irish Academic Press, 2005-2006. ISBN:
0716533588, 0716528002,
0716528053, 0716533332, 0716533340
English 494: IRISH FILM Professor Dougherty This
course will focus on Irish film in its cultural context(s), focusing
particularly on films of the last twenty years. Films will include: Man
of
Aran, The Quiet Man, Odd Man Out, The Long Good Friday, The Field, The
Crying
Game, In the Name of the Father, Hush-A-Bye-Baby, Some Mother's Son,
The Boxer,
The Nephew, Bloody Sunday, and others. ENGLISH
555 IRISH
STUDIES
Professor Dougherty
One
scholar, Theodore Allen, has
attributed our modern understanding of the concept of race to the Irish
colonial encounter; another scholar, Robert J.C. Young, has attributed
the
modern meaning of culture to the Irish experiences of Anthony
Trollope.
Historically, then the Irish situation has produced theory as well as
being
produced by it. In this course, we will examine theories of
Ireland and
Irishness. We will begin with a discussion of the creation of the
field
of Irish Studies, then go on to examine historical theories of Irish
identity
proposed by Giraldus Cambrensis, Edmund Spenser, the Irish
antiquarians, Thomas
Carlyle, Daniel Corkery, and Matthew Arnold. We will then read
contemporary works of theory by such authors as Margot Backus,
Elizabeth
Cullingford, Stephen Howe, David Lloyd, and RF Foster, exploring issues
of
race, gender, sexuality, the body, historical revisionism, language,
and
colonialism. English
555: Irish Studies
Professor Fanning Topic:
Irish and Irish Immigration
and Ethnicity in America Interdisciplinary study of the Irish experience of diaspora from the later eighteenth century, through the Great Famine of 1845-49 and the land wars of the 1880's, to World War I and the Easter Rising of 1916. Study also of the mid-twentieth-century cultural and artistic manifestations of Irish ethnicity in the United States, with special attention to the Depression Era, 1929-1940. Sources will include documents and artifacts from history, literature, oral history, personal letters, journalism, theatre, music, radio shows, comic strips, cartoons, and the other visual arts. English
555: Irish Studies Seminar
Professor Fanning Topic:
Nineteenth-Century Irish immigration to North America, England,
Australia, and
New Zealand.
English
579: Studies in Modern Literature
Professor Dettmar Topic:
Joyce's Ulysses, Inside and
Out. In
this seminar we will devote
ourselves to a careful reading of James Joyce's epochal novel Ulysses,
reading
the book from two different "direction," if you will:
"inside-out" and "outside-in." We will carefully read the
novel itself with the aid of various interpretative tools, along the
lines of
New Critical model of "close reading": our first and most important
goal will be to read the text carefully, slowly, and communally, so
that we
feel comfortable that we have understood. At the same time, we will be
reading
Ulysses from the outside in: using a cultural studies orientation, we
will
examine the strange history of this very strange novel, exploring the
ways that
Ulysses helped to shape the literary, cultural, and educational
institutions
responsible for its dissemination. English
579: Special Topics Seminar
Professor Fanning Topic:
Irish-American and
Jewish-American Writing: Comparative Literary Ethnicity Description:
Comparative Study of
the literature of these two immigrant/ethnic cultures. Organization
and writers: Immigrant
generations/the nineteenth century: Early and less-known writers from
both
cultures, including Mary Anne Sadler, Kate Cleary, Finley Peter Dunne,
Abraham
Cahan, Mary Antin, Emma Lazarus.
English
579: Studies in Modern Literature
Professor Dettmar
Irony
has been an important force in
artistic discourse for centuries, if not millennia; it's hard to know
how one
could make any kind of sense of many of the Canterbury
Tales, for instance, without a recognition that the
storyteller's version of reality wasn't to be accepted at face value,
or
mistaken for Chaucer's own. But within our century two parallel
developments in the rhetoric of ironic discourse have combined to make
the
kinds of large-scale public misreading of irony that we see in Randy
Newman and
Amstel examples above--or in countless other contemporary examples,
from TV's The Simpsons and Beavis
and Butt-head, to problematic
literary texts like Bret Easton Ellis' American
Pyscho and Mark Leyner's Et Tu,
Babe, to the confusing, ironic career reversals of bands like
R.E.M. and
U2, to the over-the-top, "ironic" screen violence of films like Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers,
or even the Scream series. In
the late twentieth century, irony has become increasingly
covert--unmarked,
undecidable, postmodern--at the same time that it's become a
mass-market
phenomenon; and the politics of the resulting mass confusion are both
unsetttling and, to this point, only rarely considered by cultural
critics. When irony becomes a populist, and not just a coterie,
discourse, its misinterpretation has important public
ramifications. An
eighteen-year-old student who miscontrues the irony of Book IV of Gulliver's Travels in an Introduction
to Literature course is a real concern for his teacher; an important
part of
what literature teachers must do for their students is to help them see
that
even when literary texts choose to "tell all the truth," they often
choose to "tell it slant." But how much more troubling, potentially,
is the ironic use of the swastika in U2's 1995 Zoo TV tour, or
Morrissey's use
of skinhead inconigraphy during his recent shows? The "point," in
both cases, is not to praise but to bury racist and homophobic
ideology; but
how easily this critique can be mistaken for its other, especially in
the
relatively undertheorized discursive space of the stadium rock concert.
English
593: Special Topics Seminar
Professors
Fanning and Riedinger
English
593: Special Topics Seminar
Professors Fanning
and McEathron
In
his pioneering study of William
Blake, Fearful Symmetry, Northup Frye says that "there are so many
symbolic constructs in literature, ranging from Dante's Ptolemaic
universe to
Yeats' spirit-dictated Vision, that one begins to suspect that such
constructs
have something to do with the way poetry is written." This seminar will
consider the literary achievement of William Blake (1757-1827) and
Willam
Butler Yeats (1865-1939) as their bodies of work emerged from the
context of
their attempts to creat coherent cosmologies. For both, a crucial
catalyst was
the historical urgency of wholesale violence--the Napoleonic Wars for
Blake and
World War I and the Irish Revolution for Yeats. Both were multi-faceted
artrists who, in addition to their accomplishments as lyric poets,
experimented
with a variety of forms and literary genres, and both were concerned
with the
published book as artifact. We will have the opportunity to examine and
consider these artifacts--for Blake the paintings and engravings
through which
he illustrated his own poetry; for Yeats the wonderful collection of
first
editions held in Morris Library. We will examine as well Yeats' own
understanding of their shared visionary lineage, through his essays on
Blake
and his 1893 edition The Works of William Blake. There is much to
compare,
assess, and speculate upon here, to the benefit of our understanding of
both
artists.
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