Discipline of English,
National University of Ireland,
Galway
3BA/4BA
Course Outline
Booklet
2015 – 2016
Head of Third Year:
Dr. Richard Pearson, Room 308, Floor 1, Tower 1
Third & Fourth Year Semester 1, 2015-2016
Students are required to choose between:
ENG304 or EN383
And
ENG238 or EN388
Plus ONE seminar course
ENG304 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 LITERATURE & CULTURE: ROMANTICISM
Romanticism 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%)
ENG238: NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
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 STUDIES IN MODERN IRISH LITERATURE
Twentieth Century Irish Drama
This 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%)
Third & Fourth Year Semester 2, 2015-2016
Students are required to choose between:
EN385 or ENG302
And
EN387 or ENG303
EN399 may be chosen instead of a lecture course in Semester 2
Plus ONE seminar course
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/POSTMODERNISM
This 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 and
Wednesday 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%)
EN399 EXTENDED ESSAY
The option of writing an extended essay is available to third-year students of English whose grade average in
second year was 60% or higher and who can put forward a clear, rigorous and well-conceived project
proposal. The number of places on the seminar is strictly limited. Acceptance will be based on a
combination of strength of proposal and grade average. The dealine for proposals will be towards the end of
semester 1 and instructions will be circulated in due course.
Your project will be an independent study devised by yourself and progressed with guidance from the tutor.
Seminar classes will take place during the first half of the semester and will discuss essay-writing practices
such as literary searches, structuring, argument, methodology, and annotation. You will also discuss your
work and comment on that of others in the seminar classes. The second half of the semester will be your own
independent research and writing. There will be two additional personal tutorial meetings set up for each
student, one early in the semester and one towards the end.
The 4,000 to 5,000 word essay is submitted in place of a third-year semester two lecture course.
Venue:
Seminars: Monday 11-1 IT206 IT Building
Tutorials as arranged
(Sem 2 only)
Supervisor:
Dr. Richard Pearson
Assessment:
End-of-Semester Essay (100%)
LIST OF 3BA SEMINARS (SEMESTERS 1 and 2)
Choose ONE 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
EN336.I/
EN336.II
Seminar Title
BECKETT ON PAGE & STAGE: PROSE, POETRY,
DRAMA
Dr. David Clare
Semester
available
1 and 2
Venue
Tuesday 3-5
Room 302 Tower 1
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
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 POETRY
Dr. 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 lesserknown 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 1-3
Room 302 Tower 1
EN3109/
EN3111
POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Ms. Kirry O’Brien
1 and 2
Monday 11-1
S202, Block S
1 and 2
Wednesday 11-1
Room 302 Tower 1
1 and 2
Wednesday 5-7
Room 302 Tower 1
1 and 2
Friday 1-3
Room 302 Tower 1
This seminar engages with the poetry of World War 1, a
poetry written by men and women, combatants and noncombatants, 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 midterm review/close reading of a poem or poster from the period
and 70% final essay.
EN3110/
EN3112
POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Ms. Kirry O’Brien
This seminar engages with the poetry of World War 1, a
poetry written by men and women, combatants and noncombatants, 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 midterm review/close reading of a poem or poster from the period
and 70% final essay.
EN426.I/
EN426.II
AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH
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.
EN434.I/
EN434.II
STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
James Joyce's Early Fiction
Dr. 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.
EN442.II
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Dr. Muireann O’Cinneide
2 only
Tuesday 1-3
Room 302 Tower 1
1 and 2
Tuesday 1-3
S202, Block S
1 and 2
Thursday 11-1
Room 302 Tower 1
(Semester 1)
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 inclass presentation; 10% written assignment; 5% in-class
participation exercises); 70% final essay.
EN448.I/
EN448.II
STORIES TOLD AND RE-TOLD
Dr. 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
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 WRITING
The Fantastic in Irish Writing
Dr. 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%.
Friday 11-1
Room 302 Tower 1
(Semester 2)
EN464.I/
EN464.II
NEGOTIATING IDENTITIES
Dr. Leo Keohane and Ms. Aingeal Ní Chualáin
1 and 2
Friday 11-1
Seminar Room,
Centre for Irish
Studies
1 and 2
Monday 1-3
TB306 Tower 2
1 and 2
Friday 3-5
Room 302 Tower 1
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%).
EN470.I/
EN470.II
OLD ENGLISH I – INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE
AND READING
Francisco 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).
EN3101/
EN3102
ALLUSION, ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION
Dr. 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 LotosEaters’ 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.
EN599.I/
Assessment: 30% continuous assessment and 70% final essay.
LITERARY COMPOSITION
Dr. John Kenny
1 only
Tuesday 1-3
IT203 IT Building
(Sem 1)
1 and 2
Monday 11-1
Room 302 Tower 1
(Semester 1)
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 ‘nonacademic’ professional modes and genres of literary writing.
On a workshop basis, you will develop writing and project
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%).
EN3105/
EN3107
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
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
Wednesday 1-3
TB306 Tower 2
(Semster 2)
1 and 2
Wednesday 11-1
TB306 Tower 2
presentation 15%, mid-term essay (35%) and a final essay
(35%).
EN3106/
EN3108
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S FICTION
Dr. Coralline Dupuy
1 and 2
Friday 11-1
S202 Block S
1 and 2
Friday 9-11
Room 302 Tower 1
1 and 2
Monday 1-3
Room 302 Tower 1
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%).
ENG232.I/
ENG232.II
AFRICAN FICTION
Dr. 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.
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.
ENG235.II
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Dr. Justin Tonra
2 only
Tuesday 2-4
IT206
1 and 2
Monday 3-5
S202, Block S
(Semester 1)
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
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 HISTORIES
Dr. 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.
Tuesday 9-11
S202, Block S
(Semester 2)
Assessment: 30% continuous assessment (one oral
presentation (10%), and one written assignment (20%)); 70%
final essay.
ENG241.I
LOOSE BAGGY MONSTERS
Victorian Serial Fiction
Dr. 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
1 only
Monday 11-1
TB306 Tower 2
(Semester 1)
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%)
ENG242.I
MODERNIST FICTION
Dr. Adrian Paterson
1 only
Tuesday 3-5
TB306 Tower 2
2 only
Tuesday 3-5
TB306 Tower 2
This seminar course considers the radical prose of two of the
twentieth century’s finest writers, Katherine Mansfield and
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 FICTION
Dr. 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.
ENG243.I/
ENG243.II
SPECIAL TOPIC
Women, Writing, and World Literature
Sorcha Gunne
1 and 2
Friday 9 – 11
TB306 Tower 2
1 and 2
Thursday 1 -3
AMB G043 Seminar
Room
(Semester 1)
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.
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 INTERNET
Dr. 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.
Thursday 1-3
AC203 Lecture
Room
(Semester 2)
EN607.I/
EN607.II
WILLIAM LANGLAND’S PIERS PLOWMAN
Dr. Cliodhna Carney
1 and 2
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%.
EN609.I/
EN609.II
Masculinity and Crisis
Rebecca Barr
Tuedsay 11-1
Room 302, Tower 1
(Semester 2)
1 and 2
This course will examine the representation of men,
masculinity and cultural change in a selection of twentiethcentury 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.
EN435.I/
EN435.II
Modern American Poetry
Sean Ryder
This seminar examines a diverse range of experimental poetry
from American poets of the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst 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.
Tuesday 1-3
TB306, Tower 2
(Semester 1)
Thursday 3-5
TB306, Tower 2
(Semester 1)
Monday 3-5
S202, Block S
(Semester 2)
1 and 2
Wednesday 1-3
TB306, Tower 2
(Semester 1)
Wednesday 1-3
S202, Block S
(Semester 2)
EN3117/
EN3118
Representing Ireland in the 1970s
Lionel Pilkington
1 and 2
Tuesday 11-1
S202, Block S
1 and 2
Monday 3-5
Room 302, Tower 1
1 only
Tuesday 9-11
S202, Block S
(Semester 1)
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).
EN3119/
EN3120
Technology and Culture
Andrew 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
ENG247.I
Samuel Richardson Clarissa
Rebecca Barr (sem 1 only)
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 firstperson voice, literature and the law, sexuality, madness in
literature, and deconstructionist theory and reader response.