Irish culture 2013-14

Dr. Aidan O’Malley, visiting lecturer
Subject: Modern literature
Course title: Irish culture
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester
Status: elective
Course type: lectures, seminars
Prerequisites: enrolment in 3rd / 5th semester
Course requirements: regular attendance and active participation in discussion; class presentation, to be developed into a 1500-2000 word essay; mid-term and end of term written exam.
Course description: This course provides an overview of Irish history, politics, literature and culture more generally, with the focus on the period from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Particular attention is paid to the intersections of political and cultural impulses that led to the creation of the two states in the twentieth century—the Republic and Northern Ireland—and to understanding how both subsequently operated as states. To do this, the course explores how ideas of what constituted Irish identity have been proposed, have come to assume hegemonic force, have been debated and resisted through political and cultural activities, as well as through modes of historical interpretation.
Objective: The course intends to further students’ skills in understanding how literary and other cultural texts interact with political and historical events. To this end, students will be introduced to some of the major texts in twentieth-century Irish literature and history. They will also be introduced to some of the major debates in Irish Studies such as postcolonialism, revisionism and nationalism.

Syllabus:
Week 1: Locating Ireland
Lecture: Overview of Irish history and culture up to the 19th century
Seminar: Images and ideas of Ireland
Week 2: Colonialism and Nationalism
Lecture: 19th-century Irish nationalism
Seminar: Celticism and cultural nationalism; readings from Renan and Arnold

Week 3: The Literary Revival
Lecture: The Revival and the founding of the Abbey Theatre
Seminar: W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand

Week 4: The Myth of the West
Lecture: The role of the west in the Irish imagination
Seminar: J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

Week 5: The Founding of the Free State
Lecture: 1916; The War of Independence; The Civil War
Seminar: Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock

Week 6: The Creation of Northern Ireland
Lecture: Unionism; World War II; The founding of Northern Ireland
Seminar: Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
Week 7: The de Valera Years
Lecture: The cultural and social life of the Free State
Mid-term exam

Week 8: Being Irish in English
Lecture: The creation of an Irish identity in English
Seminar: Michael Hartnett, ‘A Farewell to English’
Week 9: John McGahern, Amongst Women
Lecture: Amongst Women: Capturing the dynamics of mid-20th century rural Irish life
Seminar: Documentary, John McGahern: A Private World

Week 10: Gender in Ireland
Lecture: Women and gender in the Republic and Northern Ireland
Seminar: Eavan Boland, selected poems and sections from Object Lessons

Week 11: The Northern Irish ‘Troubles’
Lecture: The history of the ‘Troubles’
Seminar: Film, Paul Greengrass, dir., Bloody Sunday

Week 12: The Artistic Response to the ‘Troubles’

Lecture: The Northern Irish literary ‘renaissance’
Seminar: Selected poems from Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon

Week 13: Ireland and the World
Lecture: Emigration; Immigration; the EU
Seminar: Daniel O’Hara, dir. Yu Ming is ainm dom; Roddy Doyle, ‘The Pram’, from The Deportees and Other Stories

Week 14: Irish Music
Lecture: From Carolan to boy bands
Seminar: Joe Cleary, ‘The Pogues and the Spirit of Capitalism’; Moynagh Sullivan ‘Boyz to Men: Irish Boy Bands and Mothering the Nation’
Week 15: Representing Ireland
Lecture: Historiographical debates
Seminar: Roy Foster, ‘The Problems of Writing Irish History’; Joe Cleary, ‘Irish Studies, Colonial Questions: Locating Ireland in the Colonial World’ End of term exam

Required reading:
W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock
Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
John McGahern, Amongst Women
Other texts listed in the syllabus will be available for photocopying as a Reader.

Optional references:
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols. I-V, (Derry and Cork: Field Day and Cork University Press, 1991 and 2002)
Irish University Review, vol. 33, no. 1, (2003), ‘New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival’
Irish University Review, 35: 1 Spring/Summer 2005, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17:1, July 1991, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Irish Review, 4, Spring 1988, (Nationalism and Revisionism Symposium)
Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster: New Updated Edition, (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2001)
George D. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 3rd ed., (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, XXVI: 104, November 1989, pp. 329-351
Ciaran Brady, (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938-1994, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994)
Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: from Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972)
Terence Brown, (ed.), Celticism, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)
Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985, (London: Fontana, 1985)
Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
Clare Carroll and Patricia King, (eds.), Ireland and Post-Colonial Theory, (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002)
Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, (London and New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001)
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, (London: Penguin, 1988)
Roy Foster, ‘The Problems of Writing Irish History’, History Today, 34: 1, January 1984, pp. 27-30.
Roy Foster, ‘‘We Are All Revisionists Now’’, The Irish Review, 1, 1986, pp. 1-5.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996)
Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Nationalism, 1890-1916, (Oxford University Press, 2002)
David Lloyd, Ireland After History, (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999)
F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, 3rd ed., (London and Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press, 1993)
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992, (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2000)
W. J. McCormack, (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
John McGahern, Memoir, (London: Faber, 2006)
Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: A Mirror up to Nation, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997)
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness, (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994)
William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, A Study of an Ideological Movement, (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972)