English

The course analyses selected American literary works from the mid-17th century to today. The texts include fiction, poetry, traditional autobiographies as well as hybrid forms. Discussions will focus on aspects such as "truth", gender, race, ethnicity and morals.

The course introduces students to the nature and applications of classical and biblical texts and traditions in English literature. The main premises of the course are that writers are also readers, and that among the factors which contribute to a reader's construction of a text is previous experience of other literature; that people have read the same texts in different ways at different times and found different texts more meaningful at some times than others; that since the 1930s, or thereabouts, we have largely lost easy, personal access to a range of expectations and knowledge of classical literatures and the Bible, which were previously shared by many writers and their readers. The course provides opportunities for students to experience at first hand, from selected texts, some of the literary forms, themes, and characteristic sensibilities of ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel, which provide meaningful contexts for English literary texts.

A century of politeness and Enlightenment, but also one of revolution and filth, the 18th century was a period of excitement and change. The literature of the time both reflects and shapes this perception, and the Irish literary scene is particularly striking for the variety and richness of its literary productions. Many of the 18th century’s greatest writers attended Trinity College Dublin – Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift – while many also attended the city’s brothels and taverns, as well as frequenting Smock Alley Theatre or visiting Marsh’s Library. Different urban and rural venues provide the setting, the stage, or the inspiration for a variety of literature across genres, including poetry, plays, life writing and novels. Many of the male and female writers on this course also had cosmopolitan aspirations, and several moved to London to pursue careers there. The course will highlight these connections between Ireland and England, and indeed France, investigating the realities of authorship and readership across the 18th century. As well as familiarizing students with the literary developments taking place in Ireland, and Dublin in particular, the course also engages with issues such as gender, sexuality, and the commodification of the female body; performance and the self; and politics and national identity. It also draws on the wonderful richness of built literary heritage from eighteenth-century Dublin, and includes a research visit to Marsh's Library. 

As critics including Eric Hayot have pointed out, it can be difficult to analyze and write about contemporary culture because we lack the critical distance to gain perspective on works that depict our own historical moment. This course provides some of that critical distance, or "leverage" as Hayot describes it. Through its comparative approach, the course explores how socio-political topics that are of pressing concern to writers, artists, and thinkers now were also examined in earlier periods. The course illustrates how studying the ways in which these themes and issues were represented and understood in the past enables us to enrich our engagement with the contemporary iteration of those topics today. The course considers a different socio-political topic each week, examining how it has been explored in a pair of texts. The course covers a range of creative works, critical concepts and cultural theories from the 20th and 21st centuries. The genres covered by the course include novels, films, essays, autofiction, memoir, a play, TV episode, and photo-text book. 

This course offers a comparative study and close reading of the major heroic epics of ancient Greece and Rome: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Greece), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Rome). Topics include the warrior ethic, the distinction between kleos (glory) and time (honor), heroic friendship, of nostos (homecoming), fate and the gods, oral vs. written poetry, the social function of epic, myth and epic, and the changing nature of heroism. It also explores more closely the themes of retribution and justice, as they are very starkly presented in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and of human and divine concepts of justice in Sophocles's Antigone.

This seminar is designed to offer students a first insight into the broad range of writings during the Romantic period. It explores a number of the many authors, genres, and thematic facets of the Romantic period, from responses to the French revolution in essays, poetry, and fiction to programmatic turns towards a new kind of poetry, issues of Romantic nature writing, and the Romantic imagination (also in the visual arts). Travel narratives, the concern with science, and finally the socioeconomic contexts of publishing is also addressed. Thus, the literary versatility and (cultural) politics marking the Romantic period comes to the fore within their broader contexts; almost inevitably, gender as a critical category plays a key role.

The first part of this course explores one of the founding works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya’s BLESS ME, ULTIMA (1972), a coming-of-age novel combining magical realism with an exploration of the social and identity issues faced by Chicanos in the modern United States. The second part of the course focuses on Henry Fielding’s THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS AND OF HIS FRIEND MR. ABRAHAM ADAMS (1742), the author’s first full-length novel self-defined as a “comic epic poem in prose.” The course studies narratological issues as well as the social, political, and gender dimensions of the texts.

This course offers students a unique opportunity to spend a whole semester reading one single poem, albeit a very large one: John Milton’s PARADISE LOST (1674). One of the greatest works of English literature, this epic consists of twelve books, most of which we will devote a whole week to reading and talking about. Taking in a range of issues including love, marriage, religion, politics, education, freedom of speech, and the rights of rulers and citizens within a free commonwealth, students see why Milton still has so much to say to us. 

Haunted castles, labyrinthine catacombs, wailing ghosts, horrifying revelations, mad scientists, and undead antagonists. These are all part of the constellation of signs associated with Gothic literature. Nowadays, echoes of the historical Gothic are part of pop culture and academic theory alike; in Mark Fisher’s words, “The ghosts are swarming at the moment. Hauntology has caught on. It’s a zeitgeist.” This seminar aims to take a step back and look at where it all started. To this end, we will read key texts from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and examine Gothic aesthetics, temporality, and topology in context. We will try to answer questions such as: what are Gothic literature’s historical/cultural origins? What anxieties were embodied and explored through it? And how did it evolve into the 19th and 20th centuries?

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.