Irish Studies Undergraduate Modules: Level Three
IRST30010 Modern Ireland: Emigration and Immigration
This interdisciplinary core course will look at the history and culture of Ireland in the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first century through the lens of its experience of emigration and immigration. This is an interdisciplinary course, combining sociological, historical, anthropological and cultural perspectives. Moving from an analysis of the historical scholarship on the patterns and impacts of emigration and immigration in nineteenth-century, post-famine and twentieth-century Ireland, students will then focus on written and visual representations of emigration and immigration from the nineteenth century to the present day. The final section of the course focuses on sociological and anthropological perspectives on migration in Ireland, concentrating on the interrelations of migration, racialisation and marginalisation, and on social change and changing Irish identities emerging from recent shifts from outward to inward migration in contemporary Ireland.
IRST30050 Contemporary Ireland: Continuity and Change
This course analyzes cultural and social change in
contemporary Ireland, with particular emphasis on the impact of economic
change, of globalization and of immigration and cultural diversification and
considers how these changes are reflected in contemporary popular literature
and film. Of particular importance are:
1. the nature and significance of social and economic change in contemporary
Ireland and the extent to which cultural production has kept pace with such
change
2. gender and sexuality
3. the extent of cultural and social continuity
4. inclusion and alienation
5. urban representations and the urban/rural dichotomy in
cultural production
6. the loss of authority by the Church
7. the impact of globalization on cultural production, with particular emphasis
on genre, media and dissemination in popular culture
IRST30100 Irish Gothic
This seminar course will examine a range of Irish Gothic texts and film from the nienteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Irish authors and filmmakers have proven themselves to be very willing to use so-called gothic elements in their work such as monstrous figures, macabre occurrences, apocalyptic visions, madness, and a privileging of anti-realism over realism. Oscar Wilde may have inadvertently given voice to the reason why Irish writers are so hospitable to Gothicism when he referred to Irishness as being ‘quite another thing’. This definition of Ireland and the Irish as being unnameable, indeterminate and forever resistant to absolute classification offers a link between Irishness and Gothicism that shall be examined throughtout this course through the enabling lenses of feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and queer theory as we explore how the Irish/Gothic monster throws down challenges to essentialist nations of national, gendered and sexual identities.
IRST30110 Representing Northern Ireland
This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the intersections of culture, politics and ideology in Northern Ireland during the course of the ‘Troubles’ (1960s to the 1990s). Beginning with a grounding in historical work on Northern Ireland, the module considers the principal cultural debates in this period, and the ways in which these debates are reflected and represented in various forms of cultural production. Students will examine sectarianism, the civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, marches and parades, and the peace process, focusing on nationalism, unionism, religion, ideology, gender, class and political violence. The module will examine the configuration, representation and negotiation of identity in a variety of textual forms in Northern Ireland, including art, material and visual cultures, film and literature.