Modern Irish Literature

Language, that most innocent and spontaneous of common currencies, is in reality a terrain scarred, fissured and divided by the cataclysms of political history, strewn with the relics of imperialist, nationalist, regionalist and class combat.... Literature is an agent as well as effect of such struggles, a crucial mechanism by which the language and ideology of an imperialist class or region preserves and perpetuates at the ideological level an historical identity shattered or eroded at the political. It is also a zone in which such struggles achieve stabilization in which the contradictory political unity of imperial and indigenous, dominant and subordinate social classes is articulated and reproduced in the contradictory unity of a "common language" itself.
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus in Joyce, Ulysses (1920) 2.377

This course is concerned with Modern Irish literature as the politically articulate inscription of complex and multiple intersections of history, class and culture. Indeed, Irish history locates the modern Irish state in the political fact of appropriation by the Tudor kings in the 1600's, from which ensues those complicated doublings -- English and Irish, Anglo-Irish and Celt, landowner and tenant, colonialist and colonized, "West Briton" and insurrectionist -- negotiated in that literature. We will want to consider that achievement of identity both in terms of its figurative expression, that is, what tropes or figures can be considered intrinsically Irish, albeit expressed in an/Other language, as well as for its inscription of the cultural and political in contested and engaged identities.

The course will have three principle foci: the emergence of an Irish literature written in English in the late 18th c. against the background of a late-flourishing Gaelic or Irish literature; the various nationalisms proposed and critiqued in Yeats, Synge, and Joyce; and latterly, modern and contemporary Irish poetry and prose for its various recursions to and departures from a postcolonial mind.

Texts:
Selections from Irish poetry in translation from the 17th & 18th centuries
Swift: The Drapier's Letters, "A Modest Proposal"
Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent
Yeats: The Tower
Synge: The Aran Islands; The Playboy of the Western World
Joyce: "The Dead", Dubliners; Chapter 1: Ulysses
Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman
Beckett: Endgame
Seamus Heaney: Field Work
Poetry of Kinsella, Grennan,, Mahon, Boland, and ni Dhomhnaill
Brian Friel: Translations

Requirements: 2 essays (6-8 pp.) and a final exam
*This course fulfills the Social Justice requirement.