Queering Early Modern Ireland

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This class explores the nature of the early modern (sixteenth- to seventeenth-century) colonial encounter between the aggrandizing English state and the adjacent Irish polity through the lens of Irish and English poetry and prose, asking how older Gaelic power relations and sociocultural forms were altered (queered) by English claims, and how Irish literati responded by challenging (queering) English authority in turn. Using feminist, postcolonial and queer theory, we will ask how we can make sense of the forms of relation operative prior to and as transformed by the colonial encounter, particularly in the male homosocial bonds described by Eve Sedgwick, which become queered (troubled, stigmatized, rendered illegitimate), as Alan Bray and Jonathan Goldberg have argued in an English and New World context, when they threaten extant power relations. We will also take up longstanding areas of debate regarding the characteristics of this colonial encounter, the degree to which comparisons are useful or apt, the nature of the so-called bardic mentalité, and, if we're feeling cocky, the modern. My own particular topics of interest include poet-patron relations, the imposition of English law, and native mechanisms of legitimation; others will emerge as we read a variety of texts together. That reading will include bardic professional poetry, state papers, annals, settler-colonial and administrative screeds, English poetry, maps, and works of history and literary criticism. While you need not know any Irish (Gaelic) to take this course, you should be prepared to conjoin history and theory, poetry and politics, through historicized close reading while working across genres to produce original criticism in the form of several papers whose topics you will develop yourself. The course should satisfy the literature requirement and count toward the IRLL minor and major.