Course Description:
This senior seminar will explore both the literal revival of Celtic literature in the late 19th- and early 20th-century, and the more general renaissance in Irish literature that accompanies the emergence of Yeats, the Irish National Theatre, and the accomplishment of Joyce. We will devote specific attention to the cultural and literary significance of Ancient and Medieval Celtic sagas, myths, and legends to the development of a modern Irish literary aesthetic, 20th-century Irish political movements, and the resurgence of the Irish female author. This course will draw on material covered in a variety of English courses, including ENG 213 and 214 as well as theories of postcoloniality covered in ENG 335 and 345. In addition, we will need to consider issues of linguistics as we study the influence of English colonialism on the language, narratives, and culture of Ireland. Students will conduct historical, cultural, and literary research in both their essays and their oral presentations. Such research will invite students to consider how literary texts participate in and respond to cross-cultural and transnational events in the early twentieth century, but writing and presentation assignments will also encourage students to evaluate the relevance of early Irish literature to the Celtic Revival

Course Requirements:

• Attendance: This is an essential element of this course. Any student who is absent more that 6 times will receive an automatic failing grade.
• As this is an undergraduate seminar, student participation is a vital part of your work in this class. You will be expected to participate daily and consistently engage the readings intelligently. To participate effectively, you must come to class prepared to discuss the assigned reading. It is fairly easy to tell when students are trying to participate without having completed the reading—this will not improve your participation grade. Your participation is worth 10% of your final grade
• You will write a take-home midterm and final exam. Each exam will invite you to respond to one rather elastic question by developing an intelligent argument based upon readings of specific literary and cultural texts. I will disseminate this question at least a weak prior to the due date. Each exam is worth 20% of your final grade.
• You will have the opportunity to develop an extensive critical argument in writing with the seminar project. This project is somewhat amorphous, and I am open to creative options. The project must demonstrate three skills: a high level of critical research, the effective use of critical theory, and writing appropriate to a 400-level English class. While page lengths are not important to me, think of this project as a 10-15 page project. Your final project is worth 30% of your grade
• Students will be responsible for one oral report in which they will lead the class in a discussion of specific literary text. This presentation will occur between weeks 6-15 and will require students to conduct critical research, present a bibliography, generate and presentation handout or précis, and direct the discussion of a specific text. Your presentation on the literary text should not exceed 15 minutes. This presentation will count for 10% of your final grade.
• Students will be responsible for one group “project.” This assignment is somewhat of a report, but really more of an encyclopedic research project in which students will work with one other member of the seminar to generate research and information about specific concerns of our class. Five of these “projects” will cover the first five chapters of Foster’s Oxford History of Ireland. Please see the list of topics at the end of the syllabus. These “projects” are intended to be encyclopedic in nature; i.e. I want you to think of these “projects” as your opportunity to fill the seminar in on some information that we all need to better understand our work. You will be required to generate a handout and a bibliography that cannot exceed two double-sided pages. Your group project will count for 10% of your final grade.

Grading Scale:
A 100-92 %
B 91-83 %
C 82-72 %
D 71-66 %
F 65- %

Required Texts:
Bowen, The Last September
Finneran, ed. The Yeats Reader
Foster, The Oxford History of Ireland
Gantz, ed., Early Irish Myths and Sagas
Harrington, ed., Modern Irish Drama
Joyce, Portable James Joyce
Lavin, In a Café
O’Brien, Mother Ireland

Course Calendar

*Electronic Reserve readings that are bolded are required; unbolded readings are recommended.

Week 1

• Early Irish Myths and Sagas: “The Wooing of Étain,” “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” “The Dream of Óengus,” “The Cattle Raid of Fróec,” ‘The Labor Pains of the Ulaid and the Twins of Macha”
• Electronic Reserve: Gilles Deleuze, “Minor Literature: Kafka,” Gilles Deleuze, “Language: Major and Minor,” Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”

Week 2

• Early Irish Myths and Sagas: “The Birth of Cú Chulaind,” “The Boyhood Deeds of Cú Chulaind,” “The Death of Aife’s Only Son,” “The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind and the Only Jealousy of Emer”
• Electronic Reserve: Hannah Arendt, “The Public and the Private Realm,” John Dewey,” The Search for the Great Community,” Sigmund Freud, “from Civilization and Its Discontents”

Week 3

• The Oxford History of Ireland
• Electronic Reserve: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Terry Eagleton, “from Heathcliff and the Great Hunger—ch. 1, “Heathcliff and the Great Hunger”
• Group Projects:
  • Donnchadh ó Corráin, “Prehistoric and Early Christian Irealnd”
  • Katharine Simms, “The Norman Invasion and the Gaelic Recovery”
  • Nicholas Canny, “Early Modern Ireland, c. 1500-1700”
  • R.F. Foster, “Ascendancy and Union”
  • David Fitzpatrick, “Ireland Since 1870”

Week 4

• Modern Irish Drama: Lady Gregory, Spreading the News, Lady Gregory, The Rising of the Moon, Lady Gregory, “Our Irish National Theatre,” Ernest Boyd, “The Dramatic Movement,” Ann Saddlemyer, “Image-Maker for Ireland: Augusta, Lady Gregory”
• Electronic Reserve: Raymond Williams, “The Masses,” Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere”
• Group Projects:
  • The Irish National Theatre
  • The Easter 1916 Rebellion
  • Young Ireland Movement

Week 5

• Modern Irish Drama: W.B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand, W.B. Yeats, “An Irish National Theatre,” David Krause, “The Hagiography of Cathleen Ni Houlihan”
• The Yeats Reader: “The Reform of the Theatre,” “The Tragic Theatre”
• Electronic Reserve: Benedetto Croce, “Liberty and Revolution,” Adolf Hitler, “Nation and Race,” Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Capital”

Week 6

• Modern Irish Drama: John Middleton Synge, Riders to the Sea, Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, J.M. Synge, “Preface to The Playboy of the Western World, W.B. Yeats, “Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints,” W.B. Yeats, “The Controversy over The Playboy of the Western World”
• The Yeats Reader: “On Those that hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ 1907”
• Electronic Reserve: Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence”

Week 7

• The Yeats Reader: “The Falling of the Leaves,” “Ephemera,” “The Stolen Child,” “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “The Rose of the World,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Sorrow of Love,” “When You are Old,” “The White Birds,” “The Man who dreamed of Faeryland,” “The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “He remembers forgotten Beauty,” “The Arrow,” “The Folly of being Comforted,” “Never give all the Heart,” “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland,” The Old Men admiring Themselves in the Water,” “O do not Love Too Long,” “What is Popular Poetry,” “William Blake and the Imagination,” “The Symbolism of Poetry,” “Ireland and the Arts,” “The Adoration of the Magi,” “A Woman Homer sung,” “Words,” “No Second Troy,” “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” “A Drinking Song,” “The Coming of Wisdom with Time,” “On hearing that the Students of our New University have joined the Agitation against Immoral Literature,” “To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine,” “The Mask,” “All things can tempt me,” “September 1913,” “To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing,” “When Helen lived,” “Beggar to Beggar cried,” “To a Child dancing in the Wind,” “Two Years Later,” “A Memory of Youth,” “That the Night come,” “The Magi,” “A Coat”
• Electronic Reserve: Jacques Derrida, “from Plato’s Pharmacy”
• Hand out Midterm Exam

Week 8

• The Yeats Reader: “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” “Men Improve with the Years,” “The Living Beauty,” “The Scholars,” “On Woman,” “The Fisherman,” “Memory,” “The People,” “Broken Dreams,” “A Deep-sworn Vow,” “The Balloon of the Mind,” “On being asked for a War Poem,” “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” “Easter, 1916,” “Sixteen Dead Men,” “The Rose Tree,” “On a Political Prisoner,” “The Second Coming,” “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Sailing to Byzantium, “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “A Prayer for my Son,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “All Souls’ Night,” “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” “Coole Park, 1929,” “The Choice,” “Byzantium,” “Crazy Jane and the Bishop,” “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” “Her Anxiety,” “A Last Confession,” “Parnell’s Funeral,” “A Prayer for Old Age,” “The Four Ages of Man,” “The Gyres,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “Imitated from the Japanese,” “What Then?,” “Beautiful Lofty Things,” ‘Come Gather Round Me Parnellites,” “The Great Day,” “Parnell,” “The Spur,” “Are You Content,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “Cuchulain Comforted,” “High Talk,” “Politics,” from The Trembling of the Veil, from A Vision
• Electronic Reserve: Jacques Derrida, “Differance”

Week 9

• The Portable James Joyce: Dubliners
• Electronic Reserve: Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” Hannah Arendt, “War and Revolution”
• Midterm Exam Due

Week 10

• The Portable James Joyce: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
• Electronic Reserve: Stuart Hall, “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference”

Week 11

• The Portable James Joyce: from Ulysses, from Finnegan’s Wake
• Electronic Reserve: Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” Terry Eagleton, “from Heathcliff and the Great Hunger—ch. 7, “The Archaic Avant-Garde”

Week 12

• Modern Irish Drama: Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, John P. Harrington, “The Irish Beckett”
• Handouts: Samuel Beckett, Endgame, Happy Days
• Electronic Reserve: Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” “Martin Buber, “In the Midst of Crisis,” Raymond Williams, “Tragedy and Revolution”

Week 13

• Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
• Electronic Reserve: Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Anne McClintock, “’No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” Daniel Bell, “from The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”

Week 14

• Mary Lavin, In a Café: Selected Stories
• Electronic Reserve: Jean-Francois Lyotard, from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak”
• Seminar Project Due
• Hand out Final Exam

Week 15

• Edna O’brien, Mother Ireland
• Electronic Reserve: Homi K. Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern”

Final Exam Due Thursday, December 9th, at 4pm in my office