Irish Lit

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Revolution and Independence; Colonization and Decolonization; Nationalism and Disillusion; Development and Underdevelopment—the history of Ireland in the twentieth century is the history of the world writ small. Irish literature of the twentieth century has, not coincidentally, played a central part in the global library, and in this course we will engage with the complex interactions between politics and aesthetics that produced a rich tradition of writing in Ireland. This will be a survey course, covering the best of Irish writing from 1900 to the present. The course will cover prose, poetry and drama, giving a sense of the full range of literary production across genres. Authors will include W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, James Joyce, J.M. Synge, Seamus Heaney and others. Our approach to the literature will be broadly postcolonial, and guided by the pairs of abstract nouns above, which is to say that we will be thinking about how Irish literature in the twentieth century responds to the global legacy of colonialism. While the course title and reading list gesture towards the nation, we will venture into this material remembering always that the frame of the nation, which has so often defined how we organize courses in literature, might not always be sufficient or appropriate. We will look with a skeptical eye on nation and nationalism