English

The course introduces some of the most interesting and innovative work in contemporary fiction, and gives students the knowledge and the tools to read it, judge it, and write about it with pleasure and with critical insight. Students are asked to think rigorously about the idea of the "contemporary," and how that term might relate to other literary and cultural categories. Spanning the last twenty years or so, the set texts don't attempt any sort of representative cross-section of fiction of the period; rather than seeking such a survey, students concentrate on how certain writers have used fictional form to think about what is old and what is new: what is current, or anachronistic, or ahead of its time. (To think, that is, about the structure of contemporaneity itself.)

This course offers an introduction to the full sweep of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. It allows students to sample works from different periods while also showing how these works are connected together, over and across time, by continuing narrative, generic and thematic concerns. Teaching will be by seminar, setting literary works written in English including modern translations of Old English. The course introduces students to a wide variety of reading matter – epics, mock-epics, long poems, novels, and it encourages students, through intense weekly seminars, to further develop their reading skills, and to broaden their critical vocabulary. The richness and variety of English literature is unparalleled – it is a wonderful subject to study. But it is also a challenging one, and this course is designed to give students a taste of that challenge.

In this course, students translate passages of Old English poetry using the resources of a modern edition; comment in detail on the language and poetic form of Beowulf; discuss the Beowulf manuscript; and analyze the thematic content of the poem, relating it to appropriate historical and literary contexts.

Living and studying in a foreign country can be an exciting time in your personal and intellectual development. One productive way of dealing with the onslaught of impressions is to write about it. This course is designed to help you transform your ideas into a well-considered piece of literary writing. The resulting text may be fictional or non-fictional. It could take the form of a short story set in Berlin, a literary reportage, a creative essay, a series of poems or even the beginning chapter of a novel. Program: This course will be conducted workshop-style. You will work on your own text throughout the semester, and share and discuss it with your fellow students and the instructor. In addition, we will conduct short writing exercises and discuss assigned texts about the process of writing.

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.

The course provides a broad overview of this diverse critical discourse over the past generation, while also paying close attention to some of the most pressing debates currently animating the field. Topics include identities, sexualities, temporalities, homophobia, activism, deviance, performance and transgression. 

The course explores key works from the Irish Literary Renaissance, otherwise known as the Irish Cultural Revival, or the Celtic Revival: an extraordinary period of literary endeavor during a time of intense cultural and political transformation. The texts on the course are key works of Irish literature, of literary modernism, and would also come to be hugely influential on post-colonial writing through the rest of the 20th century. Students explore how the texts shaped and contested ideas of identity and history; how Ireland's push for freedom from English rule coincided with the context of modernity; and students close-read our primary texts, discussing how they challenge conventional notions of style, form and genre, asking how their formal innovations related to historical and political change.

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.

This course provides an overview of science fiction criticism and its history. It considers what form "scientific’" endeavors took on in the Middle Ages and how these might have informed the "fiction" of the time; it will place modern and pre-modern texts in critical conversation in order to rethink the history and future history of the genre and of the book. Most of all, this course develops new insights into a diverse selection of medieval texts and illuminations, and, through these, allows students to explore critical and theoretical topics such as periodization, otherness, space and place, and the possibilities and problems of genre fiction. 

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.