Requirements for the Minor

Course Listings - Spring 2008

Eng 190S: Freshman Seminar: Imagining Ireland
Higgins, TT 11:30-12:45, Max: 15

Content: Ireland of the Welcomes. Ireland of the saints and scholars. Ireland of the Celtic Tiger. Ireland of the troubles.  Which Ireland do we imagine is the “real Ireland?”  Declan Kiberd's influential book, Inventing Ireland begins by asking, "If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?" Ireland has been imagined or invented since ancient times by the writers, artists and thinkers who lived in, worked in or colonized “this most distressful country”.

In 2005, The Economist declared Ireland the best place to live in the world in terms of growth, per capita income and future prospects. It was not always so. For centuries, Ireland has been best known for its sad songs and happy wars, a country claimed as the point of origin for seventy million people across the globe but unable to sustain its own population of four and a half million. Now the roar of the Celtic tiger has propelled Ireland to the forefront of the European Union and to the attention of struggling economies across the globe.

Ireland's four Nobel literature laureates and five Nobel peace laureates are signposts to the twin concerns of creativity and conflict that have animated the last two centuries We will read a wide range of Irish authors concentrating on the ways in which the imagined Ireland often suppressed and surpassed the "real" Ireland.
Topics discussed will include nationalism, colonialism, Anglo-Ireland and Irish-Ireland, Women and Ireland, tourism and the Celtic tiger.

Texts: The range of writers discussed may include Eavan Boland, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey,  John McGahern, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Deirdre Madden, Frank McGuinness, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and W.B. Yeats.

(Freshman Seminar—Limited to first-year students only)

Eng 342WR: Modern Irish Literature: Civilizing Outrage: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Troubles
Kress, MWF 9:35-10:25

Content: In 1949 the philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  While Adorno later retracted this statement the sentiment remains with us: that poetry belongs to an old order rendered obsolete by the horrors of the twentieth century. 
In this course we will investigate the role of violence, history, and politics in the literature of Northern Ireland during the period of armed sectarian conflict called the Troubles (1968-1998).  The literature of the Troubles and the debates it has inspired, have become a site for hashing out the role of myth, art, and history in Irish culture, as well as the role of poetry in addressing these subjects.  Although we will begin our study with a look back to Yeats, Joyce and other writers of the revival, we will spend the majority of our time reading contemporary Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Paul Muldoon.  We will ask ourselves: How do these poets respond to violence?  Is writing poetry in such a climate barbaric or civilizing?  When is poetry political?  Finally, drawing from Emory’s extensive archive of Northern Irish poetry we will supplement our readings of the poems with studies of manuscript drafts, publication and reception history, and correspondence between poets.

Texts: McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles; Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground; Michael Longley, Selected Poems; Derek Mahon, Selected Poems; Eavan Boland, Outside History; Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998; Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti; Tom Paulin, Fivemiletown, and Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems.

Eng 389RWR: Special Topics in Literature: The Irish-American Experience
Flannery, Tu 4:00-7:00, Max: 20     Eng 389WR (20)/Hist 385WR (5)

Content: St. Patrick’s Day is the only American ethnic holiday to have become a national holiday.  There is a reason for that, namely the fact that in literature, music, sports, business, politics, theater, film and plain upward mobility, the experience of the Irish in America became the role model for virtually all other immigrant peoples.  This course examines the journey of Irish Americans from the origins of many of them in a rural Ireland of incredible poverty to the citadels of American privilege and power.  In keeping with the subject, the approach will be interdisciplinary, but with a strong emphasis on literary as well as historical explorations of the Irish-American experience.

Texts: The course will include plays by Eugene O’Neill and William Hogan as well as novels by Edwin O’Connor, Peter Quinn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Kennedy and Cormac McCarthy.  The course will also draw upon readings from Making the Irish-American:  History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, J. J. Lee and Marion R. Corey, eds.,and other sources.

Particulars:  The writing demands of the course include bi-weekly response papers as well as a final paper.  Students will also be required to deliver an oral presentation to the class on a subject to be chosen in consultation with the instructor.  In most cases, this will also be the topic of the final paper.

Eng 389RWR: Special Topics Literature: The Celtic Legacy

Flannery, TH 4:00-7:00, Max: 25

Content : The Celts represent one of the founding traditions of Western culture.   At one point this loosely affiliated tribal people occupied territories extending from the Carpathian Basin in Hungary to Galicia in Northwest Spain and from the Mediterranean to the North Sea; their descendents have been pushed to the furthest extremes of Europe: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany.

Because of its relative isolation, the island nation of Ireland has preserved its Celtic heritage more fully than any of the other Celtic lands.   Arguably, because of this still-living heritage, the artistic contributions of Ireland have had an impact on the world far out of proportion to her actual size.   This course examines the legacy of the Celts primarily through the eyes of those modern Irish writers - Thomas Moore, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and others whose work reflects the distinctive characteristics of Celtic culture.   The course also explores the Celtic legacy through a comparative study of the literature, mythology, music, religious traditions and visual arts of Ireland in relation to the other Celtic lands.

Particulars: Students are required to write a two-page weekly response paper based upon the assigned reading.   Papers will be graded for both expressive form and substantive content.

Students will also be required to write a term paper of approximately 5000 words.   During the second half of the course each student will make a half-hour oral presentation to the class based upon their research.   Research topics must be chosen in consultation with the instructor.

Class attendance is mandatory and absences must be explained in writing.

Eng 789R: Special Topics in Literature: Making Places, Placing Makers: Irish and African Diasporic Women Poets

Harper, M 4:00-7:00, Max: 12

Content: Readings for this course will focus on a small selection of the large field of poetry by twentieth-century women poets from Ireland, Irish America, African America, and the Caribbean. The poems and volumes will be examined closely and at a distance. The method will emphasize aurality, written form, the relation of individual texts and voices to larger groupings, and also issues that join the various collections placed in conjunction with each other for the purposes of this course: questions of place, power, gender, and identity, the changes to these conceptions over time and across distance, and their relation to poetic language.

Texts: Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems; Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980; Rita Dove, Museum; Tess Gallaher, Moon Crossing Bridge; Nikki Giovanni, Those Who Ride the Night Winds; Lorna Goodison, Controlling the Silver; Vona Groarke, Flight and Earlier Poems ; Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems ; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Brazen Serpent (Wake Forest; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pharaoh's Daughter.

Particulars: Students will use the manuscript and print collections of the library to write term papers on poetry from the reading list or the much wider offerings represented in the archives. The primary research for the papers will give students the opportunity to address additional issues such as appearances in (or absences from) literary and other media and the implications for reputations of personal archives for twentieth-century poets. The instructor is also an unabashed fan of memorization, so there will be some emphasis on that in class time.