English

This course studies medieval narratives of journeys in, to, and from Britain. These journeys of conquest and conversion, pilgrimage, vision, and quest allow examination of the relation between humans and their natural and built environments. Issues considered include national identity and borders; the localization of the sacred; memory places; performance and ritual; the projection of the self onto landscape; the agencies of place. Its places include taverns, cathedrals, castles, cities, forests, and Fairyland: some of them are still here. A core of literary texts is supplemented by visual and historical material.

This course focuses on the work of Virginia Woolf, exploring her novels, short stories, essays, diaries, and letters. This course considers Woolf’s responses to the historical upheavals of her period, including the trauma of the First World War, the beginnings of the end of empire, the battle for women’s rights, and the rise of fascism in both Britain and Europe.
 

This course explores Irish Theater since 1964. Some of the texts studied include Brian Friel's PHILADELPHIA HERE I COME, Enda Walsh's THE WALWORTH FARCE, FREEFALL by Michael West, and David Ireland's CYPRUS AVENUE. A new play is studied at each week's lecture.

This course examines how the tragic worldview is expressed in the great dramas of Greek antiquity, such as Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Antigone and Euripides’ Bacchae.  Attention is paid – through the study of the Old Testament book of Job and Marlowe’s Faust – to the continuing importance of the tragic worldview in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Finally, after exploring the political and philosophical conditions that caused the ever-decreasing importance of tragic modes of thought in modern times, the course turns to the remarkable new meaning the tragic legacy of the Greeks took on at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s mightily influential The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and a series of important works it inspired, it will be shown how the tragic worldview of the Greeks inspired artists to reject the dogmatism of reason and to find beauty, happiness, and truth in the irrational, subconscious and at times dark recesses of the human soul.

This course examines the readings of major American poets from the time of the colonial settlement to the present.

The course uses the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting as a lens through which develop students’ ability to think about literature, film, and art by employing diverse analytic methods. Hailing from across national, linguistic traditions, genres, and formats, the texts selected for discussion enable students to consider this pervasive theme through several disciplinary angles, from literary studies to art historical analysis. In addition, students consider the ghost’s political and cultural potential, as it appears in diverse texts across histories and territories.

In this course, students explore a broad range of texts in the Irish literary tradition. It encompasses material from the 18th century (Jonathan Swift) to the present (Emma Donoghue and Kevin Barry), and, in the process, engages with some of the most innovative and exciting literature to be produced over the last 300 years. The course is generically diverse, and includes work by a variety of poets, novelists, playwrights, and short-story writers. It is not organized chronologically, rather, material is clustered around a number of concepts or ideas (satire, history, violence, and place), with several lectures given over to a discussion of each of these issues.