THIRD YEAR ENGLISH

Late seminar registration for 3BA students will take place on Thursday, January 17th, from 12noon to 1pm in TB306, Tower 2. 

A late registration fee of €5 applies.

This course will introduce and explore two major cultural periodisations of the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. While emphasis will be on readings of literature in English, the wider geographical and cultural contexts will be discussed and parallel developments in other arts (including visual arts and architecture) will be explored.

Lecturers: Prof. Sean Ryder

Texts:

Peter Brooker, Modernism/Postmodernism (Longmans)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford paperback)

Other texts will be made available on Blackboard: selected poems, fiction and visual art

Time:  Monday 4-5 O’Flaherty Theatre and Friday 1-2  AM150 O’Tnuathail Theatre

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (20%)  and End-of-Semester Examination (80%) 

OR

This course is divided into two sections: the first half of the semester will explore contemporary world literature, and the second half will focus specifically on the literature of contemporary Ireland. We will examine contemporary narrative strategies and the relationships between story-telling, memory, history and the self. We will consider how to approach the study of fiction that has little or no literary history, and make use of key critical approaches, literary criticism and literary reviews. We will focus on issues relating to genre, style and composition – and debates that we see as shaping our own world will emerge from the texts themselves, e.g. around national and individual identity, gender, community and the family, journeys, loss, conflict, repression and moral guilt.

Texts: 

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

John Banville, The Book of Evidence (1989)

Patrick McCabe, The Dead School (1995)

John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002)

Claire Keegan, Foster (2010)

Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island (2012)

Lecturers: Prof. Richard Pearson and Dr. John Kenny 

Time: Tuesday 5-6 IT250, IT Building and Thursday 11-12 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (20%) and End-of-Semester Examination (80%)

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This course investigates selected British Victorian prose, poetry, fiction, and drama, considering the ways in which Victorian writers offered different versions of national identity in response to political, cultural and intellectual transitions in the period. It discusses how class conflict, gendered ideologies, religious controversy, scientific discoveries and imperial ambitions shaped (and were in turn shaped by) the literature of the period. Texts will include selections from the following authors: Dickens, Gaskell, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Browning, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Carlyle, Kipling, Conrad.

Students wishing to read ahead should begin with Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton.

Lecturers: Dr. Elizabeth Tilley

Texts:

Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume E, The Victorian Age (New York and London, 2012).

(Available in the Book Store. Make sure you purchase the right volume).

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

Time:   Wednesday 9-10 AM150 - Mairtin O Tnuthail Theatre and Wednesday 2-3 IT250

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (20%)  and End-of-Semester Examination (80%)

OR

The American section of the course focuses upon poetry, fiction and non-fiction from the mid-nineteenth century with an emphasis on the way in which American writers are constructing a national literature and a national history, engaging with contemporary reform movements, such as abolitionism and women's rights, and investigating religious belief. Texts include selections from Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Dickinson, Douglass .

Lecturers: Prof. Sean Ryder and Dr. Julia Carlson

Texts:
Norton Anthology of American Literature: Eighth Edition, Volume B
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin edition)

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (20%) and End-of-Semester Examination (80%) 

This course studies the cultural movement known as Romanticism, an important period of innovation in literary history.  It will be a survey course that examines major figures in the movement, c. 1790-1830, including the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley.  In addition to poetry, we will read prose, fiction and satire; lectures will also explore visual and popular culture. Some recurrent themes that will be analysed include revolutions (political and industrial), imperialism, class and gender.

Texts:

Stephen Greenblatt et al, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Romantic Period, Volume D (2012)
Ann Radcliffe,  A Sicilian Romance (1790)
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)

Lectures: Dr. Tim Keane, Professor Sean Ryder and Dr. Elizabeth Tilley

Time:  Tuesday 5-6 UC102 Aras Ui Chathail and Wednesday 9-10 UC102, Aras Ui Chathail    

Assessment: Mid-term assessment (20%) and End-of-Semester examination (80%)

OR  

This course is an introduction to some of the key elements of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century dramatic writing, dramaturgy and theatre history. We pay special attention to the ways in which meanings are produced by theatre, through acting and directional practice, and to the various ways in which the theatre functions as a social institution.  Naturalistic, modernist and postmodernist forms of theatre are considered in relation to a number of case studies.

Texts:
Students must read the following ten plays:

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (Nick Hern)
Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (Samuel French)
Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters In Search of An Author (Nick Hern)
Sophie Treadwell, Machinal  (Nick Hern)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Faber and Faber)Bertolt Brecht Life of Galileo (Methuen)
Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (Faber and Faber)
Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Suzan Lori-Parks, The America Play and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group)

Lecturers: Dr Charlotte McIvor and Dr Lionel Pilkington 

Time: Tuesday 5-6 AM250 Colm O'hEocha Theatre and Wednesday 9-10 IT250 IT Building  

Assessment: Assessment will be by essay and examination. Students will be assessed on their knowledge of all of the texts on the course.Mid-term Assessment (20%) and End-Of-Semester Examination (80%)

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Section 1: Moore and Yeats:
This half of the lecture course will focus on two major authors of the Irish revival, one a prose writer, the other a poet, who were friends, and later enemies, who left satirical portraits of one another.  Readings will include several works by each.  There will be a midterm and final assessment.

Section 2: Yeats and Joyce
This half of the lecture course will consider the later work of W. B. Yeats and the prose of James Joyce. As literary figures they had mutual respect but divergent paths: the course thus charts the movement towards the making of very different modernisms in writers who were both, in their own ways, last romantics who reformed. Their varying responses to politics and aesthetics are explored in works that remake ideas of form, nation, and voice. 

Texts: 

Section 1:
W. B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford's World Classics), ed. Ed Larissy
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (Dodo Press, or online text)
George Moore, The Untilled Field (Colin Smythe)

Section 2:
W. B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford's World Classics), ed. Ed Larissy             
James Joyce, Dubliners
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Lecturers: Prof Adrian Frazier & Dr Adrian Paterson

Time: Wednesday 2-3 IT250 IT Building and Friday 9-10 AM250 Colm O'hEocha Theatre 

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment(20%)  and End-of-Semester Examination  (80%)

OR

This course introduces students to some of the major Irish writers of the twentieth century, focusing on the fiction of James Joyce and modern Irish drama from W.B Yeats to Marina Carr. During the semester, we will consider how these writers sought to imagine new visions of Ireland, both for the world and for the country itself. We will address the many creative tensions in their writings: between tradition and modernity, patriotism and nationalism, high art and popular culture, the Irish and English languages, and so on. A major feature of the course will be the discussion of key episodes from Joyce’s Ulysses, but we will also read some of his short stories from Dubliners. We also map the movement in Irish drama from the creation of the National Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, in 1904 to the present day. Plays by Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brian Friel and Marina Carr introduce students to the social, political, and cultural tensions, complexities and motives inherent in the making of Irish theatre during the Celtic Revival, the Irish Republic, the Troubles and Celtic Tiger Ireland. By the end of the course, students will possess knowledge of the modern tradition of Irish writing and its relationship with Irish society, politics, and culture throughout the twentieth century.

Texts:
Required
James Joyce: Ulysses (Penguin)
James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford World’s Classics)
John Harrington (ed), Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama (Norton)
Recommended
Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book.

Note: Students are urged only to buy the editions mentioned above, as cheaper editions often contain uncorrected errors that will impede your appreciation and understanding of the text.

Time: Monday 4-5 O’Flaherty Theatre and Friday 1-2 Cairnes Theatre

Lecturers: Drs Patrick Lonergan and Miriam Haughton

Time: Monday 4-5 O’Flaherty Theatre and Friday 1-2 Cairnes Theatre    

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (20%) and End-of-Semester Examination (80%) 

EN399 Extended Essay

Deadline for application to EN399: December 2012 

Admission to the course depends upon the preparation and submission of an adequate proposal by email to Dr Elizabeth Tilley at elizabeth.tilleynuigalway.ie.  Please click  here for guidelines on submitting a proposal.  Please click here for the Extended Essay form.     

Lecturer: Dr. Elizabeth Tilley

Time: Monday 11-12 TB306, Tower 2 AND Monday 12-1 TB306, Tower 2