Irish Studies Undergraduate Modules: Level Two
This interdisciplinary core course will focus on the connections between place, people and identity on the island of Ireland. Students will analyse the relationship between people, place and identity in relation to models used in social history, ecocriticism, historical archaeology, film studies, literary studies and cultural geography. During the module we will explore the ways in which both urban and rural landscapes are related to issues of identity and representation in the Irish context, with particular emphasis on the representation of Dublin and Belfast in literature and film.
IRST20020 Gender, Culture and Society in Ireland
This seminar course will focus on the period 1922-present. We will begin with a survey of the main theoretical models for analysing of the relationship between gender and national identities, outlining how these might be applied in the Irish context. We will then analyse a wide range of cultural practices, literature and film under the following thematic categories: Mother Ireland; Feminism and Nationalism; Masculinity and Ethnicity; Sexuality and Irish Identity.
IRST20030 Reading Irish Culture: Tradition and Modernity
Tensions between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ pervade Irish cultural life from the work of Yeats through Joyce and Flann O’Brien and right up the present. In this seminar course, we will explores the tensions between a supposedly authentic ‘indigenous’ traditional Irish culture and ‘modernity’, often understood as coming from ‘external’, particularly Anglo-American, cultural influences. Focusing on literature and visual cultures from the late nineteenth-century up to the 1980s, we will examine the complex relationship that Irish cultural production has had with encounters between the local and the global, between tradition and modernity. We will pay close attention to how issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, globalisation, class, sexuality, gender and race intersect with the relation between tradition and modernity in Irish culture and society.
IRST20050 Irish Wars: Representing 1916 and the Great War
In this interdisciplinary module, students will examine the period surrounding Ireland’s struggle for independence in the early twentieth century, and consider the relationship between representation, ideology, memory and identity in the making of modern Ireland. Focusing on the period between 1914 and 1920, the module will begin with the history of this period and its representation in commemoration and documentary. Then, we will explore representations of the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and Ireland’s role in the First World War in a range of written and visual texts. Central to the module will be an interrogation of traditional and mythological configuarions of national identity, and the construction of alternate histories and subjectivities through the lens of gender, sexual and class. Texts examined will include poetry, novels, film, documentary, material culture and visual images.