JYA Reading Lists

MODULE CODE: ENG20630

MODULE TITLE: Reading Irish Literature in English

YEAR: 2016-17

SEMESTER: 2

MODULE COORDINATOR: Professor Anne Fogarty

CONTACT DETAILS: anne.fogarty@ucd.ie

For an overview of this module click here: http://www.ucd.ie/modules/ENG20630

This module will examine multiple representations of Irish political, national and cultural identity from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period.  It will consider how key myths of national identity were formulated, debated, replicated and ousted by successive generations of Irish writers.  The foundational role played by Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and J. M. Synge in the Irish Literary Revival will be considered and the ambiguous but potent symbolism of their writing for the stage will be investigated.   James Joyce’s Dubliners will be examined both as a counter-blast to the Revival and a searing modernist rendering of Dublin and its inhabitants.  Yeats’s predominance as cultural spokesperson and especially as poet will be reviewed.  His complex reflections on the matter of Ireland in his poetry and the problematic of the modern subject with her uncontainable desires will be scrutinised.  The degree to which  the playwrights, Sean O’Casey, Brian Friel and Marina Carr, deconstruct but also continue the conventions of Irish theatre will in turn be examined.  Contemporary literature will be viewed through the lens of the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Paula Meehan and the global fictions of Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright.  The problematisation of home, the feminine and the local, the unravelling of fixities surrounding gendered and sexual identity, and the prominence of tropes of loss, estrangement and displacement in the poetry and fiction of these writers will be reflected upon.  Postcolonial, cultural materialist and feminist theory will be drawn upon to ground debates and analysis of the texts on this course.

Primary Texts (subject to change):

• Enright, Anne. The Gathering (Vintage, 2008).
• Joyce, James.  Dubliners. Introduction, Terence Brown (1914; London: Penguin, 2000).
• Harrington, John P., ed.  Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama (New York: Norton, 2006). 
• Heaney, Seamus. New Selected Poems: 1988-2013 (London: Faber and Faber, 2015).
• Meehan, Paula.  Mysteries of the Home (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013).
• Tóibín, Colm.  Brooklyn (2010; London: Penguin, 2015).
• Yeats, W. B. Selected Poems.  Ed. Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 2000).  

Suggested Further Reading:

• Bartlett, Thomas.  Ireland: A History.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
• Bracken, Claire.  Irish Feminist Futures. London: Routledge, 2016.
• Deane, Seamus.  Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Flannery, Eóin.  Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Foster, R.F, ed.    The Oxford History of Ireland.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Kiberd, Declan.  Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation.  London: Vintage, 1996.
• Murray, Christopher.  Twentieth Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation.  Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
• O’Brien, Edna.  Mother Ireland.  London: Penguin, 1978.
• ---.  The Love Object: Selected Stories.  London: Faber and Faber, 2014.

(Students are advised that information provided here can be subject to change)

MODULE CODE: ENG31530

MODULE TITLE: 21st Century Irish Writing

YEAR: 2016-17

SEMESTER: 1

MODULE COORDINATOR: Dr Kenneth Keating

CONTACT DETAILS: kenneth.keating@ucd.ie

For an overview of this module click here: http://www.ucd.ie/modules/ENG31530

Primary Texts (subject to change):

All texts should be available in the Campus Bookshop, in any large bookshop in the city centre, including Books Upstairs and The Winding Stair (both of which have excellent poetry selections) or may be purchased online at Amazon.co.uk or Bookdepository.com. Many of these are also available as Kindle texts.

• Kevin Barry, There are Little Kingdoms (Stinging Fly Press, 2007)
• Alan Gillis, Somebody, Somewhere (Gallery Press, 2004)
• Kevin Power, Bad Day in Blackrock (Lilliput Press, 2008)
• Leanne O’Sullivan, Waiting for my Clothes (Bloodaxe Books, 2004)
• Claire Keegan, Foster (Faber, 2010)
• John Redmond, MUDe (Carcanet, 2008)
• Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Faber, 2013)
• Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Clasp (Dedalus Press, 2015)
• Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland, 2013)
• Caoilinn Hughes, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet, 2014)

 
Suggested Further Reading:

There are few academic resources yet created for the majority of these very recent texts. Much of the shaping of the discourse regarding these texts takes place in reviews and media articles on the works and the writers. For an introduction to such reviews visit (opens in a new window)www.contemporaryirishwriting.ie. Listed below are some texts to provide background for Twenty-First Century Irish writing.

• Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000.
• John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History.
• Stan Smith, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity.
• Matthew Campbell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry.
• Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry.
• Patrick Crotty, ed., The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (an anthology).
• Wes Davis, ed., An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (an anthology).
• Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland.
• Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce.
• George O’Brien, The Irish Novel: 1960-2010.
• Liam Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel, 1987-2007.
• Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel.
• Robert F. Garratt, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel.
• Rudiger Imhof, The Modern Irish Novel: Irish Novelists after 1945.
• Jennifer M. Jeffers, The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power.
• John Wilson Foster, The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel.
• Elke D’hoker & Stephanie Eggermont, The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends.
• Heather Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story.

Students are advised that information provided here can be subject to change.

MODULE CODE: FS20140

MODULE TITLE: Irish Cinema and Television

YEAR: 2016/2017

SEMESTER: 2

MODULE COORDINATOR: Dr. Anthony P. McIntyre

CONTACT DETAILS: anthony.mcintyre@ucd.ie

For an overview of this module click here: http://www.ucd.ie/modules/FS20140

Primary Texts (subject to change):

Required Texts ?

• Weekly required readings are given below ?
• Additional recommended readings, will be listed on the syllabus

Recommended Texts ?

• Irish National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), by Ruth Barton. ?
• Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester University ?Press, 2000), by Lance Pettitt. ?
• Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), by Debbie ?Ging ?

Film/Television Texts

• Week 1: Irish Destiny (1926), You Remember Ellen (1912)
• Week 2: Odd Man Out (1947), Elephant (1989)
• Week 3: The Quiet Man (1952)
• Week 4: The Rocky Road to Dublin (1967)
• Week 5: On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978)
• Week 6: Family (1994), Ballykissangel (1996-2001)
• Week 7: The Crying Game (1992)
• Week 8: About Adam (2001); Fergus’s Wedding (2002)
• Week 9: In America (1992); Catastrophe (2015)
• Week 10: The Wire (2002-2008); Rescue Me (2015)
• Week 11: Father Ted (1995-1998); Mrs Brown’s Boys (2011-); Moone Boy (2012-2015)

• Week 1: Read: Pettitt, Screening Ireland, pp. 28-33; 56-8 Barton, Irish National Cinema, pp. 13-33
• Week 2: Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, pp. 190-243 McIlroy, Shooting to Kill, “Introduction”
• Week 3: Gibbons, The Quiet Man, pp.40-66
• Week 4: O’Brien, The Real Ireland, pp.155-58; 170-79 Barton, Irish National Cinema, pp.85-103
• Week 5: Connolly, “Sighting an Irish Avant-Garde at the Intersection of Local and International Film Cultures”. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, pp.37-43. Read: Herr, “Addressing the Eye in Ireland: Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978)”
• Week 6: Barton, “The Ballykissangelisation of Ireland”; “Family Matters”. Llewellan-Jones, “The Grotesque and the Ideal: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Popular Comedy Programmes on British TV”. Negra, ““Romance And/As Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the (Inter)National Imaginary in the New Woman’s Film”
• Week 7: Pramaggiore, “’I Kinda Liked You as a Girl’: Masculinity, Postcolonial Queens and the ‘Nature’ of Terrorism in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game”. Barton, Irish National Cinema, pp.113-129?Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, pp. 190-243
• Week 8: McLoone, “Cinema, City and Imaginative Space: ‘Hip Hedonism’ and Recent Irish Cinema”. Barton, Irish National Cinema, pp.113-129
• Week 9: Moynihan, Other People’s Diasporas, pp.162-92 Barton, Irish National Cinema, pp.113-129
• Week 10: Negra, “The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture”. Meaney, “Not Irish Enough? Masculinity and Ethnicity in The Wire and Rescue Me”. Barton, “Drinking with McNulty: Irish American Identity and Spaces in The Wire”
• Week 11: McIntyre, “Moone Boy and the Ellipsis of Celtic Tiger Aspirationalism”. Free, “’Don't Tell Me I'm Still on that Feckin' Island’: Migration, Masculinity, British Television and Irish Identity in the Work of Graham Linehan”. Negra, “Adjusting Men and Abiding Mammies: Gendering the Recession in Ireland”

Students are advised that information provided here can be subject to change.