Course details

Name: ENGL - 250

Title: IRISH WOMEN WRITERS

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2015

Credits: 3

Description:
Students will read Irish folklore, memoirs, short stories, short plays, and poems by Irish women, with a focus on material from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth. All our work will be grounded in an understanding that from Ireland’s earliest history, the land and the rivers have been gendered female. We will look at pictures of such features of the landscape as Newgrange (a Neolithic passage grave) and Maeve’s Cairn to see how the land is interpreted in terms of the female body. We will devote several weeks to the study of fairy legends (told by women and collected by women) about children, adolescence, marriage, childbirth, and second wives. Then we will move to memoirs of women who participated in the Irish revolution, the Easter Rising of 1916. These memoirs, or “witness statements,” were collected by the Irish government in the 1940s to record contributions to the creation of the Irish state. The role of the seanchaí (traditional story-teller) has always been important in Irish culture, and we will look at women’s short stories with an awareness of their place in this tradition.And in reading recent Irish women’s poetry, we will note their engagement with all the legal and religious issues affecting women in the twentieth century. At different points during the semester Irish women writers and scholars will visit our class and talk about their work. Writers studied will include (among others) Lady Gregory (folklorist and playwright), Maeve Brennan (fiction writer), and Paula Meehan (poet). Required work will include reading all assigned texts, participation in discussion, quizzes, a mid-term exam, a final exam, and a paper.

Last updated on 2014-10-29 By McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)

Schedule: Tuesday,Thursday From 2:30 am To 3:45 am

Graduation requirements:

  • ()
  • ()
  • Post-1900 (1d)
  • Women and Gender Studies (3c)

Teaching Faculty: McDiarmid Lucy (mcdiarmidl)

Is course canceled: No