Irish Studies (IRST)

No prior knowledge of the Irish language required. This course provides an enjoyable introduction to modern Irish. Energetic teachers in small classes teach basic language skills and prepare students to conduct conversations and read authentic texts. Extensive use is made of role-play and interactive teaching methods. Irish 10101 is a superb opportunity to learn a new language, explore Irish/Celtic culture, and investigate the linguistic politics of the only minority language offered at Notre Dame. In addition to satisfying the language requirement of the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Science, Irish satisfies the popular Irish Language and Literature and Irish Studies minors' requirements, and selected students will have an opportunity to study in Dublin, Ireland.This class meets 3 days-a-week. In lieu of a scheduled 4th class, students work independently on technology-based language/culture projects in the CSLC.

The second of three courses in Irish; see preceding for description of program.

Various genres of Irish music have been part of a global flow of music and for well over two centuries. This course explores the place of 'Irish' music in the USA, as an immigrant music initially, as well as a diasporic, ethnic and, critically, American civic music also. Beginning with an introduction to the historical forms of Irish music which have crossed the 'Green Atlantic', we will explore of the place of Irish music in nineteenth and twentieth century American cultural life in particular, culminating in the study of specific instances of Irish music making and dissemination in Chicago up to the present day. Topics covered include: - Irish nostalgic songs of Thomas Moore and their influence on American music - The Irish music and Irish performers of American Vaudeville - Composing Irish Songs in the Tin Pan Alley Era - Irish Traditional Music in the American Metropolis (with an emphasis on Captain Francis O'Neill in Chicago) - American-made sound recordings of Irish Music on wax cylinders and 78rmp records fro 1899 up to c.1945 for the ethnic market. - The Irish Tenor in the American soundscape. - Irish musical representation (and Irish stereotypes) in Hollywood - North American festive culture celebrating Irish and Celtic Musics - Irish American pop/rock/rap bands influence by/influencing Irish traditional and popular music. - American country music and Country 'n' Irish. - American-based musical collaborations of Irish music with American, Indian music and Mexican genres - Contemporary Irish music scene in Chicago featuring case studies of Liz Carroll, bohola and others. - The work of Irish music institutions in North America - local and international - Irish music (and dance) in 21st Century USA - Post ethnic music? During the semester we will chart the emergence of a distinctly 'American' take on what constitutes Irish music in traditional and popular realms, as well as critically appraise the sounds, structures, forms and performances of 'Irish' music in North America which has either fused and hybridized with other vernacular and popular music, or has seemingly remained unchanged. Focusing on specific music texts in their historical and socio-cultural contexts, students will learn through a thematic approach, encountering concepts such as ethnicity, identity politics, post-colonialism, celticism, cultural intimacy, authenticity, structural nostalgia, hybridity, etc. We will come to understand the expressive and generic tensions in various styles of Irish music that push to become American while also retaining a sense of being tethered to Ireland (real or imagined). We will pay particular attention to the fieldwork, sound recordings and publications of Captain Francis O'Neill from Chicago, whose papers reside in the archived here in Notre Dame and whose legacy is still felt in Chicago, across the Midwest as well as in Ireland. Supporting literature will be drawn from critical Irish music studies, American music studies, vernacular music studies, ethnic studies, popular music studies, and ethnomusicology. The course will be underpinned by ethnomusicological and cultural theory approaches to understanding music culture, especially as it relates to issue of identity and performativity. We will also refer to Notre Dame's Field Day Series in Irish Studies, many publications from which from directly engage with the relationship between Ireland and America. Youtube links and MP3 recordings will be supplied and we will watch documentary excerpts in class. Hopefully, we will have the opportunity to encounter some visiting musicians and guest speakers during the semester. Finally, opportunities to engage in music making, where feasible, will be provided in order to embody the 'structures of feeling' of Irish Music(s) in North America.

This course will explore how and why the Irish adapted to an often-troubling New World. It will examine how those already in America understood them, and how the Irish came to understand themselves. We will do so from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. As we will discover, the Irish moved through the marginal areas of the broader Atlantic world. These were often violence marchlands, and this shaped their culture and the ways that others saw them. We will focus on how the Irish were seen to be an especially violent group, and how they took a term of abuse - The "Fighting Irish" - and turned into an ethnic marker of pride. Irish-American respectability was rooted in nostalgia for the violent past, and this sensibility helps explain why they dominated prize-fighting for a long time in the United States To do all this, we will view the Irish-American experience from Atlantic, global, and comparative perspectives. We will, of course, cover traditional topics, such as labor, politics, and religion. And we will encounter many colorful characters and fascinating stories. But we will do so by viewing the Irish who came to America as part of a broader, dynamic diaspora. Viewing migration to the American colonies (including the Caribbean) and the United States from this vantage point means that we must consider the changing relationship between Ireland and America, as well as the ways in which both regions were parts of broader economic and cultural systems. We will also see how the process of adaptation in America differed from the ones in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Argentina, and Canada - all places the Irish ventured to. Needless to say, we will cover the history of both sending and receiving societies in rigorous fashion. Only by doing this sort of work can we understand what defined the Irish-American experience, as well as the idea of the Fighting Irish. We will also spend some time discussing why Notre Dame would embrace the idea of the Fighting Irish and how that has changed over time.

This class introduces students to Irish traditional Sean-nós ("old style") dancing, a vernacular solo form of dancing done to Irish traditional (folk) music. No experience is required or necessary.

Irish Social Dance (ceili and set) No experience is required or necessary. Please note this does not count as one of the full-credit courses required for the IRLL major, IRLL minor or IRST minor. However, the 1 credit can count toward your overall IRLL major/minor or IRST minor credits.

This class focuses on the tunes, phrasing, and rhythm used to accompany Irish social dances. Students should have taken "Tin Whistle and Tunes" or already be proficient on their instrument (learn simple tunes quickly by ear, ABC notation, or sheet music). Please note this does not count as one of the full-credit courses required for the IRLL major, IRLL minor or IRST minor. However, the 1 credit can count toward your overall IRLL major/minor or IRST minor credits.

Irish Music: Tin Whistle and Tunes will introduce students to playing the tin whistle (penny whistle), teaching simple, popular tunes, as well as to singing Irish traditional songs. Please note this course does not count as one of the full-credit courses required for the IRLL major, IRLL minor or IRST minor. However, the 1 credit can count toward your overall IRLL major/minor or IRST minor credits.

Globally, the late 1960s were volatile and deadly. A decade that began with young idealism and revolutionary possibilities, ended with raised fists and the beginnings of violent terror. 1968 was particularly transformative. It was the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; the year that the Chicago Eight were arrested for conspiracy and inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention; the year that students across France brought the French economy to a halt; and the year that demonstrations in Northern Ireland demanding equal representation for Unionists and Nationalist escalated.In this course we will examine the political, religious, and cultural events of 1968-69 by exploring texts that were created during that period, and texts that have been created since to reflect the era. We will focus our attention on theatre, literature, music, and art created in the United States and Ireland that captures how class, generational, gender, and racial conflicts led to bloody violence.

Continuation of the study of the Irish language with increased emphasis on the ability to read 20th-century literary work in the original Irish.

The Hidden Ireland denotes both a book and a concept. The book was written by Daniel Corkery in 1924 and was an immediate success as it encapsulated a version of Irish history which had not hitherto been available to the general public; it is still considered to be a classic of its kind. The concept promoted the notion that history should emanate from "below" and should not be confined to the elites and governing classes. Both book and concept have had a profound impact on our understanding of Irish identity, Irish history, and Irish literature. This course will examine the book in depth and utilize it to open a window on the hidden Ireland of the 18th century. The cultural, historical, and literary issues which are raised by the book will be studied in the context of the poetry of the period. Poetry will be read in translation.

This course explores the society, culture, heritage and literature of Gaeltacht communities (Irish speaking communities) and uses the Aran Islands, Irish speaking islands off Ireland's west coast, as it's case study. Students will learn about Gaeltacht life, culture, traditions, historic landmarks and efforts to modernize the communities. This course will take a multidisciplinary approach by studying film and television, visual arts, performing arts, archeology, folklore, history, politics and literature to deconstruct the competing and conflicting images of the communities. This course includes a travel component. Students will visit the Aran Islands to deepen their knowledge of the area and carry out independent research. Students taking this class must be enrolled in or have completed IRLL/IRST 10101 Beginning Irish I.

Ireland can lay claim to one of the most extensive, unique, and oldest literatures in Europe. By engaging with a wide range of literary texts from the medieval and early modern periods (ca. 800-1800), participants will consider how changing social, cultural, literary and intellectual contexts, in terms of both authors and audiences, have dramatically transformed Ireland's literature over the centuries. By looking at authors ranging from heroic bards and literary monks to lamenting wives and satirizing schoolmasters, we will examine the dynamics of production and the voices that speak to us from Ireland's past. Additionally, by thinking about the identities of those who have more recently translated and edited the versions of the texts we will read, by questioning the different topics that scholars have chosen to explore, and by articulating our own responses to often arresting works from the Irish literary tradition, we will begin to understand the complexities and rich possibilities inherent in experiencing these literary masterpieces in a time and place very different from medieval or early modern Ireland. Participants will read both primary literary texts, which may include but are not limited to The Táin, stories from Early Irish Myths and Sagas, poems from An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed, Merriman's Midnight Court, as well as a number of critical essays. Participants will be required to write several short response papers, to compose discussion questions to help direct class conversations, and to write 2 papers (4-5 pp. and 6-7 pp.)

This survey course introduces students to a wide range of classic 20th- and 21st century-Irish texts; novels, short stories, plays, poetry and films. We will analyze each text from a cultural, historical and theoretical perceptive and the overall course will familiarize students with the broad strokes of Irish culture and allow them to explore Irish literature in its broader context.

This course offers an introduction to modern and contemporary Irish- language literature. We begin tracing the influence of the Revival and cultural nationalism on the development of a modern literature in the Irish language. We read key texts in the light of the national narrative, taking note of cultural change and contested identities while also considering the specificities of a literature that can trace an unbroken line to what is often described as the oldest vernacular literature in Europe. Among the texts discussed will be work by Pearse, Ó Conaire, the Blasket autobiographies, Ó Cadhain, Tiley, Ó Conghaile, Ó Ríordáin, Ní Dhomhnaill, Ní Ghriofa among others. All texts will be read in translation. Relevant documentaries will also be used and shown in class to further illustrate and elucidate the work of particular authors. This course fulfills the survey requirement for the IRll major. Texts studied in translation. No prior knowledge of the Irish language necessary.

A seminar on selected specimens from Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán, an edition of 400-plus songs, some of which were composed in Ireland as long ago as in the 17th century and many of which are still well known in Irish-speaking regions of the 20th century. No previous knowledge of Irish is required, but students taking the course will read broadly across a spectrum encompassing ethnomusicology, history, and sociolinguistics.

This introductory course to the Short Story literary form, as practiced in Ireland, introduces students to themes and motifs as well as the critical debates associated with the genre from the Revival to WWII. We begin with a survey of the literary history and cultural politics of Ireland in the nineteenth century, the Irish Literary revival, and the emergence of the short story in Irish, before considering the relationship between folklore, modernity, and modernism to the origins of the modern short story form as well as the role of cultural nationalism, regional exceptionalism, and the depiction/idealization of women and the paucity of female authors in the genre prior to WWII. Authors studied in this course, include: P.H. Pearse, Pádraic Ó Conaire, Seamus Ó Grianna, Seosamh Mac Grianna, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Liam Ó Flaithearta/Liam O'Flaherty. Stories are read primarily as literary texts that shed light on evolving cultural, political, and social conditions and provide incisive insights into the Irish literary and cultural tradition. This course is an ideal introduction to literary criticism and cultural studies. No prior knowledge of Irish or Ireland is required. All texts will be available in English translation. Satisfies -- LIT - old Core Literature (LIT) WKAL - new Core Art & Literature

"This course gives a historical overview of the development of cultural anthropology in Ireland. Beginning with early travelers' accounts and official inquiries and surveys, it moves to the development of antiquarian interest in Irish archaeology, history, language and culture. In the nineteenth century, the burgeoning interest in what would be called folklore converged with the project of a national literature, and from the end of the century, the first evolutionist anthropological studies appear. With the work of the Harvard anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball in the 1930s, the cultural anthropology of Ireland properly began, and the course looks at the key topics and themes of research since then and outlines the major ethnographic collections in the country."

This broad-ranging survey on the history and form of the novel combines traditionalliterary analysis (close reading) with the "distant reading" approaches enabled by recently developed digital techniques. In other words, while we will likely spend hours discussing and analyzing one or two short passages from a single novel, we will also learn how to use computers to "read" hundreds or thousands of novels in a matter of minutes. So-called distant reading involves aggregating and analyzing data about a large number of individual texts. While conventional literary analysis will remain an important part of what we do, computational or quantitative methods can provide insights that we never could have gained from reading books one by one. Nonetheless, during the semester we will give close attention to a small number of canonical novels, with an emphasis on Irish fiction. Some of the books we may read include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Almost from the very moment the novel emerged as a distinct genre, there have been more novels published than any one person could ever hope to read. In the late eighteenth century a new novel was published, on average, every single week; in 2010 over 50,000 new novels were published ? more than anyone could read in a lifetime. How do we keep up? Can we really understand the novel by giving close attention to just a handful of books? What can computational approaches to literature tell us that close reading can't? Moreover, can we combine close and distant reading in a way that enhances our understanding of literature, and the novel in particular? In this course we will attempt to answer these and other questions. Along the way, we will learn how to perform various kinds of text mining, such as named entity extraction, sentiment analysis and topic modeling. We will also learn how to put certain kinds of data into visual form, discussing both the benefits and limitations of such techniques. No prior technical expertise is required and ample instruction in using various digital tools will be provided.

The term "big house" refers to the country mansions that English settlers built in Ireland as a part of England's colonization of Ireland. "Anglo-Irish" refers to these settlers and their descendants. In this course, students will read nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century works that examine the Anglo-Irish big house and discuss the tense relationship between the native Irish and the Anglo-Irish. Students will read works that lament the fall of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy such as Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" as well as the incredibly sardonic "Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane. We will also investigate Seamus Deane's suggestion that Bram Stoker's Dracula is a big house novel and examine how Elizabeth Bowen uses the supernatural to describe her experiences as an Anglo-Irish woman in the mid-twentieth century. Students will analyze the tenuous position of the Anglo-Irish class that resulted from them being neither the colonizing English nor the colonized Irish and thus disowned by both. This course will give students a foundation in modern and contemporary Irish literature, history, and culture.

Since the turn of the millennium, Ireland has undergone economic, societal, and political changes that have fundamentally altered the fabric of life on the island. Focusing on literary works published since 2000, this course will investigate how these changes are addressed in contemporary Irish writing. Through the close reading of texts by a selection of Ireland's contemporary writers—John Banville, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Clair Kilroy, Colm McCann, Patrick McCabe, Paula Meehan, and Colm Tóibín--we will examine how established themes and tropes of Irish literature are being reconfigured or replaced to reflect the Ireland of today. The course will extend beyond the canon of ‘literary fiction' to include works from the popular genres of ‘chick lit' and crime fiction. We will supplement our study of literary texts by examining representations of Ireland in contemporary film, specifically, John Michael McDonagh's 2011 hit movie, The Guard, and Lenny Abrahamson's, What Richard Did (2012). By the end of this course, students will have developed a foundation in contemporary Irish literature and the skills necessary to interrogate representations of Ireland as they appear across genres.

The course follows the development of twentieth-century Irish poetry beginning with the unusual career of W.B. Yeats and continuing through the poets of the 'Ulster Renaissance.' This approach will necessitate treating the century as a long one. During the semester we will discuss topics such as Regionalism, Nationalism, Myth-making, Skepticism, Pastoralism, and Cosmopolitanism. Many of these notions are at odds with one another, and this tension will highlight the poetry's contemporary relevance. Just as importantly, we will pay close attention to the craft of Irish poets, and to how different aesthetic strains evolved from one end of the century to the other. Writers include W.B. Yeats, Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Paul Muldoon.

An advanced course focusing on reading and translating a variety of texts in the Irish language. We concentrate on further development of reading, interpretive, and technical skills mastered in previous language courses (IRLL 10101, IRLL 10102, IRLL 20103). Texts from various authors and historical periods allow students to taste different writing styles: contemporary fiction, journalism, literary criticism, historical and cultural texts. Emphasis will be on sentence structure, stylistics and syntax. Students are required to have earned a high grade in IRLL 20103 in order to take this class. At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to conduct independent research with Irish texts.

This class will examine Irish culture and society through the lens of Irish language - the native language of Ireland. No prior knowledge of Irish is required though the class will be of equal interest to those who do have.

This course will discuss the 19th century concept of folklore and its application in Ireland. 'Irish Folklore' is usually understood in terms of three main and related domains: 'folk narrative' (or oral literature), 'folk belief' (or popular religion) and 'material folk culture.' These will be examined with special emphasis placed on narrative. Representative oral narrative texts from the Gaelic tradition will be studied in translation.

Boston Celtics (baseball), Glasgow Celtic (soccer), Celtic spirituality, Celtic music, Celtic art... The word "Celtic" seems to cover a multitude, yet also has a more specific meaning. It refers to a people of the ancient world known to the Greeks and the Romans and who left their trace in many parts of Europe; it refers to rich medieval cultures in Ireland and Britain; and it refers to a group of living languages and literatures such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. But "Celtic" also evokes certain qualities and characteristics such as passion, sensitivity, imagination, musicality and bellicosity, which have been attributed to the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders, for example, since the Romantic period. This course gives a concise introduction to the question of who were and who are the Celts.

This course takes a close look at the cultural and political environment of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ireland by using the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats as a point of entry. By looking at the published works of Yeats as well as his projects such as the Irish Literary Society, National Literary Society, and Irish Literary Theatre, this course will explore the contested relationship between culture and politics. Along with Yeats, we will read his contemporaries such as Lady Augusta Gregory, Douglas Hyde, JM Synge, Alice Milligan, Edward Martyn, and more—all with an eye towards understanding the political power of art during a tumultuous period in Irish History. This course will incorporate close studies of poetry and drama and will fulfill the fine arts requirement.

Symbols of Ireland proliferate here at Notre Dame, where we are surrounded by images of leprechauns and shamrocks, teach packed classes in the Irish language and stick Salmon of Knowledge decals on our laptops. Yet Notre Dame's narrative of Ireland is just one of a multitude of competing versions, which have emerged, been contested and synthesized, and debated continually over the centuries, both within Ireland and abroad. This class is designed as an introduction to the major figures in Irish literature in English from the eighteenth century to the present, but central to our class will be the question of the ‘story of Ireland' and how it has changed over the years: What gets included in the story of Ireland and what gets left out? What does that story mean (and for who)? Who counts as being Irish and where do those definitions come from? Finally, we will consider how debates around these questions are influenced by the political, cultural and social context in which they occur. Questions will include why Catholicism is considered synonymous with Irishness, how the Famine has become such a key moment in narratives of Irish history, and why Irish people are so obsessed with land. We will work through writers including Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney and Joseph O'Connor.

Ghosts, vampires, and things that go bump in the night have been a mainstay of popular cinema since the dawn of the moving picture, but this popularity has relegated the discussion of the otherworldly to the arena of pop-culture--draining it of any perceived political power. Still, major works of literature have always been haunted by the horrific, terrifying, and grotesque. Through online posts, short presentations, a research paper, and regular class discussions, this course will reconsider what we can learn about the material world of history and politics from the immaterial world of ghosts and spirits as depicted in literature. By progressing from early Victorian to post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, we will consider the influence of history on genre and form and how authors use the ghostly to grapple with the very material problems faced by themselves and their nation. We will be reading short stories, plays, and novels from both major and minor Irish authors (in English) while supplementing the literature with short critical works to help illuminate the context of the author and the theories needed to unpack the primary texts.

In this course, we will read a wide range of plays presented on the Irish stage from the 18th century to the present. We will explore themes such as nationalism, gender and the changing representations of "Irishness," paying particular attention to connections to Irish history. Playwrights include Charles Macklin, Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde, John Synge, William Butler Yeats, Brien Friel and Martin McDonagh. Class participation will be of great importance as we will not only be discussing and interpreting the plays but also staging our own performances.

The term "big house" refers to the country mansions that English settlers built in Ireland as a part of England's colonization of Ireland. "Anglo-Irish" refers to these settlers and their descendants. In this course, students will read nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century works that examine the Anglo-Irish big house and discuss the tense relationship between the native Irish and Anglo-Irish. Students will read works that lament the fall of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy such as Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent as well as the incredibly sardonic Good Behaviour by Molly Keane. We will also investigate Seamus Deane's suggestion that Bram Stoker's Dracula is a big house novel and examine how Elizabeth Bowen uses the supernatural to describe her experiences as an Anglo-Irish woman in the mid-twentieth century. Students will analyze the tenuous position of the Anglo-Irish class that resulted from them being neither the colonizing English nor the colonized Irish and thus disowned by both. This course will give students a foundation in modern and contemporary Irish literature, history, and culture.

his class provides an educational and entertaining reconfiguration of the historical spread and cultural importance of the Irish as part of the 2st-century transnational world. Based on comparative perspectives with other emigrations, such as people from 19th century Italy and Germany into the New World, our study of the Irish helps students to understand the human narrative of resettlement, the national and global policies of settlement and resettlement, and the global impact of the spread of the Irish into many areas of the world. Based on lectures, films and presentations, we explore some fundamental historical questions, such as how are the Irish Famine, emigration, and economic developments of the 18-20th centuries interconnected, and how did the Irish diaspora shape the historical and cultural trajectory of America. We explore a range of themes relevant to other large-scale population migrations, such as the impact of the Irish spread on trans-Atlantic social memory and global economies across time and space.

The world of Harry Potter may have its fantastic beasts - and it may be able to tell you where to find them - but this course contends that British and Irish poetry has been a central place to locate such creatures - animals both fantastic and mundane - for the past hundred years. Throughout the semester, we will encounter many of the most important creatures to come out of this poetry, from W.B. Yeats's rabbits and swans and D.H. Lawrence's bats, to Ted Hughes's "Thought-Fox" and Seamus Heaney's otters and skunks, to the more otherworldly creatures of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's mermaids and Edwin Morgan's Loch Ness Monster. Though the course will touch on many cultural concerns through its poetic focus on the "creaturely" - concerns such as those surrounding gender and class, race and the postcolonial - its running interests will include that of anthropomorphism and the depiction of nonhuman experiences and phenomenologies, including the ecological fantasy of human annihilation. In addition, we will examine literary features such as genre and form, and will pair several weeks' poems with non-poetic fictional texts. Students will be graded on class participation, a project of collaborative design, several small writing assignments, and two substantial writing assignments.

This course will, in part, focus on honing your own critical reading and writing skills and approaches. We will be reading a series of texts — memoirs and novels — which have in common a concern with the nature of memory (often of traumatic memory) and the ways in which language can retrieve, accommodate, memorialize, and respond to the past. One of the themes that will emerge repeatedly is the instability of memory, as well as an emphasis on the uneasy connections and differences between fiction and memoir. The following are the texts to be covered in depth: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; Bernard Schlink, The Reader; Neil Jordan, Shade; Pat McCabe, The Butcher Boy; Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark; Toni Morrison, Beloved. These main texts will be accompanied by a number of related articles, available in a course pack. I may add additional readings if I think it necessary. You will see that most of these articles concern the first two and the last of our texts. This is in part because there is not a lot of good secondary material on the Irish books we will be studying. You will also find, as you read the essays, that there is much in them that resonates with all of our texts. Please take the time to read carefully all of this material, as we progress; I will be discussing the articles with you in class. There will also be screenings of four films: extracts from Claude Lanzmann's masterpiece Shoah; The Gray Zone; The Butcher Boy; and After ‘68.

A weekly discussion section required for students registered for IRST 20590, "Irish Hands that Built America."

Four one hour class meetings plus a safety/security meeting in preparation for participation in the 8 Day Ireland Inside Track Summer Program.

A Divine Vernacular: Old Irish Language and Literary Culture Early Irish sources record that at the Tower of Babel, when faced with the disordered confusion of languages Fénius Farsaid and Goídel Glas deployed a team of scholars to take "what was best of every language and what was widest and finest"; from these choice linguistic elements they made the Irish language, Goídelc, 'Gaelic' or (Mod. Irish) 'Gaeilge'. These origin myths tell us that Irish was created to restore and preserve God's language and heavenly speech, and that eventually it was brought from the Holy Land to Ireland, where Irish linguistic and literary culture flourished. Old Irish was at a very early period used extensively as a language of learning and literature: Irish is Europe's oldest vernacular, or native, literary culture, and Old Irish texts are some of the most diverse and intriguing of the Middle Ages, as we will explore in this course. When the Irish began to create literature in their native language, what ideas, stories and aspects of their culture were they most interested in exploring? Operating in a culture with a vibrant oral, story-telling bardic culture, how did the Irish use their native language to preserve and develop these spoken traditions in writing? In this course participants will divide their time between 1) learning the fundamentals of the Old Irish language (no previous experience necessary!) and 2) studying key texts which give us insight into medieval Irish thinking about the role and importance of language and literary culture. We will examine early heroic sagas, saints' lives, myths about legendary poets and the act of literary creation, stories of pre-Christian women warriors and otherworldly prophets, monstrous human heroes and poems as diverse as those celebrating the natural world, praising God, recording fears about Viking raids and even pondering the difficulty of getting thoughts down on paper. All literary texts will be available in English translation, though as our Old Irish skills develop over the course of the semester, we will also increasingly engage with the texts in their original Old Irish forms. No previous knowledge of Irish (modern or otherwise), or other medieval languages, is necessary for this course. Course requirements will include completion of language exercises, translation of a text of the participant's choosing (creative adaptations as well as linguistically precise translations are possible), a paper on any aspect of medieval Irish literary, linguistic or textual culture, and 1-2 exams. Graduate students will be expected to undertake additional reading, writing and translation.

This class looks at how women's voices emerge in Irish literature/art from the bloodthirsty warrior queens and powerful sovereignty goddesses of medieval saga to today's activist punk poets and videographers, exploring both how women are represented by others and how they choose to answer back. We will consider key genres of Irish verbal art in a wide range of compositions from medieval to contemporary. We will be helped along by relevant literary, anthropological and cultural criticism. How do women speak? How do "women" speak? Are these works subversive of our expectations or conservative in their relation to the status quo? How can we acknowledge and deconstruct misogyny not as inevitable but as historically and contextually conditioned and subject to demystifying critique? What vantage can we gain on Irish literary history by asking these historical, theoretical and political questions? How do tradition and the canon look when we view them through a gendered lens? What kind of impersonations might we engage in when we read...and write? Genres considered include courtly love poetry, contemporary feminist verse, oral lament, modern love poetry, bardic verse, storytelling, early modern allegorical poetry, folk song, medieval allegory, and contemporary comic verse, all read in English. Your own work for the course will include papers of literary/cultural analysis, a presentation, and a creative writing option for those who want to flex those muscles.

'Irish Folk Custom and Belief' is both the title of a popular work from 1967 by Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996), archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, and an approach to the study of rural Irish popular religion. That approach was long dominant among Irish folklorists. It tended to frame rural popular religion ahistorically and to fudge the issue of its relationship to specific social groups. At the same time it led to the recording of extraordinarily rich data, mostly from the Irish-speaking population of the West. Concentrating on the work of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century folklorists and anthropologists, the course will examine the study of rural popular religion in Ireland. It will contextualise it both in terms of historical, sociological and anthropological knowledge of Irish rural society and specifically of Irish peasant society, and in terms of the scientific study of religion. Specific topics often identified under the headings of 'folk custom and belief' will be discussed, in particular ritual, festival, magic, supernatural beings, sacred places and the oral narratives that deal with them. Specific scholarly texts, including texts by leading contemporary scholars of Irish rural popular religion, will be discussed as well as ethnographic texts recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission.

The <i>Hidden Ireland</i> denotes both a book and a concept. The book was written by Daniel Corkery in 1924 and was an immediate success as it encapsulated a version of Irish history that had not hitherto been available to the general public; it is still considered to be a classic of its kind. The concept promoted the notion that history should emanate from "below" and should not be confined to the elites and governing classes. Both book and concept have had a profound impact on our understanding of Irish identity, Irish history and Irish literature. This course will examine the book in depth and utilitze it to open a window on the <i>Hidden Ireland</i> of the 18th century. The cultural, historical, and literary issues raised by the book will be studied in the context of the poetry of the period. Poetry will be read in translation.

Born a pagan slave, fostered by a druid, a pillar of fire erupting above her, in one vita St. Brigid causes her brother's eye to explode when he tries to force her into a marriage against her will. Ireland is well-known as the Land of Saints and Scholars, the phrase conjuring up images of the holy triad of Patrick, Brigid and Columba (or Colmcille), and illuminated gospels like the Book of Kells. But stories of the saints can seem more at home in a mythic Celtic world, while the sagas of goddesses and ancient kings often show these pagan figures behaving like exemplary biblical characters. This course asks the following questions: What stories, images, icons and practices did the Irish promote when creating and developing the resources needed by a newly Christianized people? How did the Irish hold on to their ancestral beliefs and customs, revere rather than dismiss their pagan deities, heroines and heroes, or beliefs about the environment - this world and the otherworld? How did they create spaces for different voices, concerns, principles and people that are not always highlighted in official dogma? How did the Irish innovate to become famous as the Land of Saints and Scholars, their creations exported throughout Christendom? How have the products and stories of Early Christian Ireland been re-appropriated in later times? Do they still speak to us, and why? This course considers the brilliant ways that Ireland's early storymakers and artists fused elements from past and present, local tradition and universalized Christian ritual, to come up with something new, powerful and enduring.

This course examines the cultural and historical trajectory of the archaeology of Ireland through a series of richly illustrated lectures, organized chronologically, that trace cultural, social, and technological developments from the Neolithic through the Viking period. Integrated with this lecture series, and running concurrently on alternate days, will be a series of seminar and discussion classes focused upon a number of anthropological and archaeological issues related to each of these periods of time. This includes the emergence of the unique systems of communities, and the development of systems of metallurgy in the Iron Age. Other classes will touch upon the topics of regionalism and identity and contact at different periods of time, mortuary practices and ritual, and discussion of village life in ring forts during the Bronze Age.

This course will examine notions of history in oral cultures with special reference to Ireland. Who were those who transmitted oral traditions about historical events? Which genres shaped oral historical traditions? In which contexts were these traditions transmitted? What was the nature of the traditions? What was their content? What relationship did they have to the written record, to counter-hegemonic histories and to official histories? To what extent, if any, can they be said to articulate a national perspective? These are some of the questions that will be addressed, and case studies that illuminate special aspects of the subject such as oral traditions of the Vikings, of 1798, of the Famine and of landlords will be discussed in detail.

This class explores the nature of the early modern (sixteenth- to seventeenth-century) colonial encounter between the aggrandizing English state and the adjacent Irish polity through the lens of Irish and English poetry and prose, asking how older Gaelic power relations and sociocultural forms were altered (queered) by English claims, and how Irish literati responded by challenging (queering) English authority in turn. Using feminist, postcolonial and queer theory, we will ask how we can make sense of the forms of relation operative prior to and as transformed by the colonial encounter, particularly in the male homosocial bonds described by Eve Sedgwick, which become queered (troubled, stigmatized, rendered illegitimate), as Alan Bray and Jonathan Goldberg have argued in an English and New World context, when they threaten extant power relations. We will also take up longstanding areas of debate regarding the characteristics of this colonial encounter, the degree to which comparisons are useful or apt, the nature of the so-called bardic mentalité, and, if we're feeling cocky, the modern. My own particular topics of interest include poet-patron relations, the imposition of English law, and native mechanisms of legitimation; others will emerge as we read a variety of texts together. That reading will include bardic professional poetry, state papers, annals, settler-colonial and administrative screeds, English poetry, maps, and works of history and literary criticism. While you need not know any Irish (Gaelic) to take this course, you should be prepared to conjoin history and theory, poetry and politics, through historicized close reading while working across genres to produce original criticism in the form of several papers whose topics you will develop yourself. The course should satisfy the literature requirement and count toward the IRLL minor and major.

This course is what it says it is, a study of 20th Century Irish Language Poetry, from Padraig Pearse, to Gearoid Mac Lochlainn. Each week we take a different poet and study their aims, techniques, and what they offer to Irish Poetry as a 20th century artistic medium. A knowledge of Irish is not essential, as we will be using translations, though always with reference to the originals. But it helps.

Storytelling allows us to make a place, and a past, come alive, and it is through narrative that certain people, locations, and experiences lodge themselves in our memories. How, and why, do we reshape our own environment to convey certain stories about our past, our accomplishments, and our collective experiences? Why is it that road-trips loom so large in American cultural memory, and what do they have in common with other placelore stories, such as those featuring Native Americans, Irish saints and TV characters like Northern Ireland's "Derry Girls"? How can words, sounds and imagery be used to map out and draw us into new and often fantastic virtual geographies? In this class, we will think about how stories gain power by being anchored in evocative depictions of specific places, both real and imagined. We will examine verbal and visual stories, from medieval manuscripts like the Book of Kells and tales of St. Patrick's travels around Ireland, to contemporary animation (Song of the Sea), murals from Northern Ireland, place-based television series (Derry Girls) and Chicago-based road-trip films (The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off). We will contemplate how icons of ancient Ireland were used to create new spaces in Chicago, and we'll look at the massive 1893 World's Fair that put a newly rebuilt Chicago on the world map, as well as dramatic histories of Chicago and some of its murderous inhabitants (Devil in the White City). We will also turn to regional storytelling traditions and will study songs and stories about "home" composed by those who experienced diaspora and migration.

Historians and architects often disagree on the use of terms such as preservation, conservation, and cultural heritage, particularly with reference to the built environment. What happens when historical buildings face abandonment, destruction, or repurposing? What does it mean to preserve the past? Should communities be involved in the process? And how can we save the history if we can't save the objects themselves? This course explores these questions through a systematic analysis of the plight of Catholic Church buildings in Ireland. As the Church undergoes a continuing decline in attendance stemming from cultural developments, clergy shortages, shifting demographics, and lingering anticlericalism, many parish buildings face a risk of loss. Students will learn to evaluate these buildings for their historical content, assess the strategies for retaining that value, and collaborate with local communities to contribute to a digital archive of historical preservation. The course includes a class trip to Ireland during Fall Break for students to gain first-hand experience applying these skills and working with PARISH, an ongoing research project based in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Enrollment requires submission of an application essay. Students should contact Dr. Heather Stanfiel (stanfiel.2@nd.edu) for instructions.

This course explores the various literatures (especially poetry) that emerge at a time of dramatic change in early modern (16-17th-century) Ireland, including works originally written in Irish and English ranging from courtly poetry of praise and love for noble patrons to rather less savory verse justifications of colonial violence. In tandem with our reading of primary materials (read in English translation), we will examine the historiography of the period to grasp key debates and shifts in scholarly understanding; in so doing, we will take up long standing areas of debate regarding the characteristics of this colonial encounter, the degree to which comparisons are useful or apt, the nature of Irish literary culture, the characteristics of the age, and, if we're feeling cocky, the modern. While you need not know any Irish (Gaelic) to take this course, you should be prepared to conjoin history and theory, poetry and politics, through historicized close reading while working across genres to produce original criticism in the form of several papers whose topics you will develop yourself (with a creative option or two). In fact, that's the whole point: finding your own passion and doing work that only you can do! The course will count toward the IRLL major and minor, the IRST minor, the European Studies minor.

What does it mean to be "Irish"? How do the Irish define themselves in the modern era and why? How is "Irishness" developed in response to violent imposition, radical dislocation and societal rupture? Medieval Ireland boasted the oldest literary tradition in Europe outside the classical world of Greece and Rome and yet its inhabitants were described by Gerald of Wales, a writer of that time, as "a truly barbarous people ... a filthy people, wallowing in vice." It was the type of description that was to remain current in English accounts of Ireland for centuries; it was reinforced when Ireland, unlike England, remained largely Catholic during the Protestant Reformation and formed the basis for the anti-Irish sentiment that characterized much of the early immigrant experience in the United States and elsewhere. What provokes such a characterization and how do a people so affronted and degraded respond to such defamation? This course will examine the dynamic and contentious formation of individual and collective identities through literature, language and history in the period 1600-1900 in Ireland. This period sees the establishment and consolidation of English (or later British) rule over the country and is therefore a time of cumulative crisis for the Irish. We will read closely a rich, diverse selection of both prose and poetry representing various facets of this crisis and of Irish responses to them. The material provides dramatic contrasts and comparisons for those who have already studied some Anglo-Irish literature and it will also be of interest to students of Irish history and culture. The texts that we read will also be placed in their wider European and global contexts by considering work by scholars in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history, psychology and sociology on various aspects of the formation of social, cultural and national consciousness. In particular, we will examine cutting edge work on the interface between language, anthropology and identity in order to deepen our understanding of the literature and its contexts. To that end, within the framework of those texts, we will study the development of a number of words relating to concepts such as heritage, nationhood, freedom and civility to establish the affiliations between these concepts and the often traumatic changes that beset the culture in which they played a defining role. We will use our examination of the Irish experience to think about the following more general questions. How are personal and collective, including national, identities formed? Do identities formed when people think they are under attack differ from other identities? Are all national identities formed in opposition? How can we gain perspective on deeply felt identities so as to make them an object of dispassionate analysis? All materials, many of which were originally written in Irish, will be read in English and no previous knowledge of Irish is required.

This course is an introduction, through English-language translations, to the Irish-language novel. We analyze key developments in the novel through a consideration of its historical, literary-historical, and critical contexts. The twentieth century witnessed the development of the novel as part of a linguistic and cultural revival, and a corresponding growth in cultural and political nationalism yet over time, novelists were to the fore in critiquing and satirizing the official national narrative. In our readings, both primary and secondary, we focus on this tension to guide our discussion. A key question to be examined is how do Irish-language novels attend to contemporary Irish and international issues? Many of these texts are primary examples of different literary genres: the Bildungsroman, the Modernist novel, the parodic/satiric novel, the realist and the naturalist novel. We will also carefully consider thematic and formal questions related to these texts' genres. Authors to be studied may include, but are not limited to the following: Ó Laoghaire, Ó Conaire, Ó Grianna, Ó Cadhain, Mac Grianna, Standún, Ní Dhuibhne, and Wilmot. All texts are will be read in English translation. No prior knowledge of Irish is required. Extra credit is available to those undertaking research through the medium of Irish. This course meets the Literature and Theology Ways of Knowing requirement

This course will examine Irish poetry, written both in Irish and English, through the prism of protest. It will explore the public role occupied by the poet in Ireland and the concurrent anxieties and responsibilities felt by the poets who have occupied that role. The course will examine the formal prosodic dimensions of the poems and students will also learn about the historical circumstances in which the poems were produced. The course will include the work of WB Yeats, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Seamus Heaney, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paula Meehan, Liam Ó Muirthile, Michael O’Loughlin, Aifric MacAodha and Thomas McCarthy.

The Ulster Princes, Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell, left Ireland for the continent on 14 September 1607, unknown to the Dublin authorities, and without seeking the necessary permission from James I. O'Neill's secretary, Tadhg Ó Cianain, took notes during their travels and wrote them up into a coherent narrative in Rome sometime during 1609. Nollaig Ó Muraile, the latest editor of the text, divides it into eight sections: 1) Over the Sea to France 2) Sojourn in Flanders 3) Southwards over the Alps 4) Into-Italy from Como to Loreto 5) Pilgrimage to Loreto 6) Rome-the End of the Road 7) Visiting the Great Roman Churches 8) Death in Rome and other happenings We will follow Ó Muraile's subdivisions, concentrating on some more than others.The sojourn in Flanders deserves particular attention because it was in the Spanish Netherlands that the Ulster princes first encountered the Pietas Austriaca fostered by the Hapsburg dynasty. According to Anna Coreth, the significance of this term was based on 'the conviction that God had given the house of Austria a certain mission for the empire and the church, because of the religious merits of its ancestors, or, more particularly, of the great ancestor, Rudolf of Hapsburg. The same piety became a holy binding heritage, which had to be faithfully followed and constantly renewed as the destiny of the house depended on it'. O' Neill's encounter with this particular dimension of the Arch-Dukes' rule, particularly at the Shrine of Hal, enabled him to develop his self-image as a godly prince of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and consequently deserving of military aid from both the Hapsburgs and the papacy. It is highly unlikely that the Irish party would have gone out of their way to visit the Marian shrine of Loreto, were it not for the importance of this shrine in the Archdukes' spirituality. When the Ulster princes reached Rome, their encounter with the pietas austriaca had morphed into a pietas ulidiana or Ulster piety. Despite an initial welcome by the papacy and the Spanish ambassador, King Philip of Spain had no intention of allowing O'Neill to go to Madrid and thus put the treaty of London, signed between England and Spain in 1604, into jeopardy. Retaining him in Rome with the pope's consent, however, meant that O'Neill could prove a useful trump card should hostilities be resumed between Spain and England. This is the context against which we will read Ó Cianain's narrative. While an observer as astute as Tomas Ó Fiaich described Ó Cianain's reaction to the splendours of Baroque Europe as that of a country boy seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time, our investigation of the text will reveal that it is, on the contrary, a most sophisticated and nuanced work of art.

What is Irish America and how did it develop? This class will focus on distinct periods of Irish and American interaction in the United States—from early emigration times (with its emphasis on manual labor and service work) to involvement in politics (especially in large cities) and, after years of bias and bigotry, widespread participation in American business and industry. Why do we see the rapid changes within this particular ethnic group? What characteristics of Irish life contributed to those changes? What American traits were significant in the formation of Irish America? The class will approach these questions and others from a variety of perspectives: historical, political, literary, journalistic, and economic. Assigned readings will reflect the interdisciplinary orientation of the course. There will be mid-term and final examinations as well as a major research paper on a specific aspect of the Irish-American experience.

By verbal arts is understood storytelling as a practice and the various kinds of narrative -folktales, legends, heroic lays, etc. - that were usual at storytelling events.Not all genres of the verbal arts are narratives, however, but there are also such genres as lyrical songs, proverbs, riddles, etc. This course will examine the Irish verbal arts - in Irish and in English - in a comprehensive way and will study specific texts.

This course looks at the way in which Ireland is remembered. It will do so by looking at different sources of memorialisation. The course will examine the memory of the diaspora and the representation of Ireland through songs and memoirs. It will be anchored both in the question of memory studies, drawing on the work of philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur. It will explore what gets remembered in times of commemoration of historical events, such as the 1916 Rising or the Great Famine. Students will also examine the notion of nostalgia. Other sources that will be studied in the course will be photographs, films, paintings and statues.

This course will examine and analyze representations of Ireland in film from the Silent era through Hollywood film to the contemporary independant indigenous cinema of today. It will trace the representation of the rural and the urban through the varying utopian/dystopian lenses of film makers from the Kaleb Brothers to John Ford to Jim Sheridan to Lenny Abramson. Films discussed will range from early 20th century silent films to The Quiet Man, Ryan's Daughter, The Commitments, Poitin, The Field, Kings, My Left Foot, Once, Garage, Goldfish Memory and The Guard.

The goal of this course is for students to gain an understanding of Ireland’s social and economic development throughout the 20th century. Why Ireland? From The Great Famine (1845 – 1848), to The Celtic Tiger, and beyond, Ireland has transformed from a developing nation under British rule, to a highly developed independent nation. It is the 44th largest economy in the world and ranks eighth on the UN Human Development Index. Furthermore, in the post-WWII period, Ireland has played a prominent role in international peacekeeping and humanitarianism. Ireland’s changing political landscape and evolving sociology, throughout the 1900s and 2000s, tell the story of a country undergoing a turbulent century of conflict and unity, protest and peace, hope for the future while lamenting the past. To understand Ireland’s development more fully then, this course considers the political and sociological, as well as infrastructural and financial factors affecting Ireland as it is increasingly impacted by a changing international context. Two examples include Ireland’s accession and membership of the European Union (EU) and the influx of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the country. The course asks questions such as: to what extent did Ireland’s famous - yet often misinterpreted culture – contribute to facilitating and/or hindering development? To what extent can we attribute Ireland’s rapid economic growth to the “luck of the Irish”? Is this development specific to Ireland or are there lessons to be drawn from the Irish context that can be applied to currently developing nations? These include intertwined topics such as: (a) symbols and stereotyping of Ireland and the Irish (b) social change including the evolving rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, (c) accession to the EU, (d) The border, Brexit, and its implications, (e) foreign direct investment, its costs and benefits, (f) the growth of technology and, (g) Ireland’s shift from an inward to outward looking society. Each topic will be considered not as an independent entity, but as one chapter in the unfolding story of Ireland’s development over the last 150 years.

This course examines the history of Irish art from the Great Famine to today. We’ll consider the major art movements in Ireland across the “modern” period, beginning with 19th century landscape painting and print culture and moving through the display of craft and industry at International Exhibitions in Ireland, Britain, and America. A major consideration will be the relationship between aesthetics and politics before and after the establishment of the Irish Free State. As we consider key questions of identity and representation across the last two hundred years of Irish history, our course will examine issues of historicism and revival, the notion of the west of Ireland in national myth building, and questions of stereotype, religion, environment, and technology. Our modules will cover major Irish artists and art movements—including figures such as Jack B. Yeats, Mainie Jellett, Sean Scully, Mary Swanzy, and Francis Bacon among others—but we will also have chance to question the formulation of a national canon for ourselves. This course will utilize collections in Chicago as well as Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and will teach core skills in visual analysis and historical critique. No background in Irish Studies or Art History is required.

This course will examine the translation of the sacred on the Island of Ireland. It will offer an introduction to translation theory, examining many of the key issues linked to the translation of the sacred texts in a global context before turning its attention to the Irish context. Central to the course will be the translation of the bible into the Irish language, known as Bedel’s bible, undertaken at the behest of Queen Elizabeth the 1. It will examine how translation lay at the heart of the colonial project. Other topics examined will be the issue of Vatican 2 and the question of the vernacular, the Irish language masses composed by people like Seán Ó Riada or Tomás Ó Canainn, and the recent projects which offer a version of the gospels un Ulster Scots.

This course will examine the tradition of the long poem in Irish literature, both in the Irish and English languages. It will examine poems such as the epic, An Táin and “Cúirt an Mheánoíche” (The Midnight Court) in a variety of translations, or the poem the “Great Hunger” by Patrick Kavanagh. It will investigate the intersection between the epic and the long poem, and discuss the poetic sequence. It will also examine more contemporary long poems such as those by Martina Evans and Thomas McCarthy, alongside, hyper-contemporary work by Dawn Watson.

In 2007, after decades of organizing on the part of indigenous activists, the United Nations issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration was the result of years of work by people from particular communities--each with its own history, culture, language, and home--who decided to call themselves, and work together as, Indigenous people. This creative step allowed indigenous peoples to work collectively for justice on a global scale, rather than individually and in confrontation with single states. This class explores the concept, and reality, of Indigeneity in both historical and contemporary perspective: we will consider the many shared struggles and opportunities of indigenous peoples around the globe today and the ways that similar (or distinct) histories have led to similar (or distinct) present realities.

One of the most popular genres of medieval literature was the travel tale, and Celtic, Norse and British authors created an exciting range of stories about far-flung, fantastical , and holy or heavenly places, and the experiences of quite normal people in these often really abnormal places. While these texts generally stage transformations, meetings, and confrontations with new peoples, landscapes and ideas at geographically remote sites, the narratives typically lead audience members to reflect on issues of identity and belief that are actually very close to home. Analyzing the role of travel and visits to different worlds across several types of texts (legendary histories and origin accounts, hagiographies, adventure and voyage tales, sagas, pilgrimage accounts, etc.) we will identify several of the universal attributes, styles, compositional goals and motifs found in travel literature. We will also explore the differences between, for instance, secular and sacred travel tales, with particular attention to the role of the audience, the reader who undertakes an imaginative, textual journey by turning a books pages or listening to a tales? oral performance. Participants will read both primary literary texts (all available in English translation), as well as a number of critical essays. Primary texts (some excerpted) may include but are not limited to Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions of Ireland), Acallam na Senórach (Colloquy of the Ancients), Navigatio Brendani (Voyage of St. Brendan), Irish immrama (voyage tales), the Prologue to Snorri Sturlusons? Gylfaginning (Fooling of Gylfi), the Norse Vínland sagas, Geoffrey of Monmouths? Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), the Welsh Mabinogi, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and a pilgrimage account (TBD).

Jokes. Word play. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Wit. Satire. Comic Verse. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to enjoy a good laugh, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, think about the politics of (Irish) humor, and get smarter. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, and Flann O'Brien. No knowledge of Irish is assumed or necessary. Coursework will include plentiful reading, several papers (including a creative option), and a final presentation. The course satisfies the literature requirement and counts toward the IRLL major and minor, and the IRST minor.

In this class we will read and analyze a range of legends, myths, stories and more recent YA/ fantasy literature about the gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines of early Ireland and Wales. The original accounts, written in the Middle Ages (and read in English translation - no linguistic experience necessary!), provide insights into the medieval cultural contexts and goals behind these stories. However, we will also consider contemporary transformations of Celtic myth and legend in contemporary fiction and pop culture and ask how our expectations and tastes for the Celtic past speak to our worldview today. Requirements include an exam, multiple writing exercises, oral presentations, and 1-2 longer papers.

This course will examine the practice, practitioners and different genres of the verbal arts: the folktale, legends, epic, proverb, riddle, etc., and will look at the different functions of these genres. It will also look at the research traditions devoted to the study of what has been variously termed folk narrative, oral literature, orature, as well as the verbal arts.

This course surveys Irish history and literary culture through the specific lens of poetry and song from the sixth century to the present day. Across the turbulent and often traumatic centuries, poets witnessed and gave witness to a multiplicity of experiences and the rich and multifaceted tradition they created is both a reckoning with Irish, European, and global realities, and an imaginative response to them. This course unpacks that poetry's centrality to Irish history, culture and literature, and traces the island's constantly changing and ever evolving poetic traditions and culture. We explore Ireland's traumatic past and turbulent present, the vexed relationship between personal and political identities, as well as the aesthetic, critical and cultural dynamics that came and went during various periods of national formation and social change. Central to the course is an understanding of the complex creative connections between identity politics and aesthetic achievement in Irish poetry and song. All texts are present in original Irish and in translated English.

This course will examine the mythological and legendary traditions of the Celtic and Scandinavian worlds in the Iron Age and medieval periods. We will examine these traditions via the literary works produced by medieval Irish, Welsh, Scandinavian, and Icelandic writers, as well as in information recorded about them by foreign authors and in the archaeological record. We will also trace how these traditions impacted modern folklore and political ideologies. In so doing, we will aim to gain a better understanding of these historical peoples and the resonances and varied influences of their enduring literary traditions.

The Celts are often disregarded as peripheral, and are usually only superficially treated in discussions of European history. In this course, we discuss what defines the Celtic World and the history of the Celtic-speaking peoples in the Iron Age, the Roman period, and the early histories of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the medieval period. While Celtic history admittedly suffers from a lack of reliable narrative accounts, the medieval Celtic countries possess some of the richest traditions of surviving literature, law, and poetry in all of Europe, which offer exceptional insight into the medieval culture of these lands.

This course proposes to discuss the lives of Celtic women. To some, this might seem like an impossible task: if one is able to surmount the initial difficulty of defining just what a ‘Celtic woman’ is, then there remains the intractably spotty historical record to contend with. In this course, we will examine the historiographical difficulties of defining the Celtic World. We will undertake a broad and varied examination of the women who appear in the texts of ancient historians, of the historically attested women of the medieval political and ecclesiastical realms, and of literary and legendary women whose lives are placed in an ancient Celtic past by the medieval and modern authors who created them. Finally, a study of women active in the ‘Celtic Revival’ intellectual movement will demonstrate the continued significance of the ancient and medieval Celtic past into the modern era.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Ireland suffered a series of famines that nearly halved the island’s population—in less than one decade, from 1846 to 1855, between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at the hands of starvation or disease and another 2.1 million emigrated. The difficulties of these years were captured at the time and later recalled through art, literature, music, and more. Indeed, few (if any) events have had a larger impact on Irish history, politics, or national memory than “The Great Hunger.” This course is designed to introduce students to the history of Ireland’s Great Famine and its lasting political, social, and cultural repercussions.

This course builds on the reading skills that students have acquired in their first four semesters of Irish. The course will be based on the reading of selected short stories from both Gearrscéalta an Chéid and Gearrscéalta ár Linne. The aim is for students to be proficient in reading at advanced level C1 of "Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge" (The European Certificate of Irish Language).

Fantasy. Wit. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Word play. Satire. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to think about the politics of humor, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, and enjoy a good laugh. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, Flann O'Brien, and emergent writers. No knowledge of Irish Gaelic is assumed or necessary.

This course interrogates and examines representations of the West of Ireland in various twentieth-century literary texts focusing, in particular on the role of "the West of Ireland" in state formation and legitimization during the early decades of independent Ireland and its role in the construction of an Irish identity. We will look at how images of the West of Ireland were constructed in various utopian or romanticized formulations as well as examining more dystopian versions. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the visual arts and film as well as on literary texts written in both Irish and English. (Irish language texts will be read in translation).

Flann O'Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen) is a major figure in twentieth-century Irish and world literature. Regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature, his novels - At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman and An Béal Bocht are canonical texts for any student of postmodernism, humour studies and modernist metafiction. This course examines these texts in the context of the author's life and the Irish and European events which shaped his fiction and worldview. In addition to his three novels, his journalism including his famous column 'The Cruiskeen Lawn' in the Irish Times will be considered. Particular attention will be paid to the author's life and his fractious and complicated relationship to the Irish revival and the forces of modernity.

A cliché, a painful truth, an old story, a new one—this course explores alcohol and alcoholism in Irish literature, Irish society and Irishness, examining how alcohol infuses the stories Irish people tell and those told about them, and asking what happens if we take alcohol(ism) seriously as a framework and topic of analysis. We will think about the romance and conviviality of drink and drinking, pubs and wakes and more; and counterposed crusades against drinking (by Father Mathew and others), as well as the unromantic and destructive dimension so central to recent writing. We will think about alcohol(ism) in relation to political authority and nationalism, as well as in relation to colonial resistance, recalcitrance and recovery. We will ask how this "inheritance" travels into Irish America, and even to this campus, asking what legacies are being lived out, and why, and what we make of that. The course will feature a diverse set of texts across a span of Irish literary tradition, including medieval and contemporary, fiction and memoir, poetry and prose, verbal, visual and musical media. On the way students will work on their speaking, analytical and writing skills. Course work will include short writing assignments and analytical papers, a presentation, and a creative assignment.

This course will consider questions of gender, culture, and identity in looking at the history of women in Ireland. How has Ireland historically been figured female? We will consider the gendering of Ireland as a nation through the allegories of Éire and Hibernia, but also through the writing and representation of figures both real and mythic—from Cathleen Ní Houlihan to Maud Gonne and from Saint Brigid to the women of the Magdalene laundries. Along the way, we will examine related concerns including questions of masculinity, motherhood, class, race, and religion. This course will cover a range of humanities disciplines and mediums, considering gender and representation in art, literature, music, film, and poetry. The course will utilize collections at Notre Dame's Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and Hesburgh Library's Rare Books & Special Collections. No background in Irish studies is required.

This course will look at how political conflict in Ireland from the 1916 Rebellion and the War of Independence up to and including what became known as "The Troubles" in the North of Ireland has been represented on the screen. Students will analyse a wide variety of cinematic texts, mainstream commercial Hollywood features as well as independent Irish and British films. Documentary film will also be analyzed. Certain seminal events such as Bloody Sunday and the 1981 Hunger Strikes which have a diverse representational history on screen will be given particular attention. Among the films discussed will be <i>Mise Eire, Saoirse</i>, <i>Michael Collins</i>, <i>The Wind that Shakes the Barley</i>, <i>Some Mother's Son</i>, <i>In the Name of the Father</i>, and <i>Bloody Sunday</i>.

Consideration of the period between 950 and 1400 is of crucial importance in understanding Irish history. This course not only covers the range of continuities and radical discontinuities that marked Ireland's development during this time, but charts the attempted conquest of the entire country by the English Crown. The lecture series also seeks to answer a number of questions. Why did the Papacy give the English Crown sovereignty over Ireland? Why did a country like Ireland, on the verge of attaining political and economic centralization, not organize better resistance to English attempts to subdue it? Why did the English colony fail to prove more successful in exerting its will over indigenous Irish potentates? Culturally the period also witnessed the growing assimilation of English invaders to the norms of Gaelic Irish politics and society. Lastly, events in Ireland had a serious influence on developments in England, Wales and Scotland, provoking, amongst other things, the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty and an attempted invasion by King Robert I of Scotland.

From the Easter Rising of 1916, through the War of Independence 1919-1921, to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, Ireland was convulsed by a series of bloody events with a continuing political, literary and broad cultural legacy almost one hundred years later. This course will look at portrayals of the events of the period in film and television, in documentary and drama forms in Ireland and across the world, from early news-reels to blockbuster features and from early Hollywood to a planned documentary series for the 21st century. Contested events refracted through differing lenses offer varying insights into ideology and entertainment, propaganda and craft, relativism and revisionism, history and hokum. The course will be conducted by Cathal Goan, former Director General of RTÉ, the Irish National Public Broadcaster, who is currently acting as Executive Producer in the development of the Notre Dame sponsored television documentary series 1916 - The Irish Rising. Feature Films, TV Drama and Documentaries to be discussed include 1926 - Irish Destiny 1929 - The Informer (from the novel by Liam O'Flaherty) 1930 - Juno and the Paycock (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 1935 - Guests of the Nation (dir. Denis Johnston) 1937 - The Plough and the Stars (dir. John Ford) 1959 - Mise Éire (dir. George Morrison) 1965 - The Young Cassidy (dir. John Ford & Jack Cardiff) 1966 - Insurrection (dir. Louis Lentin) RTÉ 1993 - The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ABC TV 1996 - Michael Collins (dir. Neil Jordan) 2001 - Rebel Heart (writer Ronan Bennett) RTÉ/BBC Co-production 2010 - Seachtar na Cásca [The Easter Seven] TG4

This course will explore literatures from a time of dramatic sociopolitical change in early modern (16-17th-century) Ireland, as England was renewing (and energetically justifying) its colonial errand in Ireland, to which Irish people responded in complex ways. We will read a range of texts from royal proclamation to rebel incitements, poetry of love to poetry of the lovelorn, early (anti-Irish, colonialist) ethnography to doggerel travelogue, professional praise poetry to scathing satire, and more. We will look at the intriguing survivals of poetry by women alongside texts that throw Irish manhood into question. In tandem with our reading of primary materials in various languages (read in English translation), we will consider critical debates and shifts in scholarly understanding of the period. Course work will include discussion, reading, short writing assignments and analytical papers, as well as a creative option, as we delve into a fascinating and formative period of Irish history. The course satisfies the literature requirement and counts toward the IRLL major and minor, and the IRST minor.

This course offers a chronological survey of Ireland and the Irish from the Act of Union with Great Britain to the present day. It will consider the social, political, religious, gendered, cultural and economic aspects of that history, and will place the island of Ireland within its wider contexts, as part of the United Kingdom, as part of Europe, as part of the British Empire, and as the source of the global Irish Diaspora. The course will focus on a number of central issues, including: how enduring sectarian divisions have influenced the development of Irish history; the Famine, mass emigration, and the rise of the Diaspora; the development and course of both Ulster and Southern unionism, and of Irish nationalism; the relationship of Ireland and the Irish to the British Empire and the wider Anglo-world; the Irish revolution, counter-revolution, and partition; the development of the Irish Free State, and Republic of Ireland; the history of Northern Ireland, the Troubles, and the peace process; the collapse of the "Celtic Tiger".

This course examines the origins of Irish migration, the history of Irish people and their descendants in America, and the connections and interactions between the Irish at home and abroad. The principal themes are the process of migration and settlement, labor and class, race and gender, religion, politics, nationalism and, encompassing all of these, the evolution of ethnic identity. This course will work closely with the extensive Irish studies collections of Hesburgh Library to provide students with hands-on experience researching and curating historical objects and primary sources related to the history of the Irish in America.

In 1924 the scholar Daniel Corkery published a study of eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry entitled, The Hidden Ireland. He referred to the fact that up onto that point the history, politics, and culture, of the Irish-speaking majority on the island of Ireland were virtually invisible in the work of mainstream, Anglphone, historians, such as the otherwise meticulous W.E.H.Lecky. Lecky, rather, focused on the Dublin parliament, the Anglo-Irish, Protestant governing elite, and drew on entirely English language sources in print and in the archive. It was as if the majority community has vanished from history. Corkery instigated the slow, painstaking, retrieval of that hidden past, and in recent decades Irish language scholars have mined the rich and vast corpus of poetry in manuscript, to reconstruct a vibrant political ‘counter-culture'. This team-taught survey course examines in counterpointthe overlapping histories of Corkery's hidden- and leckey's Anglo-Ireland. beginning with the plantation of the province of Ulster by Scots and English protestant settlers at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the topics covered include religious conflict, the wars of the three kingdoms in the 1640s, the Cromwellian conquest, the Williamite wars, Jacobitism, parliamentary reform, the age of revolution, and the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800-01. (All materials originally in the Irish language will be read in English translation.)

Did Ireland have an Empire? Did Ireland play a part in the exploitation of other peoples through the British Empire? Were the Irish foot-soldiers or leaders? To what extent did Irish religious missionaries exploit the opportunities afforded by Imperial expansion? This course will look at the Irish role in a period of European-wide Imperial expansion, from about 1880 to about 1950. In addition to tracking Irish entrepreneurs, soldiers, missionaries and colonists across the "settler colonies" such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand it will look at the Irish in India, West Africa, Argentina, and the West Indies. Drawing on a growing scholarship in the area we will decide whether the Empire was utilised mainly by people from one particular class, or from all. Did the people who left home believe they were part of a progressive or evangelical mission of "improvement" or were they just out for themselves?

As the visit to campus of the most recent Irish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature suggests, this small island has produced a disproportionate number of great writers. Designed as a general literature course, the class will introduce the student to a broad range of Irish writers in English from the eighteenth century to the present. Writers will include Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Brian Friel, and John McGahern. We will also look at recent film versions of several of these writers' works, including Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. Themes to be explored include representations of national character and the relationships between religion and national identity, gender and nationalism, Ireland and England, and "Irishness" and "Englishness." Students can expect a midterm, a paper (5-6 pages typed) and a final.

This course of lectures and readings concentrates on British (that is, Scottish as well as English) history from the restoration of monarchy in 1660 to the great crisis detonated by the French Revolution and war in the 1790s. Themes include the politics of Protestant dissent, political ideologies, the role of parliament, Jacobitism, and the rise of the radical parliamentary reform movement.

The period from 1485 to 1603, often feted as something of a 'Golden Age' for England, saw that country undergo serious changes that challenged the traditional ways in which the nation conceived of itself. These included the break from Rome, the loss of England's foothold in France, and the unprecedented experience of monarchical rule by women. Each of these challenges demanded creative political responses and apologetic strategies harnessing intellectual resources from classical, Biblical, legal, chivalric and ecclesiastical sources. This course will examine these developments. It will also look at how the English, emerging from under the shadow of the internecine dynastic warfare of the fifteenth century, sought to preserve political stability and ensure a balance between continuity and change, and, furthermore, how individuals could use these unique circumstances to their own advantage.

Between 1497 and the Mayflower's voyage to New England in 1620 England had to adjust itself to the implications of the reality of the existence of the Americas. This course will survey the story of England's 'Westward Enterprise' across the Atlantic in this period. It will take the measure of figures like Francis Drake, Walter Ralegh, Martin Frobisher, and Humphrey Gilbert as they raided, reconnoitered, and laid claim to portions of the Americas during the reigns of the Tudor monarchs and finally James VI & I. The course will be suffused in primary source accounts of the various voyages and enterprises endeavored by Englishmen in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

Ireland, a country rich in history, has undergone dramatic changes in the twentieth century beginning with its fight for independence and culminating in its meteoric rise during the Celtic Tiger years. What explains Ireland's distinctive political trajectory and how does it compare to other European nations? How should we understand the Celtic Tiger, the rapid series of social, economic and political transformations that have occurred within Ireland since the 1990s? This course explores these questions by studying the political actors and institutional settings of Irish politics, the nature of political influence and the shaping of political priorities, and the forces that shape policy outcomes. It will address such critical issues as the legacies of colonialism and civil war, nationalism, democratization, the relationship between the Church and State, the Northern Ireland Troubles and the European Union. While the course focuses on the Republic of Ireland, it will adopt a broad comparative perspective, situating the country both within the wider global context and within the political science literature.

Following the defeat of the indigenous Irish aristocracy in 1603 and the departure of their natural leaders in 1607 King James I of Great Britain and Ireland found that he had something of a clean sheet in the smaller kingdom, which seemed open to exploitation and short-term demands. After a period of peace, negotiation and domination, simmering sectarian tensions in Ireland boiled over in 1641 playing a central part in the convulsion in both Britain and Ireland known as the Civil War. The resulting cocktail of new constitutional ideas, religious experiments and virulent sectarianism that made Ireland into a chaotic battlefield on which the British King and his Royalist supporters, the English Parliament, the Covenanting Scots, the Confederate Irish (split between Old English and Gaelic-Irish factions) and the Army of the English Commonwealth all met each other to assert pre-eminence . Oliver Cromwell's lieutenants set the foundations of a new order of expropriation and colonisation in Ireland which, despite occasional indications to the contrary, became more and more entrenched. After the fall of the Catholic King, James II of England, the Protestant elite in Ireland were raised into the ascendancy and imposed a sectarian society on the country which established the framework out of which modern Ireland emerged.

This course examines the history of Irish secret societies both in Ireland and in a broader Atlantic world. We will begin with the early oath bound agrarian societies such as the Whiteboys and move forward through the nineteenth century studying groups such as the Defenders, Rockites, Ribbonmen, Fenians and Molly Maguires. As we study these groups in their historical contexts, we will survey the shifting political and social landscapes of Ireland, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World. This course also addresses the question: how do we as historians research groups whose nature means they leave behind minimal written records?

This course explores the main themes in Irish histories from the plantation of Ulster, after 1603, to the rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union with Great Britain in 1800. Attention focuses on plantation, colonization, and religious conflict; the Cromwellian reconquest and the Williamite wars in the 17th century, and the anti-Catholic penal laws and rise of Protestant Ascendancy in the 19th century. This dramatic and formative period witnessed the emergence of many of the forces and rivalries that shaped modern Irish politics and society and continues to generate lively disagreement among historians today.

This course offers new perspectives on the struggle for mastery in Ireland from 1470 to 1660. Though keeping in mind the traditional view of the "English reconquest" (decades of rebellion, dispossession, and plantation until, in the aftermath of Cromwell, all Ireland was finally subjected to English rule) this course will take a different approach. By investigating a range of primary sources from the period, students will explore the interactions between the three different models of conquest: (1) descendants of the old Norman colonists (e.g., Fitzgeralds and Butlers) seeking to finish the job; (2) Tudor reform (inspired by Renaissance optimism), by which the English attempted to establish rule by means of legal, social, and cultural assimilation; and (3) unabashed exploitation by English private entrepreneurs on the make. The most important effect of these "contending conquests" was the way they shaped the diverse responses of the native Irish, ranging from accommodation and assimilation to outright rebellion and national war.

This course explores the history of the six north-eastern counties of Ireland which became "Northern Ireland" in 1920/1. Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom and had a built-in Protestant unionist majority, while the Catholic minority, alienated from the state from the outset, looked across the new border and to Dublin, capital of the Irish Free State, as the site of their allegiance. Northern Ireland was thus, from the beginning, dysfunctional, scarred by sectarian violence and systematic discrimination in housing and employment. After examining the origins of the state and the early decades of it existence, the class will turn to its main concern, "the troubles," which broke out in the late 1960s. The major episodes under scrutiny include the civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, and the Good Friday Peace Agreement.

From the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century to today the hegemony, and later the survival, of native Irish culture in the Irish language has been challenged by English language culture. This course seeks, by analyzing primary sources in Irish (available to students in translation) in their historical context, to chart this process over time. The course also seeks to ask questions about the extent to which the Irish Catholic population resisted or collaborated in the process of anglicization that took place. Was the 'Sacsa nua darbh ainm Éire' /(New England going by the name of Ireland) culturally alien to the Irish population that resided in it?\

The period of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries represents the onset and consolidation of English (later British) colonial rule in Ireland and sees the breakdown of the old Gaelic social and political orders. This course will examine how the Irish-speaking world reacts to this trauma by focusing on the evolution and development of some key ideas: those of heritage, nationhood, civility and freedom. These concepts will be examined within their historical and literary contexts, Irish, British, European and American. We will closely examine original texts written in Irish, English and Latin especially, from the perspective of both English colonizer and Irish colonized. All materials will be read in English translation.

The Irish language has a fascinating and turbulent history. From being the earliest and most copiously attested European vernacular outside the classical world of Greece and Rome, to a language on the verge of extinction in the late nineteenth century, few languages in Europe have endured such vicissitudes over a millennium and a half. Ireland is indeed unique in Western Europe in modern times in having been the colony of a neighboring country over a period of centuries. Not surprisingly, this colonial experience has left a profound and enduring imprint on the language and on its community of speakers. As much recent work on language endangerment around the world has brought to our attention, a language depends for its continued vitality on the entire material, social and cultural world, or "ecology," that sustains it. When this ecology is attacked and undermined, as occurs under colonialism, a language suffers as a result. The history of the Irish language is therefore a case study in the complexity of a particular human experience over a period of 1500 years; it is a history not of linguistic forms and expressions per se but rather the history of the people who have used and who still use them, of the institutions that have nurtured and been sustained by the language and of the political slings and arrows of fortune that have undermined and threatened (but ultimately failed) to extinguish it. It is therefore a holistic history, a history of Ireland which foregrounds language (principally Irish but also those other languages and their speakers with which it has interacted and competed) as its overarching theme.

This course will explore the politics of constitutional change in Ireland over the period from the enactment of the Constitution of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the present day, encompassing issues such as electoral reform, democratic accountability, institutional reform, the role of women, the relationship between Church and state, divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage. These in themselves, and to an extent independently of the issues involved, raise increasingly important theoretical and political questions about the relationship - and the tensions - between the institutions of representative democracy - especially the Constitution - and participatory democratic politics in a modern state. Case histories will be used to illustrate the theoretical issues involved.

This course will explore the politics of constitutional change in Ireland over the period from the enactment of the Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na Eireann) in 1937 to the present day, encompassing issues such as the place of Northern Ireland, the place of Europe, electoral reform, the presidency, democratic accountability, institutional reform, the role of women and children, the relationship between church and state, divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage. These issues raise increasingly important theoretical and political questions about the relationship, and the tensions, between the institutions of representative democracy - especially the Constitution - and participatory democratic politics in a modern state. Case histories will be used to illustrate the theoretical issues involved.

This course begins with the premise that the twentieth-century situations of Ireland and the Caribbean bore more than a passing resemblance to each other. In a 1979 interview, Derek Walcott (the first Caribbean writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) claimed affinity with Irish writers on the grounds of a shared colonial background: "I've always found some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realised that they were also colonials with the same kind of problem that existed in the Caribbean - Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce, or Yeats, or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation, and be defiant and creative at the same time." To explore this assertion, we will read selected writings of James Joyce (Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucian poet, playwright, and essayist). This comparative reading will highlight their common themes of ethnicity, postcolonial constructions of masculinity, cultural chauvinism, and political inequality. Both work within and against the traditional Western canon, and so our primary focus on their epics, Ulysses and Omeros (we will read selections from each), will consider the ways that Joyce and Walcott are writing back to the imperial center/rewriting the imperial canon, employing its literary techniques and traditions in their works. Both writers thematically investigate the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, the interplay between their own culture and Western civilization writ large, and the influence of island geography on their societies. Their writing exposes the lasting wounds - personal, cultural, and political -inflicted by British colonialism in their native lands and the ways that anxieties of masculinity were exacerbated by and contributed to this domination. Our readings of Joyce's and Walcott's texts will be guided throughout by the theoretical lens of masculinity studies. This course is open to students interested in exploring the ways that masculinity studies serves as a useful lens for reading Joyce and Walcott and for analyzing the political and cultural ties between their homes (as well as their problematic relationships to those homes); no prior knowledge is assumed.

Ireland famously (or infamously) voted in 2004 to end the automatic citizenship right for all babies born in Ireland; supporters of the legislation argued that women were travelling to Ireland to give birth specifically to obtain an EU passport for their children. This was certainly not the first time that constructions of the family created conflict in Ireland (we might think of the 1937 Constitution and the series of divorce laws enacted by the State, or the Ann Lovett case and the various child abuse scandals), nor that representations and understandings of childhood were contentious topics of public discourse. Thus the 2009 release of the Ryan Report has been seen as signaling a new openness in Ireland to discussing formerly taboo topics. This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections of childhood and the construction of the family in twentieth-century Irish society. The central focus of this exploration will be literary representations of the family (texts to be read may include James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices; Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood ; Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy; Mary Leland, The Killeen; and Emma Donoghue, Stir-fry); we will also examine media depictions of the family. Topics to be covered include: education; child abuse; traditional roles of the mother and father in the family; teenage pregnancy and the Magdalene laundries; censorship issues.

British colonization of Ireland (the only European nation to be colonized by a European imperial power) spanned centuries - and Irish resistance was equally sustained - by both men and women. The final opening volley launched with the 1916 Easter Rising and independence was achieved with the 1919-21 War of Independence (though challenged with the 1921-22 Civil War). As a newspaper headline proclaims, "Secret exploits of women who were crucial to freedom fight": contrary to misconceptions that they were passive beneficiaries of the Irish fight for independence, women were active in paramilitary organizations like Cumann na mBan, undertook intelligence work, fought alongside Irish men (176 women applied for military pensions for active service performed between 1916 and 1923), and recorded their experiences in journalistic and fictional accounts. This course will survey literary responses (both contemporaneous and retrospective) to the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War as we celebrate the centenary of the events leading to the founding of the Irish Republic. As we engage with close textual readings, our prime focus will be on parsing out gendered differences in ways that men and women fought for Ireland as well as in how they describe the fight. No prior knowledge of Irish history is presumed.

The 20th and 21st centuries have seen numerous Greek tragedies adapted, translated or reconfigured by Irish dramatists in order to highlight social or political issues in Ireland. In this course we will study a selection of these adaptations, in conjunction with English translations of the Greek originals on which they were based, to explore how Greek tragedy has been appropriated to an Irish context. Themes covered will include tensions within Irish politics and social issues relating to conceptions of religion, the place of women, and psychological disorders within Irish society.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the literary imagination across the world was seized by a sudden onset of radical experiment and innovation. This aesthetic revolution not only changed the idea of what novels could do, but offered new ways of understanding the self. The explosion of literary masterpieces in these decades expanded the possibilities of what art can do, and remain cultural touchstones to this day. In this course we will read a selection of novels from places such as Paris, London, Dublin, Vienna, Prague, New York, and Berlin. Authors may include some of the following: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, John Dos Passos. Works not written in English will be read in translation, and the course will also include films.

This course will look at the work of contemporary women poets through the mediating prisms of gender, national, regional and linguistic identities. It will locate their work in relation to the traditional canon and examine the poetic strategies used by these diverse poets. Poets studied will include Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Maedhbh McGuckian, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Moya Cannon, Vona Groarke, Paula Meehan, Dorothy Molloy, Collette Bryce and Martina Evans.

In its manifold forms, from the newsreel to the ‘feature; film is a major source of evidence for, and an important influence upon, contemporary history, and a vivid means of bringing the recent past to life.The Historian and Film, Paul Smith ed. Cambridge University Press This course will examine how modern Irish history has been presented in both documentary and feature film from the silent era to the present day. It will interrogate the possibilities and pitfalls of history for film-makers and look at how Irish history has been presented to a mass audience through cinema and television. Films discussed will include Irish Destiny (1926), The Dawn (1936), Anne Devlin (1984), Michael Collins (1996), The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2003), Mise Eire (1959), Saoirse?/Freedom? (1961), Insurrection (1966) A Television History of Ireland, The Troubles (1981), Seachtar na Casca.

Bhí riamh ardmheas ag Gaeil ar an scéalaíocht agus ar an deisbhéalaí. Le healaín bhéil tuigtear an scéalaíocht mar nós agus na cineálacha insinte - seanscéalta, finscéalta, rannscéalta, laoithe Fiannaíochta, ?rl. - ba ghnáth ag ócáidí scéalaíochta. Ní insíonn gach genre den ealaín bhéil scéal, áfach, agus i dteannta na scéalta is féidir amhráin liriciúla, seanfhocail, tomhaiseanna, ?rl., a áireamh. Scrúdaíonn an cúrsa seo ealaín bhéil na Gaeilge go cuimsitheach agus léifear téacsaí samplacha. Irish-speakers always greatly respected storytelling and verbal dexterity. By verbal arts is understood storytelling as a practice and the various kinds of narrative - folktales, legends, cante fable, Fenian lays, etc. - that were usual at storytelling events. Not all genres of the verbal arts are narratives, however, but there are also such genres as lyrical songs, proverbs, riddles, etc. This course will examine the Gaelic verbal arts in a comprehensive way and will study specific texts.

The medieval literatures of the North Atlantic -- Medieval Irish, Icelandic, English and Welsh literature (Latin and vernacular) -- feature a high concentration of sophisticated narratives invested in mapping the North Atlantic zone, and the movement, migration, and transformation of people as they move through these landscapes and seascapes. All unified by their conscientious use of a poetics of place, the texts we will examine variously focus on the movement of men and women, migrants and settlers, heroes, saints and colonizers through challenging and transformative geographies; some tales probe both individual and community reactions to being shepherded to or driven from the places, both mundane and otherworldly, they would like to call home; bountiful hunts and harvests demonstrate the happy union of a people with an intended homeland; these lands also show agency by catching fire or flooding in furious protest of a leader's bad judgments or wholesale rejection of an invader. Rooted in the physical geographies of Ireland, Iceland, England and Wales, these narrative topographies move beyond the land itself and become powerful, portable worlds that can be accessed and occupied by readers anywhere and at any time. All readings will be in English translation -- no previous linguistic knowledge is assumed. Primary texts may include: Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica; various saints' lives; Irish immrama or voyage tales; Old English poetry; Irish texts including T'in B' Cuailnge ("Cattle Raid of Cooley"); Mesca Ulad ("Drunkenness of the Ulstermen"); Togail Bruidne Da Derga ("Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel"); Acallam na Senorach ("Colloquy of the Ancients"); Dindshenchas or "lore of high places" poetry; the Welsh Mabinogi; topographical writings on Ireland and Wales by Gerald of Wales; and Old Norse-Icelandic poetry and sagas about voyaging, settlement and "land-taking." We will also examine some contemporary environmental writing and placelore, including novels (The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth, and City of Bohane, Kevin Barry) and perhaps film to compare how and why medieval and modern authors create and deploy narrative topographies (and how audience members respond to them). Critical readings will be wide-ranging and will include material from anthropologists, environmentalists, geographers, literary and cultural studies theorists, and numerous medievalists.

How do you tell a story that is supposed to be unspeakable? In this course, we will investigate the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) writers have transformed narrative conventions as they explore their experiences and their identities through fiction. Beginning with the fiction of Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century and continuing through the modern and postwar eras into the twenty-first century, we will look at LGBT British, Irish and American writers whose work engaged with or dramatically departed from the dominant conventions that typically shaped fictions of identity formation, of love and marriage, of sexual experience, of political protest, and of death and loss. We will also investigate public responses to some of these fictions, and the changing discourses about gender identity, homosexuality, and sexual orientation that have shaped both the realities and the fictions of LGBT writers over the past century. Students will write three papers and be responsible for one in-class presentation.

In the eighteenth century, parallels were drawn between the enslavement of African Americans and the marginalization of Irish Catholics in Ireland. Belfast newspaper the Northern Star published, William Cowper's "The Negroe's Complaint," and Thomas Day and John Bicknell's "The Dying Negro," manufactured, propagandistic anti-slavery poems in an attempt to draw sympathy for enslaved African Americans and to also suggest that the Irish were metaphorically "slaves" in their own country. The practice of depicting the Irish and African Americans as equivalent or in comparison with each other continued throughout the nineteenth century, even after the end of the American Civil War. An illustration commenting on the travesty of the African American and Irish American vote was published in Harper's Weekly December 1876. Captioned "The Ignorant Vote-Honors Are Easy," by Thomas Nast, the cover is a good visual illustration in regards to how Irish Americans and African Americans were perceived in post-bellum America. By the beginning of the twentieth century, competition for jobs and the steady Irish climb into whiteness distanced Irish Americans and African Americans, but that did not stop black American writers from frequently making a case for Irish "freedom;" highlighting how the Irish struggle for civil rights in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland had been akin to the post-slavery African American quest for civil rights in the United States. And by the mid-twentieth century, African American forms and the African diaspora were influencing on how political activists in Northern Ireland approached the civil rights struggle there. In this course we will explore African American and Irish texts. We will examine how black and Irish artists have gestured towards each other in literature, film, and music. Our goal is to concentrate on how these two cultures have intersected - their shared experiences - while also focusing on important differences between the two cultures. We will examine a broad range of texts, from the eighteenth century to the present, in order to determine the way in which the Irish and African Americans have been racialized. Our ultimate goal is to have a better grasp of the racialization processes in the transnational context.

An introduction to Ireland and the Irish poetic tradition, this course is a magnificent chance to study with a world renowned poet. It offers a unique opportunity to study modern Irish poetry with the greatest living Irish-language poet. Visiting Notre Dame for the 2006 Fall semester only, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill will teach a course on modern and contemporary Irish poetry. This class will spotlight key canonical texts by Irish-language poets as students conduct close readings, examine the verses' social and political context, and deconstruct the mechanics of each individual poem. We will read Cathal O Searcaigh, Gearoid Mac Lochlainn, Biddy Jenkinson, Michael Hartnett, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Liam O Muirlithe, Pearse Hutchinson, Sean O Riordain, Mairtin O Direain and Aine Ni Ghlinn. This course also focuses on Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's own work. All texts will be available in English. No prior knowledge of Irish required.

The ideological character of the 19th century concept of folklore allowed it to transcend the social category of peasants from whom it was largely recorded. This course will look at the role of folklore in the building of an Irish national culture from the time of the Gaelic Revival. Programmatic texts in Irish and in English by Douglas Hyde, first president of the Gaelic League, and by Séamus Delargy, director of the Irish Folklore Commission, will be discussed. It will also look at a later polemical text of the Gaelic writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain directed at what he perceived as the essentialism of Irish folklorists. <b>No knowledge of the Irish language required.</b>

"All ethnography is fiction" contended Edmund Leach, and it is true that ethnography may sometimes demand qualities of imagination in other contexts more typical of literature. While ethnography "at home," in the work of folklorists especially, was often understood to be a "national science," documenting and mapping the national culture, ethnographers were not alone in creating representations of the nation. The work of many writers was in part informed by their ethnographic engagement (Ibsen and Yeats, for example, both collected folklore), and literature (as Fredric Jameson has intimated) can itself be an "allegory for the nation." Romanticism was particularly important here, with its esthetic attempts to rescue tradition from the homogenizing and universalizing logic of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Tradition in this way was often ethnicized or nationalized (as Volksgeist), with the corollary that modernity was seen as a mortal threat to ethnic or national specificity. Populist politics typically evoked the nation that would exist only for the traducement of its elites, hence representing the plebs as the real people (as Ernesto Laclau argues). In these terms the work of many writers and folklorists was implicitly or explicitly populist. But ethnography too could be used to identify the obstacles to political unity and integration, both at the national and the imperial level. This indeed is a well-known part of the history of anthropology, but also of folklore studies. If Romantic folklorists wished to record and preserve folklore in the spirit of cultural relativism, "metropolitan" folklorists saw it through a universalistic lens, strongly influenced by the evolutionism of Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) for which it was a "survival" from an earlier era. This course will look at the intersection of folklore, literature and nationalist and colonial politics in 18th, 19th and early 20th century cultural history, using critical works from anthropology, folklore studies, history, literary theory and sociology.

In 1727, shortly before the publication of the first two volumes of their joint Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, Alexander Pope wrote Jonathan Swift a letter in which he expressed his pleasure at the image of their relationship that the work conveyed. "Methinks we look like friends," he wrote, "side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity." Elsewhere, Pope would tell Swift that "yours and my name shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose." This course will provide a conceptual context in which to read, discuss, compare and contrast the works of these two writers. Jonathan Swift (1667-1744) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Pope is remembered to posterity as the most famous poet of his age, whose satires stung a corrupt political regime during England's rise to world power. His long career came in spite of a disabling childhood tuberculosis that left him crippled for life. (In later years, Pope would refer to his "crazy carcass" and "his long disease, my life.") Swift is seen as a masterful political writer in the first age of party, an early, fierce defender of his native Ireland against English colonial policy, and one of the great prose stylists in the language. (His 1726 work, Gulliver's Travels, has never been out of print). If we look close enough, the lifelong friendship and collaboration between the two-- an Irish Protestant clergyman and an English Catholic poet-- can be viewed as an eighteenth-century rendition of the odd couple. What issues brought them together? Where did they differ on such questions as the role of women, sociability, the nature of the individual in a new consumer society, political economy and the financial revolution, the role of science, global expansion and the ends of empire? These are a few of the questions we will pursue. In addition to the required and collateral readings, each member of the class will be responsible for at least one oral report: by posing a question, by sounding out critical and theoretical response to Swift's and Pope's art, by presenting a thesis on a work at hand, by executing a pantomime, by doing anything short of public scandal to stimulate discussion and to make the class a body unto itself. Each student will also prepare a short, five page paper and a longer critical paper (10-12 pages in length) that demonstrates a capacity for independent thought and research and the ability to argue a thesis in a clear and coherent style.

At the end of the eighteenth century a series of radical shifts in the way culture and society functioned transformed the world. From the American Revolutionary War to the French Revolution and Haitian Independence, fundamental questions were being asked about what constituted the human self, the responsibilities of humans to one another and the mutual obligations between the people and the governments that ruled them. Today, for better and for worse, we are still living with the legacies of these disputes. At the very heart of the debates lay "literature" - a highly contested domain that was often held up as the very essence of liberty. What exactly was this thing called literature and what role did it play in the fights for freedom? In this class we will read contemporary political texts alongside literary works in order to understand the entanglement of literature and revolution, and to consider the role that literature played in shaping the modern world.Texts to be examined will include works by, among others, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, AlexanderHamilton, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. The movie version of Linn-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton will frame some of our discussions, raising questions that we can ask of eighteenth-century texts.

In this seminar students will engage extensively with Hesburgh Library's Irish Ballad Collection, which will form the core corpus of texts for our class, alongside a range of supporting materials from canonical authors. The collection provides a fascinating glimpse into popular street song from the nineteenth century in Britain and Ireland. Through these materials students will learn about the history of the ballad, the mentalities of ordinary people in living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the vexed relationship between lyric poetry and popular song, and the economics of poetry production. Along the way will be asking what difference cheap broadside ballads such as those found in the collection might make to our understanding of poetry.

This course bridges the theories of the environmental humanities and ecocriticism with the study of Irish literature from 1600 to 1900. We will analyze critical theory of the environment in relation to Irish novels, tales, plays, and poems written during the height of British colonialism in Ireland - by authors like Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, J.M. Synge, Emily Lawless, and W.B. Yeats. Our readings will cover environmental events and colonial systems, such as the deforestation of Ireland, shipwrecks and rebellions, tenant farming, the Irish Famine, and island ecosystems. In class, we will discuss how these environmental contexts impacted the expression of Irish identity and colonial struggle. We will read Irish literature not just for plot, character, and style, but also for the environmental narratives it contains, exploring how each one illuminates the other.

Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats are two of the greatest Irish poets, a fact recognized by the critical attention they have attracted and by the many awards and accolades they won in their lifetimes, including the Nobel Prize. The sad and unexpected death of Seamus Heaney now enables us to begin to see his literary canon as a whole and to start to make assessments of his role in the literary history of Ireland. This is what the present course will attempt, using as a yardstick and comparison the career and poetry of W. B. Yeats. Although from significantly different backgrounds, both lived in turbulent times, both were keenly aware of the Irish traditions which gave their work its identity, and both were acutely sensitive to the historical, political, and cultural forces which helped shape their poetry. They both brooded intensely on the nature of poetry and on the need for a rigorous attention to technique and craft to avoid falling into rhetoric in their public poetry and sentimentality in their more private and autobiographical work. Their gifts in both cases extended to playwriting and to perceptive and influential critical writings, which raise questions about the nature of poetry, illuminate their own practices, and contextualize their respective canons The essence of the course will be close reading of major poems and texts by both poets, and, growing out of this, developing a comparison of their approaches to poetry and to the themes that engaged and occupied their imaginations. We shall resist any temptation to force the two into a false symbiotic relationship, and their differences will be as important in our attempts to ‘place' them as their similarities. We shall begin with a biographical and historical overview of their careers, illuminated by their own life-writings and poems of particularly personal significance. We then move on to examine the literary and cultural contexts in which they began to write (paying attention in particular to what Heaney had to say of Yeats, and how Yeats appears in his work); to appraise their early poems in providing a foundation for their respective careers; to discuss how and why they learned to be public poets; to compare how they addressed the question of violence; to assess their achievements as ‘private' and love poets; and to explore the nature and scope of their criticism (especially their writings on the art and practice of poetry). We shall conclude by attempting to assess their contribution to, and place in, the modern Irish literary tradition. The main texts for the class will be Yeats's Collected Poems and Heaney's Selected Poems. These will be supplemented by a course book which will make available further poems by Heaney and extracts from both writers' prose works, as well as providing the texts of poems or other significant work by those who influenced them.

This course will deal with the challenge of reading Joyce and Beckett in a way that gives full relish to the various voices that permeate their works. These European Modernist works are suffused with an Irish sensibility which is often either ignored or misunderstood. Joyce's four great prose masterpieces will be considered with particular emphasis on Dubliners and Ulysses. Beckett's prose will be looked at in some depth with particular emphasis on the four stories or Nouvelles and the three novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The strong sense of irony and black humor with which these works are laced will be examined. The aim of the course is to leave the student with a fresh way of reading and, more particularly, hearing Joyce and Beckett leading to a fuller enjoyment of the work.

This class has four basic objectives, to explore different ways in which to read texts, to explore the different ways in which memoir and autobiography can be read, though the lives of the authors to introduce modern Irish social and political history, and more broadly, to introduce students to different human experience. Key texts may include Frank McCourt's Anglea's Ashes, Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy, Maurice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years Agrowing. In addition we may study extracts from other books, by writers such as William Carlton, Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Harbinson.

During the nineteenth-century, Irish authors crafted some of the most iconic novels of the Gothic genre: Melmoth the Wanderer, Uncle Silas, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula. That authors from Ireland – with its atrocity-haunted past and rich folk culture – produced such works should come as no surprise. What is surprising is that the most famous of these novels do not even mention Ireland. Did these authors find escape from Irish problems by setting their fiction abroad or did they conceal their native land in the subtexts and allegories of their transplanted works? This course will explore the variety of ways Irish authors utilized the grotesque, the fantastic, and the otherworldly as vehicles for exploring culture, identity, and history. Works of Irish Gothic fiction not only profoundly impacted popular culture but also influenced the critical tradition, challenging scholars to develop new methods to engage with the narrative strategies of these strange creations. Examining world-famous novels alongside lesser-known works that more overtly engage with Irish culture and society, we will evaluate how Irish authors utilized the Gothic genre to explore both regional and universal fears, anxieties, and trauma.

Oscar Wilde's life and career was anything but sterile and he left his imprint as both a dynamic artist and iconic cultural figure. The subversive subject matter of his art and his hedonistic lifestyle not only revolted against Victorian sensibilities but also introduces an approach to literature that allows us to look forward to modernism. He was an accomplished Irish playwright for the English stage influencing future playwrights and the theatre of his public trials shaped twentieth century attitudes around homosexuality and performativity. In this course we will examine a range of Wilde's texts in order to investigate how the social and sexual transgressions in his life and his work impacted early twentieth century artists around the Atlantic.

A study of the evolving poetic careers of the two most famous Irish poets of the early and late 20th century respectively, W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Emphasis will be on collective close reading rather than historical or political contexts. Reading load is an average of 50pgs per week, but requires intense preparation. In-class presentations also required.

What is it about Jane Eyre that has so captured our collective imagination for the past one hundred and sixty years? In this course, we will celebrate Charlotte Brontë's cultural legacy and assess the enduring appeal of her mousy governess. We will begin by carefully reading Jane Eyre; we will supplement our understanding of the novel by applying selected theoretical approaches (specifically feminist and cultural theories) to the novel. As we work with Brontë's text, we will explore as well the historical parameters under which she worked, attempting to account for her success. We will then sample the richly varied film and novel adaptations of Brontë's novel (including Rebecca, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Autobiography of My Mother, as well as pop culture reincarnations like Jane Slayre) to interrogate the story's continuing hold on our imagination. Our readings of these derivative texts will focus on their constructions of femininity and masculinity and their questioning of social mores to reveal the gendered concerns driving them. Throughout the semester, we will interrogate the ways in which people respond to the literary canon so that their literary intervention and reinventions assure a classic like Jane Eyre's lasting relevance.

Images of terrible, horrifying mothers have long abounded in literature and have dominated media portrayals of motherhood for decades. Consider the mothers in Precious and the maternal substitutes in Disney films, or real-life examples like Nadya Suleman (the infamous Octomom) or Michelle Duggar: not only do a multitude of examples of "bad" mothering exist, but women's attempts to mother are also scrutinized in excruciating detail. In this course, we will read a selection of texts from the Irish and African diasporic traditions to interrogate the literary use of maternal motifs. What purpose is served by making a fictional mother monstrous? What literary effect is created? Maternal theory will provide a framework for analyzing these texts and theorizing possible impacts on the role of the modern mother. What does it say about society that these images are so popular? And what is the connection between a woman's reproductive power and the urge to label her "monstrous"?

In this course we will look at the relationship between gender politics and national politics as it plays out in the development of Irish fiction after the era of James Joyce. Focusing on Irish novels and short stories which were groundbreaking and/or controversial in terms of their exploration of gender and sexuality, the course will also investigate the historical contexts in which they were produced and the controversies they produced. Our investigation will focus on the question of how the 'trouble' generated around these controversial explorations of gender and sexuality relates to other kinds of trouble that have shaped the history of twentieth century Ireland. We will begin with the reaction against government censorship in the Irish Free State during the 1930s and 1940s, follow the emergence of Irish women writers and Irish feminism from the 1950s to the 1980s, and conclude with the rise of openly LGBT Irish writers in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Students will write three essays and participate in one in-class presentation.

In this course, we will examine the relationship between national and sexual politics through our study of gender and twentieth-century Irish drama. Beginning with the first controversies surrounding the representation of women on the Irish stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, we will study representations of gender and sexuality in the major canonical figures of the Irish renaissance--W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey--while investigating lesser-known female and queer Irish playwrights from that time such as Lady Augusta Gregory, Lennox Robinson, and Teresa Deevy. We will also look at how the treatment of gender and sexuality changes in the work of postwar and contemporary Irish playwrights, including Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Anne Devlin, Frank McGuinness, and Marina Carr. Along with the plays we will study their historical and cultural context and the sometimes quite vehement responses that these plays evoked in their audiences. Students will write three papers and do one in-class presentation.

What, and how, do writers create in the aftermath of a crisis of capitalism? How do we study the literature of our present moment and very recent past? This course explores the experimental Irish literature which flourished in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crash. Students will gain an understanding of the Irish modernist tradition and the realist novels that flourished during the prosperous years of the "Celtic Tiger", before diving into close analysis of the modernist-influenced novels of the 2010s, including Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Mike McCormack's Solar Bones and Anna Burns' Milkman, and ask where this modernist "Movement" went next by looking at even more recent Irish novels. Students will also examine the material economic circumstances of literary production, as they discover the role of small, Arts Council-supported presses and magazines in revitalising Irish writing after the crash.

Research Seminar; The ballad has long been recognized as crucial to the development of British Poetry in the eighteenth century. Precisely what a ballad is, however, remains a remarkably vexed question. This is in part because ballads fall inconveniently between disciplines ? literature, music, book history, folklore, cultural studies ? so that the study of ballads requires a broad interdisciplinary approach. For the literary scholar in particular the ballad poses difficulties because it does not fit conveniently within our familiar frameworks for study. Often there is no known author; only occasionally do we have any idea when a ballad was written; even when we know the name of the printer we cannot be sure the print we have is the earliest printing. Moreover, the printed life of ballads represents only one part of their existence: they need also to be understood as performance texts that straddle the world of orality and print. Rather than seeing these challenges as hurdles to our understanding, this class will explore the possibilities that the ballad opens up for reconsidering our approaches to the study of literature. This research seminar will train students in the use of ballad archives and will require a substantial research paper, which considers both textual and performative aspects of ballad production.

In this course we will be looking at the relationship between gender politics and national politics as it plays out in the development of Irish fiction after the era of James Joyce. Focusing on Irish novels and short stories which were groundbreaking and/or controversial in terms of their exploration of gender and sexuality, the course will also investigate the historical contexts in which they were produced and the controversies they produced. Our investigation will focus on the question of how the 'trouble' generated around these controversial explorations of gender and sexuality relates to other kinds of trouble that have shaped the history of twentieth century Ireland. We will begin with the reaction against government censorship in the Irish Free State during the 1930s and 1940s, follow the emergence of Irish women writers and Irish feminism from the 1950s to the 1980s, and conclude with the rise of gay and lesbian Irish writers in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Students will be responsible for several short response papers, at least one in-class presentation, and a 20-25 page seminar paper.

In this course we will look at the relationship between gender politics and national politics as it plays out in the development of Irish fiction after the era of James Joyce.Beginning with the short stories of Liam O'Flaherty and Sean O'Faolain in the post-independence era, we will follow the reaction against government censorship in the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland in the fiction of Kate O'Brien, John McGahern, Mary Lavin, and Edna O'Brien, and investigate the emergence of feminist and gay and lesbian writers in the 1980s and 1990s. We will conclude with an investigation of the way 21st century Irish writers respond to the major changes in Irish culture, and major revelations about the recent past, that emerged during the first decade of the 21st century. Students will write one 20-30 page seminar paper and several shorter response papers and give one in-class presentation.

Directed Readings in Irish Studies facilitates a student's reading and analysis of a specialized set of texts under the guidance of an individual instructor.

Directed Research in Irish Studies facilitates a student's research project on a topic in Irish Studies under the supervision of an individual instructor. This may include participation in ongoing faculty research projects in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

In this class, which is offered by special arrangement with the supervising professor, the student researches and writes a senior thesis.

A research course for the capstone essay for the minor in Irish Studies. Departmental approval is required.