The Modern Irish Writers

Catalog description

This is a course on Irish writing of the modern period. In our readings over the semester (which will include some of the twentieth century's greatest literary texts), we will cover the development of Irish writing from the Yeats-led Irish Revival of the century's early years through Joyce's high modernist virtuosity to Bowen's Bloomsbury-inflected fiction to the proto-postmodernisms of O'Brien and Beckett. Along the way we will also examine how Irish modernism raises fundamental questions about such things as: the relation between language and national identity; the nature of modernism's newness; colonial, postcolonial, and semicolonial culture; the political uses of literature; and the contending forces of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the modern period. (ENGL-PST)