Reading the Irish City

(5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What has become known as the ‘spatial turn' in the humanities has alerted us to the ways in which the spaces we inhabit are produced by culture. These seminars take as their starting point the premise that Irish writing since the end of the nineteenth century (the massive exception of Joyce not withstanding) has defined itself predominantly in terms of versions of the pastoral, and this in turn has had implications for the ways in which it has been possible to write the city as an Irish space. The central avenue in this module runs through the question of how literature produces space, and how this occurs differently across literary forms (fiction, poetry, drama). However, there will be diversions down side-streets to encounter writing and memory, the flaneur, psychogeography, modernity and the mediations of culture. There will be glances at visual culture, as well as excursions into history and architecture, all with a view to sketching an outline map of the Irish city in literature. The course will visit some of the following places: Dublin and its history and inhabitants, Belfast and the Troubles, Cork and the Munster region, Galway and the West, the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, crime in the modern Irish city, the urban/rural divide in Ireland, community and the (discontented) family in the modern Irish city.