Ireland

What has become known as the "spatial turn" in the humanities has alerted us to the ways in which the spaces we inhabit are produced by culture. These seminars take as their starting point the premise that Irish writing since the end of the 18th century (the massive exception of Joyce notwithstanding) has traditionally defined itself in terms of versions of the pastoral, and this in turn has had implications for the ways in which it has been possible to write the city as an Irish space. The central avenue in this course runs through the question of how literature produces space, and how this occurs differently across literary forms (fiction, poetry, drama).  However, there are diversions down alleys to encounter ghosts, crime, history, the flaneur, psychogeography, modernity, and the mediations of culture. There are glances in the shop windows of visual culture, as well as excursions into history, architecture, and philosophy, all with a view to sketching an outline map of Dublin in literature.

Students review and apply research on social behavior and collaborative practices from the broad range of social sciences to the context of online social interaction and computer-mediated collaboration. They explore how social identity theory, network theory, actor-network theory, and research on communities of practice, public formation and computer-supported cooperative work explain online and digitally-mediated social interaction. Research frameworks and methods such as text-based qualitative analyses are introduced and applied. The challenges in working collaboratively in online distributed teams is examined critically.

The course gives students a comprehensive introduction to the Irish language and culture, and enables them to carry out a basic conversation in Irish. The course focuses on listening and speaking skills, and also on reading and writing skills. 

Topics include the development of the study of victimization; measuring victimization; theoretical perspectives on victimology; the ideal victims and claims to victimhood; victims' role in the criminal justice system and rebalancing in favor of the victim; victim offender overlap; the vulnerable victim; victims of sex crimes; victims of state and corporate crime; overcoming victimization; and victim support organizations.

Originating in romance and comedy, the marriage plot became a major element in the novel. In its classic versions the marriage plot permits the satisfaction of desire: of characters and readers alike. It may also be involved in the negotiation of complex moral choice and in the resolution of difficult social issues.  This course examines how the marriage plot functions across the history of the English novel. The first half of the course examines important 18th and 19th century examples of the marriage plot. The second half of the course asks how, in the social circumstances of the 21st century— including the availability of divorce and changed concepts of gender—novelists deploy or adapt the marriage plot.

Ireland’s symbolic and gendered construction as a musical nation offers a starting point for discussions of music, gender, and Ireland. Following that, the course surveys a range of genres, performers, and performance platforms from the 19th century onwards to explore the relationship between gender and music in the Irish context. Particular emphasis is given to traditional and popular music examples. 

The course identifies and discusses some of the major theoretical positions that have shaped 20th and 21st-century theatre practice.

This course explores key texts and themes in developing an understanding and appreciation of European film practices from 1940 to the present day. Using a series of case studies, students learn to situate a range of film texts according to historical, cultural, and social contexts, in addition to relevant theoretical debates.

Using an “ecocritical” approach, this course examines how literary texts have represented the relation of humans to “nature” and to environmental change from early mythological writings to present-day fiction. Among the texts to be studied are the Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek and Roman pastoral poems, Romantic landscape poetry, American environmental writing, Irish nature poetry, and contemporary ecological dystopic fiction.

The course examines a range of Yeats’s poetry, drama, and prose. Structured loosely around different phases of the poet’s career, seminars will emphasize key historical and cultural contexts, ranging from Yeats’s use of Irish myth and folklore through to his engagements with eugenic theory and global politics. They also attend to key question of poetics and ideology, including Yeats’s revisionary compositional practices, his use of poetic form, his attitude towards literary tradition, and how his work intersects with issues of race, religion, gender, and nation.