THIRD YEAR ENGLISH

Seminar Registration for Semester 2 is now closed.  Students who have not yet submitted their form must attend LATE REGISTRATION on Wednesday, 18th Janurary from 10.00-11.00am in TB306, Tower 2. Seminar forms will be available at late regsistration.

NOTE: Course outlines will  NOT be printed in Semester 2. It is the responsiblilty of each student to obtain this information from the website.

Romanticism represents one of the most important periods of innovation in literary history. This course examines major figures in the movement, c. 1790-1820, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley, and critics and satirists such as Thomas Love Peacock and Jane Austen. The Romantics challenged inherited orthodoxies of subject matter and style in poetry and prose, emphasizing the value of imagination and the sublime, childhood, superstition, and taboo subjects of sexuality and violence. 

Lecturers: Dr. Daniel Carey and Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide

Texts: Course Reader:  Includes selected writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats, John Clare, and lesser-known writers, as well as extracts from political commentators such as Burke and Wollstonecraft. (The Course Reader will be available from Print That on Concourse)

Individual Texts:

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(These texts will be available from the College Bookshop.)

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%) 

OR

An introduction to key elements of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century dramatic writing, dramaturgy and stage history with special attention to the ways in which meanings are produced by theatre. The course also considers some aspects of acting and directorial practice (Stanislavsky and Brecht), and the different ways in which the theatre functions as a social institution. At least 6 case studies are considered.

Texts: 

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Chekhov’s The Seagull

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

Jarry’s Ubu Roi

Ionesco’s Exit the King

Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Kushner’s Angels in America (Part 1)

Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life

Lecturers: Dr. Lionel Pilkington and Dr. Irina Ruppo 
          

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%)

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The Nineteenth Century (English)

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, Wilde, Conrad.

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

Lecturers: Dr. Elizabeth Tilley and Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide

Texts:
Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume E, The Victorian Age (New York and London, 2006). (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 2-3 IT250 and Friday 9-10 AM200 Fottrell Theatre

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: Volume B (1820-1865) (7^th Rev edn)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin edition)

Time:  Wednesday 9-10 AC002 Cairnes Lecture Theatre and Friday 9-10 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre

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

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.

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

Lectures: Prof. Sean Ryder 

Time:  Tuesday 5-6 IT125g Theatre, IT Building and Wednesday 9-10 UC102, Aras Ui Chathail    

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

OR  

This course explores themes, issues and arguments relating to contemporary fiction in English. It will examine the idea of the ’contemporary’ and the issues we face in selecting and studying fiction that has little or no literary history. Novels will be studied in relation to key critical approaches and concepts and the course will focus especially on the role of the review in shaping our responses. The course will particularly consider narrative strategies and the relationships between story-telling, memory, and history. Debates that we see as shaping our own world will emerge from the texts themselves, e.g. around identity, gender, the family, journeys, loss, conflict, repression, and moral guilt.

Click HERE for course schedule & further information (lecture slides from Week 1)

Texts:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

Anne Enright, The Gathering (2007)

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2010)

Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

William Trevor, Felicia’s Journey (1994)

AS Byatt, Possession (1990)

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (2005)

Lecturers: Dr. Sinead Mooney and Prof Richard Pearson

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

Assessment: 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 and 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 the three major writers of the Irish literary renaissance: James Joyce, W.B Yeats, and J.M. Synge. During the semester, we will consider how these writers sought to imagine new visions of Ireland, both to the world and to 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 will survey the poetic career of W.B Yeats, and will explore Synge’s plays.

Texts: 

Required

James Joyce: Ulysses (Penguin)

James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford World’s Classics)

WB Yeats, Poetry, Drama and Prose (Norton)

JM Synge, Complete Works (Wordsworth Poetry)

NOTE – these editions have been specifically chosen for the course, so you are strongly advised not to purchase other editions.

Recommended

Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (contains a chapter-by-chapter summary of Ulysses – much more reliable and accurate than material online)

Lecturers: Dr. Patrick Lonergan

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: 20th December by 12 noon  

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