Discipline of English,National University of Ireland,

Galway

Visiting StudentsCOURSE OUTLINE

Booklet2015-2016

Visiting Student Academic Co-ordinator:Dr. Richard Pearson, Room 308, Ext 5613Floor 1, Tower 1, Arts/Science Building

Visiting Student Administrative Co-ordinator:Ms. Irene O’Malley, Room 511, Ext 2567Floor 3, Tower 1, Arts/Science Building

Discipline of English Guidelines for Visiting Students

Please read the following carefully:

Each Lecture and Seminar Course is worth 5 ECTS.

Visiting Students may take as many Lecture Courses from the options available in 2BA and 3BA as their timetable allows. (Please note some lectures are capped and some lectures are on at the same time.)

Only ONE Seminar Course per semester is allowed to be taken by any student.

Semester 1 Seminar classes commence during the third week of term (ie week beginning September 21st)

Registration for Discipline of English seminars takes place on: Thursday, September 10 th, 2015 from 10am to 12noon, Aula Maxima, Ground Floor, Quadrangle Building.

All Visiting Students are assessed by Essay only.

Dates for submission of Essays will be announced at Lectures.

Seminar Courses are assessed by continuous assessment and a final essay/portfolio.

Lecture Courses Semester 1, 2015-2016

ENG304.E CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE This course will explore contemporary world literature through works of new and recent fiction. The course texts will comprise of novels by writers from across several continents. We shall explore how these current voices make sense of our complex contemporary global culture, using key critical approaches, literary criticism and literary reviews. We will examine contemporary narrative strategies, authorial identities, and the relationships between story-telling, memory, history, and the self. We will focus on debates that shape our own world: deriving from such topics and social issues as globalization and capitalist development, sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, memory and loss, migration and journeys, community and the family, repression and moral guilt, decolonization and neo-colonial formations, and conflict and violence.

Venue: Thursday 11-12 AM250 O’hEocha Theatre and Friday 1-2 Richard Kirwan Theatre SC001

Lecturers: Dr. Sorcha Gunne and Dr. Richard Pearson

Texts: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (2007)Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008) Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006)Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)Nadine Gordimer, The House Gun (1998)Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN383.E LITERATURE & CULTURE: ROMANTICISMRomanticism represents one of the most important periods of innovation in literary history. This course examines major figures in the movement, c. 1790-1820, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats and Shelley, and critics and satirists such as Thomas Love Peacock and Jane Austen. The Romantics challenged inherited orthodoxies of subject matter and style in poetry and prose, emphasizing the value of imagination and the sublime, childhood, superstition, and taboo subjects of sexuality and violence. 

Venue: Monday 4-5 O’Flaherty Theatre and Tuesday 5-6 IT250 IT Building

Lecturer: Prof. Daniel Carey and Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide Texts: Course Reader:

Includes selected writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats, John Clare, and lesser-known writers, as well as extracts from political commentators such as Burke and Wollstonecraft. (The Course Reader will be available from Print That on Concourse)

Individual Texts:Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)(These texts will be available from the College Bookshop.)

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN2118: NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE(Home students register under ENG238)This course investigates selected British Victorian prose, poetry, fiction, and drama, from 1832 until the turn of the century. It discusses how class conflict, gendered ideologies, religious controversies, scientific discoveries and imperial ambitions shaped (and were in turn shaped by) the literature of this tumultuous period. Students wishing to read ahead should begin with Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton.

Venue: Wednesday 9-10 AM150 O’Tnuathail Theatre and Wednesday 2-3 IT250 IT Building

Lecturers: Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide

Texts: Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume E, The Victorian Age (New York and London, 2012). (Available in the Book Store. Make sure you purchase the right volume). Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848)Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN388.E STUDIES IN MODERN IRISH LITERATURETwentieth Century Irish DramaThis course introduces students to the rich, diverse and innovative drama of Irish playwrights in the twentieth century. It charts the movement in Irish drama from the creation of the national theatre movement at the end of the 19th century to the present day. Plays ranging from the works of Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats to those of Brian Friel and Marina Carr will introduce students to the social, political, and cultural tensions, complexities and motives inherent in the making of modern Irish theatre. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify, analyse and contrast a range of plays written in a variety of theatrical styles and will be able to relate these dramas to changing issues in Irish society, politics, and culture throughout the twentieth century.

Venue: Wednesday 9-10 AC002 Anderson Lecture Theatre and Friday 9-10 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre

Lecturers: Dr. Ian R. Walsh and Dr. Miriam Haughton

Texts: John Harrington (ed), Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama (Norton) All other primary texts not in the Norton Anthology will be provided or are available through online databases. Note: Students are urged only to buy the editions mentioned above, as cheaper editions often contain uncorrected errors that will impede your appreciation and understanding of the text.

Assessment Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

Lecture Courses Semester 2, 2015-2016

ENG203.E GENRE STUDIES This course will involve the study of literary genres and how these relate to and emerge out of the cultural contexts that formed them. The course will focus on a series of literary texts representative of particular generic forms, for example, the realist novel, science fiction, political writing, imperial romance, historical fiction, children's fiction, utopian writing, travel writing. We will study generic narratives, myths and characters alongside cultural themes and contexts and evolving media formats.

Venue: Thursday 12-1 IT250 IT Building, 1st Floor and Thursday 3-4 Kirwan Theatre

Lecturers: Dr. Andrew O’Baoill and Dr. Richard Pearson

Texts: (not in running order):George Eliot, Silas Marner (OUP)Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Norton)H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (Norton)Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (Broadview)Nellie Bly - 10 Days in a Mad HouseUpton Sinclair - The JungleJules Verne - Around the World in Eighty DaysFinal text tbc

Assessment: Essay (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

ENG202.E 18 TH CENTURY STUDIES

This course aims to introduce students to the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The Victorians loathed and disowned their eighteenth-century predecessors, denouncing their literature as disgusting, immoral, and horribly impolite. This assessment is not entirely unfair. Yet eighteenth-century authors were deeply concerned with politeness, with debating the meaning and role of literature and art-forms, and exploring the morality of human nature and society itself. This course seeks to uncover some of paradoxes of eighteenth-century writing in order to recover the richness of its literary heritage. It will look at the expansion of print culture, with the 'rise of the novel' as a dominant literary form, the modulations of satire, the flowering of 'sentimental' literature and its more carnal dimensions. Themes covered will include financial crisis, the tension between money and morality, and the slipperiness of gender and sexuality. While seeking to historicise the period, the course will also raise parallels with modern culture and explore what resonances the literature of the period might have for contemporary readers.

Venue: Wednesday 10-11 Aras Ui Chathail Lecture Theatre and Thursday 3-4 Darcy Thompson Theatre

Lecturers: Dr. Rebecca Barr

Assessment: Essay (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN2126 STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE(Home students register under ENG204)This course seeks to familiarise students with the rich variety of early modern drama and poetry. To this end, we will consider the work of well-known authors such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, alongside that of their less-familiar contemporaries, including Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer. The course is arranged thematically, rather than in a text-based way, into two sections. Section A focuses on religious and political contexts that inform early modern literature. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England was ruled by several monarchs, experienced religious reformation and conflict, faced a succession crisis and lived in threat of foreign invasion. We will be exploring how these historical circumstances informed literary representations of kingship and court politics, and articulations of faith and belief. Having addressed some political and religious contexts for interpretation of early modern literature, Section B moves to consider identities (of gender, race and sexuality). This section of the course will address ideas such as gender transgression, desire, female speech, selfhood, and difference as they are manifested in drama and poetry by male and female writers.

Venue: Monday 5-6 O’Flaherty Theatre and Tuesday 3-4 O’Flaherty Theatre

Lecturers: Dr. Victoria Brownlee

Texts: Christopher Marlowe, Edward II William Shakespeare, The Tempest William Shakespeare, Othello William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam Course Reader

Assessment: Essay (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN2127 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE(Home students register under EN2123)This lecture course examines a range of sixteenth and seventeenth British literature written by Shakespeare and his early modern contemporaries. Section A of EN2123 will run on Mondays and Tuesdays from weeks 1 to 6, and Section B will run on Mondays and Tuesdays from weeks 7 to 12 of the semester.

Section A:Topic TBD.

Section B:Section B of ‘Studies in Renaissance Literature’ deals with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its confluences. We will begin by raising broad questions about what ‘Shakespeare’ means and why we continue to study his works today. Our first few lectures will investigate the varied resonances of ‘Shakespeare’ across time and cultures. The remainder of this section will then be dedicated to an intensive investigation of the work for which Shakespeare is best remembered in contemporary society: Hamlet. Not only will we apply a variety of modern critical lenses (including feminist and Freudian theory) to this Renaissance play, but we will also give some consideration to how Hamlet has been received and adapted by later authors such as Iris Murdoch or Laura Bohannan.

Venue: Monday 5-6 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre and Tuesday 3-4 IT250 IT Building

Lecturers: Dr. Lindsay Reid and A.N.Other

Texts: Section A:To be confirmedSection B:A course reader, available from PrintThatWilliam Shakespeare, Hamlet (Norton edition), available from the university bookshop

Assessment: Essay (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN385 DRAMA AND THEATRE STUDIES

This course is an introduction to some of the key elements of dramatic writing, dramaturgy and theatre history from the late nineteenth century to the present. We pay special attention to the ways in which meanings are produced by theatre, through acting and directional practice, and to the various ways in which the theatre functions as a social institution.  Naturalistic, modernist, postmodernist and globalized forms of theatre are considered in relation to a number of case studies. The course will also involve attendance at a theatre production during the semester.

Venue:   Tuesday 5-6 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre and Wednesday 9-10 IT250 IT Building  Lecturers:           Prof. Lionel Pilkington and Dr Charlotte McIvor Texts:   Students must read the following ten plays:

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (Nick Hern)Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (Samuel French) Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Drama Online)Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (Nick Hern)Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Faber and Faber) Bertolt Brecht Life of Galileo (Methuen/Drama Online) Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (Faber and Faber/Drama Online) Lynn Nottage, 'Ruined' (Theatre Communications Group)Suzan Lori-Parks, The America Play and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group)

 Assessment        Mid-term Assessment (40%)

End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

ENG302 MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISMThis course will introduce and explore two major cultural periodisations of the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. While emphasis will be on readings of literature in English, the wider geographical and cultural contexts will be discussed and parallel developments in other arts (including visual arts and architecture) will be explored.

Venue: Tuesday 5-6 ENG-G018 Lecture Theatre 1, Engineering Building andWednesday 9-10 Kirwan Theatre

Lecturers: Prof. Sean Ryder and Dr. Justin Tonra Texts: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford paperback)

Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (Penguin)Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Penguin)A Course Reader is available from Print That, and other texts will be made available on Blackboard.

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

EN387 SPECIALIST STUDIES: TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE Irish Poetry and Fiction: Yeats, Joyce and After

This course focuses on two of the Irish giants of twentieth-century literature and on the impact of their work on subsequent poets and fiction writers. W.B. Yeats and James Joyce will be the concentration of the first six weeks of the course, with brief looks ahead at their influence; what emerges in more recent writers who borrow, steal, adapt, and contest their writing will be the focus of the course for the second six weeks.

Venue: Wednesday 2-3 IT250 IT Building and Friday 9-10 AM250 Colm O’hEocha Theatre

Lecturers: Dr. John Kenny and Dr. Adrian Paterson

Texts: W.B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissey (Oxford, 2008)Writing After Yeats (course book available at Print That / on Blackboard)James Joyce, Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) [extracts]Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)John McGahern, The Dark (1965) Patrick McCabe, The Dead School (1995)Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island (2012)Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013)

Assessment Mid-term Assessment (40%)

End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

ENG303 NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE This course focuses upon poetry, fiction and non-fiction from the mid-nineteenth century with an emphasis on the way in which American writers are constructing a national literature and a national history, engaging with contemporary reform movements, such as abolitionism and women's rights, and investigating religious belief. Texts include selections from Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Dickinson, Douglass.

Venue: Monday 4-5 O’Flaherty Theatre and Friday 1-2 AC002 Anderson Lecture Theatre

Lecturers: Prof. Sean Ryder and Dr. Sorcha Gunne

Texts: Norton Anthology of American Literature: Eighth Edition, Volume B            Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin edition)

Assessment: Mid-term Assessment (40%)End-of-Semester Examination (60%)

LIST OF SEMINARS (SEMESTERS 1 and 2)

You may choose ONE seminar each semester

STUDENTS MUST TAKE A DIFFERENT SEMINAR COURSE EACH SEMESTER. STUDENTS MAY NOT TAKE TWO SEMINARS WITH THE SAME COURSE TITLE EVEN IF THE COURSE CODE IS DIFFERENT.

Code Seminar Title Semester available

Venue

EN278.I/EN278.II

MILTON’S POETRYDr. Victoria Brownlee This course focuses on John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost, which tells the story of Adam and Eve, their fall from Eden, and the conflict between Satan and God. The seminar’s primary aim is to facilitate a close reading of Milton’s poem while also referring to seminal critical interpretations. We will explore the poem’s treatment of character and motivation, good and evil, free will, gender, politics, marriage, and literary epic. For the purposes of comparison, we will consider extracts from the King James Bible, and explore how the political, theological, and philosophical contexts of the seventeenth century inform Milton’s reading of the biblical narrative of Genesis.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (one oral presentation (10%), and one written assignment (20%)); 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Monday 11-1AMB-G043 Seminar Room, Arts Millennium(Semester 1)

Monday 11-1Room 302 Tower 1(Semester 2)

EN280.I/EN280.II

TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE NOVELThe Novel and the Ethical Effects of Reading Ms. Kathleen Pacious

The crossover of literature and ethics is an exciting and recent field in literary studies. This seminar pays particular attention to the capacity of novels to persuade, influence, and affect their readers. We will explore topics that include aesthetics vs ethics, empathising with “bad” characters, the connection between novel-reading and empathy, fictionality vs reality, the relationship between reader and

1 and 2 Monday 9-11TB306 Tower 2

author, the role of affect in literary studies, and how to “measure” readerly engagement and ethical influence. Eschewing the idea that ethics only focuses on moral issues, we will draw on narrative theory as we engage in close reading of four novels from 1818-1989, drawing on historical and contemporary ethical theories.

The novels include: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989).

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (10% in-class assignments, 20% mid-term essay), 70% final essay.

EN2112/EN2100

CREATIVE WRITING "Patrols of the Imagination"Ms. Siobhan Kane

This course will provide a context and framework to nourish and enhance students' interest and ability in creative writing, with a mixture of weekly writing exercises and critical readings of notable writers, with a particular focus on the short story, referencing some of the genre's greatest exponents, such as; Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O' Connor, Raymond Carver, Roald Dahl, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams, Annie Proulx, Kate Chopin, and Ray Bradbury. The course will also touch on a diverse range of novels, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and encourage weekly class discussions around the culture and processes of creative writing.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (a combination of weekly written exercises and critical reviewing,) and 70% final submission - a creative writing project of the student’s choice i.e. a chapter of a novel, some short stories, poems, play, or non-fiction.

1 and 2 Tuesday 9-11TB306 Tower 2(Semester 1)

EN2114/EN2102

RENAISSANCE DRAMAMs. Kirry O’Brien

This course explores four plays, two by William Shakespeare and two by his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. We will examine the development of theatrical drama during this era, and invigilate many of the concerns of the day that were addressed by said theatre: Kingship, power, race, gender etc.

Texts: Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Edward II. William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV.

Assessment: 15% for the class presentation write up, 15% for a mid-term minor essay and 70% for the final essay.

1 and 2 Tuesday 9-11 Room 302 Tower 1

EN2115/EN2103

RENAISSANCE DRAMADr. Dermot Burns

1 and 2 Thursday 1-3TB306 Tower 2

This course examines the treatment of love in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure. The method of study will involve close textual analysis and consideration of a variety of critical approaches to the plays.

Texts: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure.

Assessment: two short essays (15% each) - 30%, one final in-class essay 70%.

EN299.I/EN299.II

FILM AND SHAKESPEAREDr. Lindsay Reid

What happens when a Renaissance-era stage play is adapted for the contemporary screen? Why have successive generations of filmmakers so often sought to reinterpret Shakespeare’s works? What does the plethora of modern film adaptations say about the ‘Shakespeare Industry’? This seminar is designed for students interested in exploring Shakespeare's dramatic art alongside cinematic adaptations of his plays. We will study one tragedy and one comedy from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, respectively) as a means to understanding the interpretative choices made by filmmakers who have reworked these two texts. Feature-length films under our consideration will include Romeo and Juliet (1968), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), among others.

Assessment: 15% group presentation, 15% film review, and 70% final essay

1 and 2 Tuesday 9-11Q1, Huston School of Film and Media(Block Q, Earls Island)

EN2116/EN2106

SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDIESMs. Kirry O’Brien

This seminar will examine, in detail, some examples of Shakespearean Comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage: however, many trials and obstacles have to be overcome along the way. We shall explore the complex issues raised on the journey towards a so-called happy ending. Recommended (not obligatory) text: RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Measure For Measure.

Assessment: 15% for the class presentation write up, 15% for a minor essay and 70% for the final essay.

1 and 2 Tuesday 11-1 TB306 Tower 2

EN2117/EN2107

SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDIESMs. Kirry O’Brien

1 and 2 Wednesday 9-11 TB306 Tower 2

This seminar will examine, in detail, some examples of Shakespearean Comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage: however, many trials and obstacles have to be overcome along the way. We shall explore the complex issues raised on the journey towards a so-called happy ending. Recommended (not obligatory) text: RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Measure For Measure.

Assessment: 15% for the class presentation write up, 15% for a minor essay and 70% for the final essay.

EN441.I/EN441.II

PLAYS, PLAYERS AND PLAYHOUSES Victorian Farce and MelodramaProf. Richard Pearson This seminar explores the popular forms of theatre that dominated the nineteenth century: farce and melodrama. We will examine a number of texts within each genre to identify their central characteristics, and then consider how these plays were situated in the theatrical and cultural contexts of the day. We will look at the playwrights, theatres, managers and actors who wrote, staged and performed some of the most popular examples of the forms. Above all, we will explore the question of why these forms became so dominant in the nineteenth-century London theatre.

Texts include a series of One-Act farces: J.M. Morton, Box and Cox and Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw; William Brough, Apartments; Mark Lemon, The Ladies’ Club; J.S. Coyne, How to Settle Accounts with your Laundress; and a series of Melodramas: Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn and Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow; Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep; Colin Hazlewood, The Chevalier of the Maison Rouge; or, The Days of Terror!; Tom Taylor, The Ticket-of-Leave Man; H.M. Milner, Mazeppa.

NOTE – YOU WILL NEED TO BRING A TABLET, LAPTOP OR E-READER TO THESE CLASSES, AS ALL TEXTS ARE ONLINE.

Assessment: Portfolio (30%); final essay (70%).

1 and 2 Monday 3-5TB306 Tower 2

EN444.I/EN444.II

PAIN AND PLEASURE IN JACOBEAN THEATREProf. Lionel Pilkington

Jacobean drama is well known for its often-spectacular stage explorations of sexual transgression and social punishment. This course considers four of the most famous of these plays, and examines the relationship between theatricality, social order, power and sexual desire. The main emphasis of the course will be on close textual analysis, and to that end a detailed knowledge of all four plays

1 and 2 Semester 1 Thursday 9-11Room 302 Tower 1

Semester 2Thursday 9-11Room 302 Tower 1

will be essential. As well as class presentations, there will be two short critical essays.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (Penguin);Anon The Revenger’s Tragedy (New Mermaids or Methuen);Thomas Middleton and John Rowley’s The Changeling (NHB or New Mermaids); John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (NHB or Revels New Student Edition).

Assessment: 30% for continuous assessment (15% for a short [1000 word max] essay and 15% for general class participation including completion of a one page in-class analysis). 70% for final (2,000 word max) essay.

ENG201.I/ENG201.II

EXPLORING THE CREATIVE ARTSMs. Mary McPartlan

This ten-week course aims to offer students of literature and theatre an opportunity to experience other relevant art forms, thereby gaining a valuable broader context for their chosen field of study. Thus,traditional Irish music, old style and contemporary song and dance, one contemporary Irish Film, one contemporary Irish Play and a TG4 documentary will be included, with a view to developing a critical understanding of the creative arts, and the varied forms of cultural expression. The Arts in Action programme will be a compulsory element of study with attendance at three of the workshop- lunchtime performances, follow up class discussion and written reviews.

Valuable resourceTexts: - Carson, Ciarán, The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music; - Breathnach, Breandán. Folk Music and Dances of Ireland; - Hast, Dorothea and Scott, Stanley. Music in Ireland: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture; - Brennan, Helen. The Story of Irish Dance; - White, Harry, and Barra Boydell, eds. The Encyclopdia of Music in Ireland. 1st ed. Vol. 1&2; - Mulrooney, Deirdre. Irish Moves: An Illustrated History of Dance and Physical Theatre in Ireland.

Assessment: 30% Continuous assessment and 70% end of term essay of 2,000 words.

1 and 2 Wednesday 11- 1Large Acoustics Room, Aras na Mac Leinn.

ENG205.I/ENG205.II

OLD ENGLISH I – INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND READINGFrancisco Rozano Garcia

Old English is an exciting and beautiful language. Apart from being an invaluable object of study to those with an interest in etymology, it is the vehicle for some of the most challenging and captivating literature you will ever read.  This course will provide you with a thorough introduction to learning to read Old English without painful

1 and 2 Monday 1-3 TB306 Tower 2

memorisation! We’ll think about many important theoretical issues related to engagement with the language and its texts, and we’ll explore the culture of the Anglo-Saxon people. 

Texts: Robert Hasenfratz and Thomas Jambeck’s Reading Old English.

Assessment: Weekly assignments 30% (five assigned, best three chosen); Essays 70% (two short essays assigned, worth 35% each).

ENG207.I/ENG207.II

19TH CENTURY WRITING: SCARY LONDONAnna Gasperini

Victorian London was the natural environment of some of the scariest monsters of literature in the English language. This course focuses on representations of the Victorian city in serialized popular fiction, cheap literature written specifically for lower-class readers. Using a critical approach based on new historicism and spatial theory, the course analyses the monstrous characters and spaces of literature from the perspective of Victorian London’s geography, class structure, and such infrastructures as markets, workhouses, hospitals, and cemeteries. Finally, the course examines how the space and characters of Victorian London survived, through adaptation and reinvention, in contemporary fantasy fiction.

Main texts: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist 1837 (Oxford edition); G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London 1846-52; James Malcolm Rymer, Sweeney Todd (1846-7); Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (1996).

Assessment: 30% Continuous Assessment (20% Short Writing Assignment + 10% Class Presentation) , 70% Final Essay

1 and 2 Thursday 9-11TB306 Tower 2

ENG208.I/ENG208.II

TWENTIETH CENTURY STUDIESDr. David Clare

This seminar will examine the children’s fiction of Belfast writer C.S. Lewis, alongside Irish children’s literature that either influenced his work or that has much in common with it. Lewis was heavily influenced by the literature of his native country – particularly Irish works of fantasy by Swift and Stephens. Like Wilde and Edgeworth, he attempted to infuse his work with spiritual and moral teachings while never losing sight of the need to tell a good story. Writers who came after Lewis, such as Lavin, have tried to emulate his success at

1 and 2 Tuesday 11-1 Room 302, Tower 1(Semester 1)

Monday 2-4 IT204 IT Building(Semester 2)

introducing supernatural happenings into the prosaic lives of ordinary children. The anti-colonial themes in the work of Lewis and the other writers will also be discussed.

Texts: Jonathan Swift – Parts I & II of Gulliver’s Travels; Maria Edgeworth – Eton Montem, “The Orphans”, and “The White Pigeon”; Oscar Wilde – “The Selfish Giant” and “The Happy Prince”; James Stephens – The Crock of Gold; C.S. Lewis – The Magician’s Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader; Mary Lavin – A Likely Story [All but the Lewis and the Lavin will be included in a Course Handbook].

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (class participation, one oral presentation and one, brief written assignment); 70% final essay.

ENG223.I/ENG223.II

SPECIAL THEMEDr. Sorcha Gunne

Bodies and Ireland This module will explore representations and registrations of the body in a selection of Irish and related writing and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It will consider both the specificities of the Irish socio-historical context and the corresponding conditions of global modernity. As such, it will examine the tensions, negotiations and new articulations that can be read through the lens of both Irish social history and transnational configurations of bodies, particularly women’s bodies. The module has been arranged into 4 interconnected units of intellectual debate. By way of introduction, we begin by considering the female embodiment of Ireland in discourses of nationalism. We will then think about the embodiment of Ireland through the literary trope of the body in the bog. We next turn to the topic of food and hunger before concluding with two units that will explore the policing of women’s bodies in various manifestations.

Reading list includes:Seamus Heaney, North (1975, selections from)Aislinn Hunter, Stay (2002)Marita Conlon-McKenna, Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990)Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence (2007, selections from) Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (1996)Emer Martin, Baby Zero (2007) Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013)

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment, 70% final essay

1 and 2 Wednesday 3-5Room 302 Tower 1

EN298.I/EN298.II

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie QueeneDr. Clíodhna Carney

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590s) is one those very rare works of art into which a whole culture seems to have been poured. There is everything in it: love, sex, evil, religion, theories of government, philosophy, violence, slavery, perversion. And above all, brilliant poetry. Spenser was looking in two directions: back to

1 and 2 Monday 9-11Room 302, Tower 1

the literature of Virgil, and forwards through the political and religious change of his own time into a hypothetical future world. Our class will involve a close reading of Books 1 and 2, and students can bring all sorts of other interests to bear on our discussions: history, science, philosophy, political science, mythology, classics.

Text: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, rev. ed. (Longman, 2007).

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (4 short written assignments: 20% (i.e. 4 x 5%); one panel discussion: 5%, one debate: 5%) and one long end-of-term essay: 70%.

EN2113/EN2101

Creative WritingSiobhan Kane

This course will provide a context and framework to nourish and enhance students' interest and ability in creative writing, with a mixture of weekly writing exercises and critical readings of notable writers, with a particular focus on the short story, referencing some of the genre's greatest exponents, such as; Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O' Connor, Raymond Carver, Roald Dahl, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams, Annie Proulx, Kate Chopin, and Ray Bradbury. The course will also touch on a diverse range of novels, creative nonfiction, and poetry, and encourage weekly class discussions around the culture and processes of creative writing.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (a combination of weekly written exercises and critical reviewing,) and 70% final submission - a creative writing project of the students choice ie. a chapter of a novel, some short stories, poems, play, or non-fiction.

1 and 2 Tuesday 1-3Room 505, English DeptSemester 1

Tuesday 1-3,TB306, Tower 2Semester 2

EN2119/ EN2120

Media StudiesBernadette O’Sullivan

This Seminar series is an introduction to journalism. Students who engage fully with all aspects of the seminar will begin to develop the knowledge, practical skills and confidence to find their journalistic voice: to generate ideas and research and develop a portfolio of journalistic material. Students will select and attend two newsworthy events on campus, in the city, or in their own locality and submit follow-up work.

Assessment:  Portfolio of journalistic work: 30% continuous assessment and 70% for final portfolio of articles.

1 and 2 Friday 11-1TB306, Tower 2(Semester 1)

EN2121/EN2122

Media Industries AAndrew O’Baoill

How do issues of ownership, funding, and organisation shape our media environment? This course will provide an introduction to study of media industries, through a critical political economic lens. We will examine a variety of models, including commercial, political economic and alternative; identify the institutional pressures shaping media texts; and discuss the role of a number of interventions aimed at disrupting 'business as usual' in the mass media

Assessment: 30% Continuous Assessment and 70% Final Assessment

1 and 2 Wednesday 5-7TB306, Tower 2

ENG213.I/ENG213.II

Film StudiesDr Fiona Bateman

1 and 2Thursday 9-11,B1 Huston School of

This seminar is an introduction to studying film in an academic context. During the semester students will develop new ways of watching and thinking about films; they will learn how to ‘read’ a film. Issues including genre, intertextuality, narrative and narration will be discussed in class. The films (texts) which students will view and analyse for the course are all Irish, chosen because they share certain thematic characteristics but differ in significant ways.

The films are: Flight of the Doves (1971), Into the West (1992), Mickybo and Me (2006) and Kisses (2008). As we will be focussing on Irish films, this seminar will also address representations of Ireland and Irishness on screen.

Assessment: 3 short assignments (10% each) and 1 essay (70%).

Film & Media(Semester 1)

Friday 12-2, Q1 Huston School of Film & Media(Semester 2)

ENG222.I/ENG222.II

Special Author: Jane AustenMuireann O’Cinneide

This seminar explores a selection of the writings of Jane Austen (1775-1817). Austen’s current status as one of the best-loved and most critically-admired novelists in English literature can obscure the formative influences and cultural contexts of her work. This module begins with some of Austen’s earliest work, tracing a transition in narrative voice from parody to satire to a distinctive ironic mode. It then traces the refinement of this mode into a powerful tool of ethical commentary through examining two of Austen’s most complex and often-misunderstood mature novels. We will also examine the present-day cultural production of Austen as author through twentieth-century cinematic adaptations and literary pastiches.Main Texts: “Love and Freindship” (~1790); “Lady Susan” (~1794); Northanger Abbey (1818); Mansfield Park (1814); Emma (1815). Oxford University Press editions (where possible), esp. the 2008 edition for NA.Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (15% class presentation; 10% written assignment(s); 5% in-class participation); 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Wednesday 3-5TB306 Tower 2

ENG217.I/ENG217.II

MEDIA STUDIESExploring JournalismMrs. Bernadette O’Sullivan

This Seminar series is an introduction to journalism. Students who engage fully with all aspects of the seminar will begin to develop the knowledge, practical skills and confidence to find their journalistic voice: to generate ideas and research and develop a portfolio of journalistic material. Students will select and attend two newsworthy events on campus, in the city, or in their own locality and submit follow-up work.

Assessment:  Portfolio of journalistic work: 30% continuous assessment and 70% for final portfolio of articles.

1 and 2 Monday 1-3CA002 Cairnes Building(Semester 1)

Monday 1-3 AM112 Arts Millennium Building(Semester 2)

Code Seminar Title Semester available Venue

EN336.I/EN336.II

BECKETT ON PAGE & STAGE: PROSE, POETRY, DRAMADr. David Clare

Samuel Beckett’s work is often described as ‘ahistorical’ and as being set ‘nowhere’. In keeping with a recent shift in Beckett criticism, however, this module seeks to place Beckett’s work in socio-historical context. Close analysis of the works is employed to reveal the depth of Beckett’s lifelong engagement with the landscape and culture of his

1 and 2 Tuesday 3-5Room 302 Tower 1

native Ireland. Students will discover the degree to which Beckett’s early work is critical of Free State Ireland and narrow definitions of Irishness. They will learn that Beckett’s later work is often set in a ‘liminal space’, with Beckett superimposing the countries where he lived in later life (England and France) over the Ireland of his youth; Beckett does this in order to subtly explore the psychological effects of exile, which is itself a very ‘Irish’ preoccupation. Other topics covered in discussions include narrative and dramatic experiment, Beckett’s play with genres, and the developments in his style between the early 1930s and the 1980s.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (class participation, one oral presentation and one, brief written assignment); 70% final essay.

EN404.I/EN404.II

CONTEMPORARY IRISH POETRYDr. Adrian Paterson

This course traces the enormous variety of streams and tributaries in Irish poetry after Yeats, with a particular emphasis on the poems and poets of mid-century and how they influenced later writers.  Exploring local and contemporary contexts, the focus is carefully drawn on close readings of the most interesting poems.  This allows for discussion of exciting work from a range of known and lesser-known authors, including Louis MacNeice, Samuel Beckett, Austin Clarke, Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and John Hewitt, considering in detail their influences and after-effects.  Text: Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Patrick Crotty (Blackstaff Press), Coursebook.

Assessment will take into account the quality of class participation and two brief written assignments (30%), and a longer final essay (70%).

1 and 2 Thursday 1-3Room 302 Tower 1

EN3109/EN3111

POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WARMs. Kirry O’Brien

This seminar engages with the poetry of World War 1, a poetry written by men and women, combatants and non-combatants, at home and at the front. It examines how literature helped prepare people for war and sustained them through it. It also looks at the production of mythologies which still inform our understanding of the Great War.

Assessment: 15% class presentation write up, 15% for mid-term review/close reading of a poem or poster from the period and 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Monday 11-1 S202, Block S

EN3110/EN3112

POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WARMs. Kirry O’Brien

This seminar engages with the poetry of World War 1, a poetry written by men and women, combatants and non-combatants, at home and at the front. It examines how literature helped prepare people for war and sustained them through it. It also looks at the production of mythologies which still inform our understanding of the Great War.

Assessment: 15% class presentation write up, 15% for mid-term review/close reading of a poem or poster from the period and 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Wednesday 11-1Room 302 Tower 1

EN426.I/ AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH 1 and 2 Wednesday 5-7

EN426.II Prof. Daniel Carey

The seminar focuses on factual and fictionalised accounts of murder in America, asking why violence is a central part of American culture and the literary imagination. Texts include Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart, William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Assessment: One presentation and commentary (30%) and 70%: two essays at 35% each.

Room 302 Tower 1

EN434.I/EN434.II

STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTIONJames Joyce's Early FictionDr. Irina Ruppo

This course will examine James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and some of his short stories. We shall consider various conflicting approaches to the texts and develop new interpretations through class discussions and debates. Texts: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; ‘Araby’; ‘The Dead’; ‘An Encounter’.

Assessment: 10% participation, 20% two short written assignments and 70% for final essay.

1 and 2 Friday 1-3Room 302 Tower 1

EN442.II VICTORIAN LITERATURE Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide

This seminar explores the influence of imperialism and colonialism on the fiction of the Victorian period (1832-1901). It discusses the dynamics of colonial power and racial hierarchies that underlay literary encounters with ‘foreignness’ in and out of England). Authors include Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Olive Schreiner, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells. Main Texts: Elleke Boehmer, ed. Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868); H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898); Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901).

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (15% individual in-class presentation; 10% written assignment; 5% in-class participation exercises); 70% final essay.

2 only Tuesday 1-3Room 302 Tower 1

EN448.I/ EN448.II

STORIES TOLD AND RE-TOLDDr. Irina Ruppo

The course examines authors’ use and adaptation of folkloric and mythological material in their works.  The course examines a variety of early modernist and contemporary texts alongside earlier materials alluded in or explored by those texts.  Straddling the perceived divide between popular fiction and classic literary works, the course considers the writing of W. B. Yeats, minor authors of the Irish Revival, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Joyce, John Updike, and Douglas Adams.  The course enables students to query the nature of literary production and reception across different time periods. It

1 and 2 Tuesday 1-3S202, Block S

allows them to explore why authors choose to underpin their works by references to well known narratives, and, conversely, why authors choose to revive forgotten legends.

Assessment: 10%: class participation; 20%: two short assignments; 70%: final paper (2500 words).

EN459.I/ EN459.II

CONTEMPORARY IRISH WRITINGThe Fantastic in Irish WritingDr. Irina Ruppo

The course will consider the use of the fantastic mode in Irish writing across a variety of genres. It will explore the novels of John Banville and Clare Boylan, the drama of Marina Carr, and the short fiction of Neil Jordan and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and ask the questions how these writers use the fantastic mode to explore contemporary social issues and to engage with and challenge the Irish literary tradition. Texts: A number of short stories by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and poems by Matthew Sweeney, Pat Boran, and others will be distributed in class. Longer texts are Clare Boylan, Black Baby (1988), Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats (1998), John Banville, The Sea (2005) and Neil Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994). Assessment: participation 10%, 2 written assignments 20%, and final essay 70%.

1 and 2 Thursday 11-1Room 302 Tower 1(Semester 1)

Friday 11-1Room 302 Tower 1(Semester 2)

EN464.I/EN464.II

NEGOTIATING IDENTITIESDr. Leo Keohane and Ms. Aingeal Ní Chualáin

This course provides an introduction to twentieth-century Irish writing and considers how writers in Irish and in English have participated in the negotiation of modern and contemporary Irish identities. Through a close critical reading of key selected texts in Irish and in English, it will investigate the ways in which writers have imagined and re-imagined Ireland and Irishness from the literary and cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through to the new millennium. Issues to be addressed will include Ireland’s transition from a traditional to a modern society, language, gender, and the connections between literary production and the imagined ‘nation’. A knowledge of Irish is not necessary for this course. Assessment: 30% continuous assessment: class participation, oral presentation and abstract for final essay. 70% for 2 essays; one (25%) and the final essay (45%).

1 and 2 Friday 11-1 Seminar Room, Centre for Irish Studies

EN470.I/EN470.II

OLD ENGLISH I – INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE AND READINGFrancisco Rozano Garcia

Old English is an exciting and beautiful language. Apart from being an invaluable object of study to those with an interest in etymology, it is the vehicle for some of the most challenging and captivating literature you will ever read.  This course will provide you with a thorough introduction to learning to read Old English without painful memorisation! We’ll think about many important theoretical issues related to engagement with the language and its texts, and we’ll explore the culture of the Anglo-Saxon people. Texts: Robert Hasenfratz and Thomas Jambeck’s Reading Old English. Assessment: Weekly assignments 30% (five assigned, best three chosen); Essays 70% (two short essays assigned, worth 35% each).

1 and 2 Monday 1-3TB306 Tower 2

EN3101/EN3102

ALLUSION, ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATIONDr. Lindsay Reid

Works of literature are always in dialogue with texts that came before; they inevitably recall and comment on the past even when presenting something ‘new’. Using case studies from world literature alongside critical secondary readings, this module focuses on the intertextual relationships that exist between and inform our understandings of literary works. Drawing on a wide variety of short texts, our case studies may include examinations of such topics as: how later literary pieces like ‘The Story of Sindbad the Sailor’ from The Arabian Nights or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ build on famed episodes from Homer’s Odyssey; how contemporary short stories by feminist authors such as Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood revise and critique classic fairy tales; how subsequent poets have responded to the sentiments and form of Shakespeare’s sonnets; and/or how particular characters from Greco-Roman mythology, such as Pygmalion or Orpheus, have been variously reinterpreted by authors from the Middle Ages to today.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment and 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Friday 3-5 Room 302 Tower 1

EN599.I/ LITERARY COMPOSITIONDr. John Kenny

Please note: This seminar is not available to students of the BA with Creative Writing

This module will introduce you to a number of related ‘non-academic’ professional modes and genres of literary writing. On a workshop basis, you will develop writing and project

1 only Tuesday 1-3 IT203 IT Building(Sem 1)

skills as they apply in creative composition in the traditional genres of poetry, drama and fiction and also as they apply in various critical forms (cultural reporting; articles and profiles; the personal essay; literary journalism in both senses: books journalism, and nonfictional essay-writing). As a group, we will explore how the critical and creative dispositions can cooperate in the actual production of written work, and the concept and practice of style will be extensively examined. You will emerge with a working knowledge of the processes of self- and group-editing, of the importance of producing ‘clean’ and individualised script, of the combined imperatives of information and entertainment in the kinds of writing aimed at a wide audience. Assessment: Participation: 20%, minor writing projects: 10%; major writing project: 70%.

ENG230.I/ENG230.II

NINETEENTH CENTURY DETECTIVE FICTION Dr. Coralline Dupuy

The focus of this course is a selection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The critical tools used in class features structuralism, psychoanalysis, colonial and gender studies.Reading list: Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet 1887 (Oxford UP); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1891 (Oxford UP); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles 1901 (Oxford UP); Arthur Conan Doyle, The Final Problem 1893 (Oxford UP).Assessment: At-home assignment 15%, in-class presentation 15%, two essays at 35% each (70%).

1 and 2 Monday 11-1Room 302 Tower 1(Semester 1)

Wednesday 1-3TB306 Tower 2(Semster 2)

EN3105/EN3107

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S FICTIONDr. Coralline Dupuy

The focus of this course is an in-depth analysis of modern novels for children written in the last three decades. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis. The critical theories used in this purpose are Jungian psychoanalysis, structuralism and gender studies. Through this course, the students will be asked to appraise each text individually and also to look at the general issues pervading the genre. These include family politics, the role of imagination, ethics, and mentors. Reading list:  Roald Dahl, The Witches (1983, Puffin Books). Louis Sachar, Holes (1998, Bloomsbury). Neil Gaiman, Stardust (1998, Headline). S. F. Said, Varjak Paw (2003, Corgi). Assessment: At-home assignment 15%, in-class presentation 15%, mid-term essay (35%) and a final essay (35%).

1 and 2 Wednesday 11-1TB306 Tower 2

EN3106/ EN3108

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S FICTION Dr. Coralline Dupuy

The focus of this course is an in-depth analysis of modern novels for children written in the last three decades. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis. The critical theories used in this purpose are Jungian psychoanalysis, structuralism and gender studies. Through this course, the

1 and 2 Friday 11-1 S202 Block S

students will be asked to appraise each text individually and also to look at the general issues pervading the genre. These include family politics, the role of imagination, ethics, and mentors. Reading list:  Roald Dahl, The Witches (1983, Puffin Books). Louis Sachar, Holes (1998, Bloomsbury). Neil Gaiman, Stardust (1998, Headline). S. F. Said, Varjak Paw (2003, Corgi). Assessment: At-home assignment 15%, in-class presentation 15%, mid-term essay (35%) and a final essay (35%).

ENG232.I/ENG232.II

AFRICAN FICTIONDr. Fiona Bateman

This seminar will focus on writing from and about Africa. We will read and discuss novels as well as other texts from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Issues to be considered will include language and the oral tradition, postcoloniality, tradition and modernity, gender, landscape and politics. Reference to texts by both African and non-African writers will enable analysis of contrasting narrative styles and representations. Texts: Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958); Ngugi wa Thiongo The River Between (1965); Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions (1988); and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013). Assessment: 30% for continuous assessment (one short piece of written work and one presentation, 15% each) and 70% for the final essay.

1 and 2 Friday 9-11Room 302 Tower 1

ENG233.I/ENG233.II

ARTHURIAN LITERATURE Dr. Dermot Burns

The main text under consideration on this course is Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the first major prose narrative in English literature, which attempts to tell the complete story of the rise and fall of the legendary King Arthur. Our study will include the perusal of a broad range of secondary texts concerning medieval chivalry, including chivalric treatises, religious texts, other medieval romances and pseudo-historical chronicles, in order to place Malory's work within the context of a range of medieval views on knightly virtue and behaviour. Major themes including religion, love, honour and courage will be considered in light of the striking events described in Malry’s rendition of the Arthurian legend. Assessment: 30% Continuous Assessment (1 mid-term essay) and 70% Final In-class Essay.

1 and 2 Monday 1-3Room 302 Tower 1

ENG235.II DIGITAL HUMANITIESDr. Justin Tonra

Computers have played an increasingly prominent role in humanities research and study in recent years, but as literary scholars, we have not given adequate attention to the effects of this paradigm shift on what we study and how we study. In this class, we will explore a range of topics from the intersection of computing and literary studies, such as: what is digital humanities? How have computers been used to study literature in the past and present? How has technology shaped

2 only Tuesday 2-4IT206

and changed our reading patterns? Though computers have expedited many traditional scholarly tasks, how can we improve our analysis and insight through tasks that only a computer can perform? The course will demonstrate the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, though our practical focus will be on literary texts. Classes will be divided between and lab, and students are expected to have a good degree of digital literacy. Students must have access to a laptop computer for each class. Core texts include Siemens & Schreibman, eds. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Assessment: 30% continuous assessment; 70% final assignment.

ENG240.I/ENG240.II

LITERARY HISTORIESDr. Victoria Brownlee

This course assesses the shaping influence of particular historical junctures on four early modern plays, Thomas Dekker’s Whore of Babylon, Shakespeare’s Henry V and The Merchant of Venice, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. By engaging with extracts from a variety of contemporaneous documents, we will locate the issues raised in these plays amid broader discussions of Catholicism, kingship and nationhood, Jewishness, and femininity in early modern England. Through this comparative scrutiny of the intricate interactions of text and context, seminars will elucidate how literary writings reinforce and undermine dominant political and social attitudes, and assess the difficulties inherent in reading history.

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (one oral presentation (10%), and one written assignment (20%)); 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Monday 3-5S202, Block S(Semester 1)

Tuesday 9-11S202, Block S(Semester 2)

ENG241.I LOOSE BAGGY MONSTERSVictorian Serial FictionDr. Richard Pearson

Unique to their period, but founding a cultural format of serial consumption still present in soap operas and serial dramas today, the 20-month part-issue novel challenges modern assumptions about the neat and well-made text. Henry James referred to such novels as ‘loose, baggy monsters’. This seminar will focus on a close week-by-week reading of Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House (1852-53). We will explore the issues raised by an unfamiliar form of writing and reading, and exmaine the essential elements of serial narrative and the central figure of the narrator. We will also study how these novels shape themselves as commodity-texts and encode the politics of economic exchange and consumption in areas such as gender and class relations. Finally, the seminar will explore how the disturbing ‘monstrosity’ of these texts – their excess, loss of control, and engagement with what lies beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability – is expressed. Set text: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Penguin).Assessment: portfolio (30%), final essay (70%)

1 only Monday 11-1 TB306 Tower 2(Semester 1)

ENG242.I MODERNIST FICTIONDr. Adrian Paterson

This seminar course considers the radical prose of two of the twentieth century’s finest writers, Katherine Mansfield and

1 only Tuesday 3-5TB306 Tower 2

Virginia Woolf. Their innovations in technique and in perception revolutionized the short story while their rivalry and mutual influence spurred Woolf to conceive a new shape for the novel. While reading closely and conducting a detailed analysis of narrative form and prose style, we will be considering key questions such as war, ego, science, time, sex, gender, audience, and empire. We will also consider the place of genre and length in bringing about change in modernist fiction, and the role of essays and diaries in forming new kinds of narrative. Active class participation is encouraged and demanded. Texts: Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (Oxford), Orlando (Oxford); Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories (Penguin). Assessment: 30% continuous assessment, including class participation and shorter written work; 70% final essay.

EN3113.II MODERNIST FICTIONDr. Adrian Paterson

This course will explore major works of global modernist fiction from about 1900 to 1940. As we read, we will cast a critical eye on accounts of modernism that present it as a retreat into aesthetic experimentation or an elitist cultural sphere. Instead, we will seek to understand literary modernism as a movement that embraces and insists upon the world, and that is formed by means of global encounters and exchanges. As we examine how modernist writers construct cosmopolitan identities through their short stories and novels, the formal and aesthetic innovations of modernism will provide invaluable maps of the global. Ultimately, our goal will be to understand modernism not only as a set of aesthetic and political responses to empire, colonialism, and war, but also as a series of related ways of imagining global community. Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902); Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman” (1918); Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party” (1922); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927); Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935).

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment, including class participation and shorter written work; 70% final essay.

2 only Tuesday 3-5TB306 Tower 2

ENG243.I/ENG243.II

SPECIAL TOPICWomen, Writing, and World Literature Sorcha Gunne

This module offers an introduction to a selection of world literature by focusing on gender and globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will examine the ways in which texts mediate between local conditions and literary forms, particularly in relation to gender, confronting a (prospectively) global audience. The module has been arranged into 5 units of intellectual debate and the works will be read comparatively, in relation to one another, and as contributions to particular literary and cultural traditions. We will question the categories of ‘women’s writing,’ ‘global literature,’ and ‘the West vs the Rest.’ We will also ask: what it means to read texts in the ‘world-language’ of English; how literary forms and strategies ‘travel;’ what are the potentials and limitations of comparative analysis; and how we might think of texts not only in relation to nations but also in relation to world-systems.

1 and 2 Friday 9 – 11TB306 Tower 2

Reading list includes: Anita Desai, Village by the Sea (1982)Nawal El-Saadawi, Love in the Kingdom of Oil (2001)Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)Nami Mun, Miles From Nowhere (2009)Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003) Melissa Hill, All Because of You (2007)Angela Makholwa, The 30th Candle (2009)

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment, 70% final essay

EN3103/EN3104

LITERATURE OF THE INTERNETDr. Justin Tonra

This seminar examines the ways in which the internet has influenced the structures, themes, and contents of recent literature. A survey of the history and development of the internet and the world wide web will form the basis from which students will examine two distinct but related ways in which the internet has influenced literature. First, the class will consider the structural influence of the internet on literary narratives and poetics by reading born-digital hypertext poetry and fiction and their print antecendents. Second, students will study recent works of literature with a thematic focus on the internet, and analyse authors’ descriptions of how the internet has shaped and changed human behaviour and communication. Students will ultimately synthesise the perspectives from these two strands to form a greater understanding of how a new technology has influenced the age-old practice of literature. Authors featuring in this course will include Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, Michael Joyce, Ara Shirinyan, and Dave Eggers.  Assessment: 30% continuous assessment; 70% final assignment.

1 and 2 Thursday 1 -3 AMB G043 Seminar Room(Semester 1)

Thursday 1-3AC203 Lecture Room(Semester 2)

EN607.I/EN607.II

WILLIAM LANGLAND’S PIERS PLOWMAN Dr. Cliodhna Carney

In England in the fourteenth century a man named William Langland, about whom very little is known, wrote an extraordinary, disturbing and ambitious poem. Piers Plowman is a vast, alliterative, allegorical dream-vision, whose subject is nothing less than greed, corruption, the reform of the clergy, virtue, sin and salvation. This course will comprise an intensive reading of the first seven passus of the poem, which together form a coherent sub-section of the whole. Text: William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd ed. (New York, NY.: Everyman, 1995). Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (4 short written assignments: 20% (i.e. 4 x 5%); one panel discussion: 5%, one debate: 5%) and one long end-of-term essay: 70%.

1 and 2 Tuesday 1-3TB306, Tower 2(Semester 1)

Tuedsay 11-1Room 302, Tower 1(Semester 2)

EN609.I/EN609.II

Masculinity and CrisisRebecca Barr

This course will examine the representation of men, masculinity and cultural change in a selection of twentieth-

1 and 2 Thursday 3-5TB306, Tower 2(Semester 1)

century novels. While first wave feminist criticism made the study of gender an integral part of literary studies, it is only relatively recently that critics have begun to interrogate and analyse representations of masculinity in literature. This course will examine novels by American, English, and Irish authors that depict men and masculinity at moments of personal or historical crisis. We will look in detail at the differing forms these crises take, and the ways in which authors use the form of the novel to articulate and develop responses to changing roles of men. 

Monday 3-5S202, Block S(Semester 2)

EN435.I/EN435.II

Modern American PoetrySean Ryder

This seminar examines a diverse range of experimental poetry from American poets of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Themes to be discussed include: poetic language, politics, originality, gender issues, and the role of poetry in contemporary culture.

The course text is: Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry, 2nd edition (Norton, 2013). 

Assessment: 30% continuous assessment, 70% final essay.

1 and 2 Wednesday 1-3TB306, Tower 2(Semester 1)

Wednesday 1-3S202, Block S (Semester 2)

EN3117/EN3118

Representing Ireland in the 1970sLionel Pilkington

This module discusses the relationships between Irish writing and politics in a crucial decade of Ireland's 20th century modernisation. A selection of novels, poetry and plays will be considered by means of close readings, seminar discussion and some independent archive-based research. Special attention will be given to Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City (1973), John Banville's Birchwood (1973), John McGahern's The Leavetaking (1975).

1 and 2 Tuesday 11-1S202, Block S

EN3119/EN3120

Technology and CultureAndrew Ó’ Baoill

Does technology shape society, or do our social structures drive how technology develops? What do we mean by 'new media' and how does it differ from 'old' media forms? There are numerous schools of thought on how to properly understand the interplay of technology and culture, from McLuhan's claim that "the medium is the message" to various forms of social constructivism. In this class, we will explore these issues drawing on contemporary case studies and the work of a range of influential thinkers, including Marshall McLuhan, Nancy Baym, Manuel Castells, and Henry Jenkins.

Assessment: 30% Continuous Assessment and 70% Final Assignment

1 and 2 Monday 3-5Room 302, Tower 1

ENG247.I Samuel Richardson ClarissaRebecca Barr (sem 1 only)

1 only Tuesday 9-11S202, Block S(Semester 1)

This is a seminar in extreme reading. Students will study Samuel Richardson’s 'Clarissa'; the most important (as well as the longest) novel of the eighteenth century. In its plot of a young girl’s resistance to an arranged marriage, her rape at the hands of a rake and her subsequent death, Richardson’s controversial work produced a storm of admiration and shock. The novel's unremitting representation of sexual aggression and analysis of the human heart raises crucial questions about textual interpretation and morality that continue to have implications for contemporary readers, writers and critics. Topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, literature and the law, sexuality, madness in literature, and deconstructionist theory and reader response.