Course details

Name: ENLT - 349

Title: CONTEMPORARY IRISH LITERATURE

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2014

Credits: 3

Description:
This course meets 1 - 2:15 Tuesday and Thursday.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
A selection of Irish film, poetry, fiction, and drama from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Films studied will include (among others) The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952); Butcher Boy (dir. Neil Jordan, 1997), a critique of 1960s Ireland (in which Sinéad O'Connor plays the Virgin Mary); and Once (dir. John Carney, 2006), a Dublin love story whose cinematic subtleties should be appreciated even by those who enjoyed the off-Broadway musical. Poets studied will include the late Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995) and the Cork/Dublin poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Drama will include work by Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel as well as The Sugar Wife (by the half-Hungarian Elisabeth Kuti), a play set in nineteenth-century Dublin that features a freed American slave and a wealthy Quaker family. Fiction will include recent work by Kevin Holohan, an Irish writer living in Brooklyn who will visit our class when we discuss his novel The Brothers' Lot, about the apocalyptic dissolution of a Catholic boys' school in Dublin. As we study these modern and contemporary Irish films and literary works, we will consider such issues as the urban landscape and its association with the reconstructed family; critique of the Catholic Church's control of sexuality; the role of the Irish "public" poet; and the emergence of secular, global Ireland in the 1990s. Required work will include several tests and a final paper.

Last updated on 2013-10-21 By McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)

Schedule: Tuesday,Thursday From 1:00 pm To 2:15 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Any Literature (1e)
• Post-1900 (1d)
• Ethnic Studies (3b)

Teaching Faculty: McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)

Is course canceled: No