English

This course offers a study of English-language literature and culture from the second half of the nineteenth century with a focus on marginal and non-canonical work including poetry, fiction, drama, and visual culture. It is divided into four modules: Avant-garde movements of Victorian modernity such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and Decadence; popular fiction with a focus on genre literature including adventure, detective, horror, and children's narratives; cultural particularities of the fin de siecle, examining the shift in cultural paradigms towards twentieth-century modernity; critical reception of Victorian culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Neo-Victorianism and other contemporary versions of Victoriana. This course explores significant aesthetic, cultural, and ideological aspects of each module.

Pre-requisite: Nineteenth-Century English Fiction 

This course introduces English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The course familiarizes students with some of the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts which informed the emergence and development of literature in this period. The course's set texts reflect the broad generic range and preoccupations of the era, such as authority, gender, selfhood, and nation. Two or more plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and a variety of poetic and/or prose texts will be studied. The course provides a foundation for further study of Renaissance literature, including Shakespeare.

This course introduces students to the literature of the English Renaissance through a combination of close reading and contextualization in the cultural, social and political milieu. It focuses on the study and analysis of the most significant authors and works, particularly those by William Shakespeare. In working with texts from this period, students build on critical and discursive skills developed in previous courses, as well as increase their literary and historical knowledge.

This course introduces a number of different texts ranging from the canonical via the postcolonial to the contemporary. The course engages in the affective turn in literary studies and explores the relationship between literature and emotions. In turning to critical theory, it also considers how affective science has impacted on literary studies. The course is organized around thematic clusters, zooming in on emotions such as passion, anger, shame and grief.

London in the 18th century was the first recognizably "modern" city, the metropolitan center of a global trading empire. For this reason, poets, artists, novelists, playwrights, travel writers, satirists, and essayists were drawn persistently to London as a fascinating and complex subject for literary representation. There were few established precedents for how cities might be imagined through text. Solving the problem of how to represent the diverse, enigmatic, ever-changing city of London is one of the core literary questions that we ask on this course. 

The course introduces students to the life and novels of Jane Austen and explores how her work has been adapted in Hollywood. Students examine the relationship between source texts and their adaptations, and analyze genre, form, and thematic concerns like feminism and class.

This course explores the development of modern British drama from the late 19th century to the present, focusing on major playwrights and their works. We approach the history of British drama in three parts: the emergence of modern drama (Oscar Wilde & Bernard Shaw) at the turn of the twentieth century, two major trends in postwar Britain (John Osborne & Samuel Beckett), and the political and experimental theatre of the late 20th century onwards (Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill). Keeping in mind that dramatic texts are realized on stage, we pay attention to theatrical elements and genres, including melodrama, social realist drama, the theatre of the absurd, the comedy of menace, the play of ideas, in-yer-face theatre, and political theatre. Films and other visual materials are used to enhance students’ understanding and engagement with the plays.

This course is an introductory writing course that combines a creative writing workshop with literary seminar on the short form. Students study and write prose poems, prose sonnets, haiku prose, palm-of-the-hand stories, auto flash fiction, flash fiction, prose portraits, short lyric essays and short stories. Each week, representative works are read alongside critical assessments, followed by discussion and attempts at producing original versions. The course considers the lyrical in short form prose—the use of compression, line breaks, metaphor, analogy, juxtaposition and paratactic structures, the primacy of language over linear narrative, sonic resonances, associative writing strategies, and fragmentation. Class-time is divided between critical discussion and writing workshop.

This course provides a forum for students to develop their own creative voices through the medium of writing. Students write their own creative pieces (short stories, novel extracts, poems, personal essays) and discuss them, along with the work of others, in an encouraging space. Grounded in a philosophy that to write well is to read well, the course also discusses a number of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry texts. By engaging in close reading, editing, and writing exercises, students develop and hone creative skills applicable to a broad range of disciplines, both in academia and the creative arts.

This course begins by considering the Irish context of Shakespeare's The Tempest. It then moves to Ireland itself and examines the many different ways in which Shakespeare's work has been appreciated and appropriated in the country over the centuries. Topics include the history of Shakespeare productions in Ireland; the publication of his plays in the country; appropriations across a broad political spectrum; and the influence of Shakespeare's work on Irish writers. The course includes a number of out-of-classroom sessions at various venues, including Smock Alley and the Pearse Museum.