Readings in Irish Culture

(2.5,3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

IRST 20030 at UCD. Popular culture in Ireland, and the representation of Ireland and Irishness in popular culture, are crucial to an understanding of the transformation of `Ireland' and `Irishness' between the colonial past to the globalized present. From Joyce's ambivalent engagement with the colonial popular entertainments of music hall and pantomime in Ulysses to Anne Enright's satirical portraits of the globalized culture industry and Cathal Ó Searcaigh's explorations of conflicts between a Western queer identity and the Gaelic linguistic and cultural heritage, Irish literature has had a complex relationship with the cultural, political and aesthetic encounters between `local' and `global' popular and sub-culture. This `inbetweenness', where `tradition' and `modernity' conflict with, comment upon, and revise each other, is evident in both the form and the content of many Irish literary texts; it is likewise a preoccupation for contemporary Irish cultural criticism and theory. Paying attention to issues of postcoloniality, globalization, class, sexuality, gender, race, diaspora and location, in this course we will explore the ways in which a range of literary and cultural texts diagnose, exemplify, engage with, and reimagine the intersections of `tradition', `modernity', and the `popular'.