English

This advanced course on postcolonial literature situates the representative texts of postcolonial literature in broader intellectual and historical contexts, exploring not only the works of literature under this category but also the important issues often associated with postcolonial studies in general by means of comparative, historical, and theoretical approaches.

This course looks at ways of writing throughout the long history of experimentation with critical form: from essays and auto-fictions to critical fabulations and diaries, the "personal" and the "political" in writing have often deeply intermeshed. The course considers ways of thinking about the relationship of formal innovation and structure to the content or air of the text; to ways writers enact performative relationships with their real or imagined interlocutors; and to ways we ourselves can examine and reinvent our own manners of shaping written thought. Affect, race, gender, aesthetics, and politics, as well as archives and documents occupy students' attention, as they navigate some radical and long-lasting experiments in the history of critical thought. 

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.

Why was love such a burning topic in pre-modern France? How did poetry and prose fashion attitudes towards women, men, love, and sex? What were pre-modern constructions of gender and were there any alternatives to traditional models? During this course, students answer these questions by consulting a wide range of pre-modern texts, including courtly romance, lyric poetry, short stories, and longer narrative. They examine the portrayal of love and the conventions that govern its representations in literature. Topics include the body, virtues and vices, marriage, sexuality, seduction, chastity and violence. Students compare how men and women treat these themes, and look at how women write in genres traditionally dominated by men. Knowledge of French is not required. English translations of the works studied can be read.

Designed for sophmore students and above, this course requires no previous knowledge of literary criticism. Introducing textual analysis through hands-on exercises, the course exposes students to various perspectives for reading literature and culture through lenses of class, gender, power, knowledge production, economics, health, globalization, etc. The course covers important debates in literary and cultural studies, developing skills for analyzing texts to help them succeed in literature courses. Over two semesters, six professors introduce a variety of critical lenses for viewing literature and society. Students engage with a range of literary and cultural objects to gain new perspectives on our world and better prepare them for future courses in DFLL. Students may take one or both semesters. 

This is the second semester of the course. 

This course explores the timeless journey of coming of age through a diverse selection of literary works, ranging from classic novels to contemporary fiction and short stories. By examining these texts, the course delves into the emotional, social, and cultural challenges faced by characters as they navigate the transition from youth to adulthood. Through close reading and class discussions, the course explores how themes like identity, relationships, societal expectations, and self-discovery are reflected and reimagined across different historical periods, cultural contexts, and narrative styles. 

This course introduces students to a wide range of texts (literary, visual, and academic), concepts, ideas, theories, and practices, both historical and contemporary, and the skills they need to analyze them. The course is divided into two 5-week blocks, devoted respectively to reading literary texts, visual cultures, cultural theory and politics, and linguistics. 

This course considers a range of recent novels produced by Irish writers considering the relationship between writers and the state, north and south. Students explore what kind of difference literature can make to a society’s growing consciousness of itself. Issues to be addressed include modernity in an Irish context, sexuality, violence, the fantastic, religion and its aftermath,  the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, and the connections between literary production and the imagined "nation."  The course treats Edna O’Brien’s debut novel THE COUNTRY GIRLS (1960), as its founding text. O’Brien has said that the Archbishop of Dublin and Charles J Haughey (who was at that time Minister for Justice) characterized the book as “filth” that “should not be allowed in any decent home”. Her first three novels were subject to multiple public burnings. The course also considers works by writers such as Brian Moore, John Banville, Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Niamh Campbell, Colm Tóibín, Eoin McNamee, Anna Burns, and Sally Rooney. 

Students explore major formal, historical, and theoretical questions posed by the novel, including key ideas in narrative theory, the relationship between the novel and modernity and why the novel is often viewed as a central form for representing social life.