Please click  HERE   for the 2BA Semester 1 Reading List for 2012-13.                                                                    

Chaucer wrote his famous Canterbury Tales in the 1370s and 1380s and this last great work of his is one of the most exciting and varied in the English language. Obscenity and profanity jostle with piety as twenty-three characters tell tales of fornication, magic, war, love, philosophy, religious devotion and virtue.

The fourteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a striking example of the genre of medieval Arthurian romance. Chivalric worth, testing, temptation, religious devotion, games and nature are among the themes which permeate this tale of one knight’s quest to uphold the honour and integrity of the Round Table.

In this course you will read two great works of the fourteenth century:

·         Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

·         Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (author’s name unknown)

Lecturers: Dr. Cliodhna Carney and Dr. Dermot Burns  

Texts: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue, ed. Glending Olson, 2nd edition (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2005).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, W. R. J. Barron, ed., revised edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)

Venues:  Monday 5-6 O'Flaherty Theatre and Tuesday 3-4 Kirwan Theatre

Assessment: End-of-Semester Assessment: two essays, each worth 50% 

OR

This course is an introduction to the earliest literature in English, in both translation and its original language.  Students will be given some basic instruction in Old English, and will approach texts in both the original language and in translation.  We shall examine style, function and effect, as well as some of the major themes including heroism, Christianity, exile, and mutability.

Lecturers:  Dr. Frances McCormack

Texts: 

Carole Hough and John Corbett, Beginning Old English (Palgrave, 2007);

Michael Alexander (ed), The Earliest English Poems (Penguin,  2006);

Venues:   Monday 5-6pm AM250 Colm O'hEocha Theatre and Tuesday 3-4 IT250 IT Building 

Assessment: End-of-Semester Assessment: two essays, each worth 50%  

Section 1: Jonathan Swift and his Circle  

This section will examine the career of the Anglo-Irish poet and satirist, Jonathan Swift. It will examine Swift's poetry and prose in order to focus on the satirical mode, questions of identity and patriotism, the representation of women, and the social contexts for writing in early eighteenth-century Dublin. Texts will include: Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, The Drapier's Letters, selected poetry by Swift and his Dublin circle.

Section 2: From Satire to Sensibility

This section will examine the ’rise of the novel’ and the literature of feeling in the eighteenth century. It will discuss the transformation of satire by eighteenth-century sentimental literature, and the ways in which early novels represent individual identity, gender, morality, and sexuality. Texts will include The Rape of the Lock, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, selections from Richardson’s Pamela, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.

Lecturers:  Dr. Rebecca Anne Barr and Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan

Texts:   

Section 1:

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; Jonathan Swift, Major Works (Oxford World's Classics); course handbook

Section 2:

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton edition); Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Oxford World's Classics);

Course handbook (’ The Rape of Lock’ and ’ Oroonoko’ will both be in the course handbook, so students will not have to buy these texts)

Assessment:  End-of-Semester Assessment: two essays, each worth 50% 

OR

Section 1:  Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Lyric

This course will focus on a number of great lyric poems written between 1580 and 1700, with an emphasis on the sonnet.  Poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Marvell will be included.

Section 2: Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

This section will examine the genre of social realist and naturalist fiction in the nineteenth century, and consider how writers chose to represent a rapidly changing world and what kind of new realities they perceived. We will analyse realist narrative strategies such as narrative voice and point of view; thematic contexts such as art, science and evolution, sociology, and psychology; the politics of texts in relation to gender and class issues.  

Lecturers:  Prof. Adrian Frazier and Prof. Richard Pearson 

Texts: 

Section 1

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1 OR Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edn Vol B, The Sixteenth Century/The Early Seventeenth Century

Section 2

Elizabeth Gaskell, ’ Lizzie Leigh’ (available online);

George Eliot, Silas Marner (OUP);

Émile Zola, ’The Flood’ (available online);

Émile Zola, Thérése Raquin, transl. Robin Buss (Penguin);

Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean, transl. Julie Mead (OUP)

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (OUP)

Assessment: End-of-Semester Assessment: two essays, each worth 50% 

This course will offer an historical introduction to the variety of writing produced during the English Renaissance, covering dramatic, prose and poetic genres. Section A will focus on key themes relating to humanism and the Protestant Reformation as the basis for discussion of debates about utopian writing, the life of action versus contemplation, politics and public service, representations of women and femininity, and attitudes to love, death and religion. Section B will focus on drama, specifically on the evolution of Renaissance tragedy.

Lecturers: Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan (Section A) and Prof. Hubert McDermott (Section B)

Texts:
Section A
Thomas More, Utopia
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World

Poetry (available in course handbook) by John Donne, George Herbert, Henry King, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Locke, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Katherine Philips

Section B
Sackville and Norton, Gorboduc                                 
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare, King Lear
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Venues: Monday 5-6 AM250 and Tuesday 3-4 UC102 Theatre, Aras Ui Chathail  

Assessment:  End-of-Semester Assessment: two essays, each worth 50%