Negotiating Identities: Aspects of Twentieth-Century Irish Writing

Course code:  EN464

This course provides an introduction to twentieth-century Irish writing and considers how writers in Irish and English have participated in the negotiation of modern and contemporary Irish identities. Beginning with the literary and cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the course will investigate the ways in which writers were actively involved in the formation and reformation of identities in terms of nation-building, language and gender. The politics and practice of translation will be a key issue throughout the course. Through a close reading of selected poetry, drama, fiction and film, it will provide insights into the ways in which writers have imagined and re-imagined Ireland and Irishness throughout  the twentieth century.

The Irish language material included in this course will be studied in translation.

Course Weekly Outline:

Week 1: The Irish Revival: literary production and cultural nationalism. Pádraic   Mac Piaras, Mise Éire’, ’Renunciation’, ’Íosagán’, and Pádraic Ó’Conaire, ’The Woman at the Window’.

Week 2: Whose Identities?: The Literary Revival and Cultural Production, A National Theatre? WB Yeats, Cathleen Ní Houlihan, JM Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen, and extracts from ’On National Culture’, Frantz Fanon, and Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said.

Week 3: A Vanishing World: Tomás Ó’ Criomhthain’s The Islandman.

Week 4: Spiritual Hungers: The Native Intellectual Writes Ireland. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger  and Seán Ó’Faoláin, ’This is Your Magazine’(from The Bell).

Week 5: The War Years: Máirtín Ó Direáin.

Week 6: 1950s - Society and Sexuality. Edna O’Brien , The Country Girls,  John McGahern Amongst Women (extracts) and ’Introduction’, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir.

Week 7:  Challenging the moral consensus:  The poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Seán Ó Riordáin.

Week 8: Gendered Spaces and Archaeologies of Knowledge: Seamus Heaney, North (selected poems), ’Frontiers of Writing’, and Eavan Boland selected poems and ’The Irish Woman Poet: Her Place in Irish Literature’.

Week 9: Contemporary Poetry in Irish: Nuala Ní Dhomnaill.

Week 10: The Politics of Language and Translation: Brian Friel, Translations, John Montague, ’A Severed Head’, Thomas Kinsella ’The Divided Mind’ and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill ’Traductio ad absurdum’.

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