AN23100 Modern Irish Literature and Culture
AN32001BA Introduction to Irish Studies
A series of lectures offering the students an introduction to Irish culture, giving insights into various aspects, phenomena, and authors of modern and contemporary Irish history, arts, music, film, literature, with glances at antecedents. Each lecture is self-contained but also inter-connected to the other lectures.
AN25101 Art and Artist in Irish Literature
The course will offer an insight into the concepts of, and views on, the role, function, capability of the artist and art in Irish culture through selected pieces of Irish literature. The multidisciplinary approach of the discussions will introduce students to some forms and methods used to depict art within art (whether through the artist-protagonist, through an ekphrastic method, or as metatheatricality, etc.). Issues such as the relationship between art and life, art and society, art and motherhood, the artist’s versus general human/social morality, art’s aesthetic, ethical, psychological, social, religious functions and their combinations, and so forth will be investigated.
AN25400 Early Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
The course attempts to give an insight into one of the most fertile periods of Irish culture and literature: the Irish Renaissance on the one hand, and, on the other, to provide an introduction to the drama forms that emerged in Ireland as part of the Irish Dramatic Movement.
The Irish Renaissance will be discussed as a cultural phenomenon in its relation to cultural nationalism, anti-colonialism, decolonisation, post-colonial subject- and nation-formation, while also endeavouring to define the theatre’s instrumental role in national self-reflection as a “mirror up to nation” (Ch. Murray) and in the formation, definition, and sustenance of national consciousness. Analyses of plays by the outstanding playwrights of the period – J. M.Synge, W.B.Yeats, A. Gregory, S. O’Casey – will draw attention to thematic and formal innovations (including modes of characterisation subverting the “stage Irishman” stereotyping of English theatres, (re-)introducing dramatic forms such as tragicomedy, comic tragedy, history play, poetic, symbolic, mythic drama and, most uniquely, variations on the Japanese Noh drama, the special use of language and stage images, devices of the “total theatre”) that helped reinvigorate the English-language drama of Europe and re-define the dramatic genres.
AN32006BA The Irish Renaissance
The Irish Renaissance will be discussed as a cultural phenomenon in its relation to cultural nationalism, anti-colonialism, decolonisation, post-colonial subject- and nation-formation, while also endeavouring to define the theatre’s instrumental role in national self-reflection as a “mirror up to nation” (Ch. Murray) and in the formation, definition, and sustenance of national consciousness. Analyses of plays by the outstanding playwrights of the period – J. M.Synge, W.B.Yeats, A. Gregory, S. O’Casey – will draw attention to thematic and formal innovations that helped reinvigorate the English-language drama of Europe and re-define the dramatic genres.
AN25100 Myth and the Mythic in Twentieth-Century Irish literature
The course aims to give students an insight into the potential role, value, and relevance of myth and the mythic in contemporary life and literature in general and in a postcolonial framework in particular, since Irish culture in the process of decolonising emphatically relies on Irish mythology. The readings will attempt to draw attention to the extraordinary richness of Irish mythology and the unusually long survival of the mythic worldview in Irish culture.
Discussions will attempt to clarify to what purposes and with what alterations some mythic figures, situations, and events are deployed in a selection of twentieth-century Irish poems, plays, and novels. The nature of myth and the mythic will be approached primarily through Jung and Eliade’s theories of the mythic, sometimes referring to space theories such as Heidegger’s or Bachelard’s, and the theorizing of the specific Irish sense of place by Gerry Smyth. The typical twentieth-century ironic myth reversals and de-mythicising tendency will be seen together with the need to “re-mythicise” (R. Kearney).
AN2105MA03, AN32007BA-K3
(Post)colonial Identity in Contemporary Irish Drama
The seminar will discuss a few representative contemporary Irish plays, with one of the most prominent Irish contemporary playwrights, Brian Friel’s work in the centre. The multidisciplinary approach of the discussions will aim to introduce students to the ongoing Irish cultural debate about postcoloniality moving into globalization, and to show how drama as a specific genre can participate in and respond to such discourses. The discussions of the plays will focus on issues pertinent to that discourse such as identity (personal, cultural, national; different narratives of identity), relation to place, the relationship between past and present, history and history-making, truth and fiction, memory and desire, language and communication. The representation of these issues through the dramatic idiom, the use of dramatic forms, styles, the relationships between words and theatricality and the implications of handling dramatic space and place will form the frame of discussions.
BTAN28011 (Post)colonial Consciousness in Contemporary Irish Drama – I: Brian Friel and Tom Murphy
The first half of a year-long seminar on contemporary Irish drama, will discuss two of the most prominent Irish contemporary playwrights: Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and their representative works. A continuation of the course will introduce several other contemporary Irish playwrights and plays, and will rely on this course but participation in this one will not be an exclusive criterion.
The multidisciplinary approach of the discussions will aim to introduce students to the ongoing Irish cultural debate about postcoloniality, to show how drama as a specific genre can participate in and respond to such discourses and and to introduce them to the dramatic art of two of the most remarkable contemporary Irish playwrights, addressing similar questions in very different forms and modes. The plays to be discussed will be grouped around issues central in postcolonial discourse such as identity (personal, cultural, national; different narratives of identity), the relationship between past and present, history and history-making, truth and fiction, memory and desire, language and communication – all pertinent to the (post- and neo)colonial situation and consciousness. The representation of these issues through the dramatic idiom, the use of dramatic forms, styles, the relationships between words and theatricality – e.g. the special Irish tradition of storytelling and its deployment in drama – or the implications of handling dramatic space and place will form the frame of discussions.
AN223I.. Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Irish Drama -- II
Several of the most prominent Irish contemporary playwrights and representative works are discussed with special attention paid to such central issues as identity (personal, cultural, national), past and present, truth and fiction, history and history-making, language and communication, as well as to dramatic forms, styles and means such as realism, surrealism, carnivalesque and the fantastic, storytelling, myth and ritual – all pertinent to the postcolonial discourse and to the specific genre. There are no prerequisites to this course although it is a continuation of the seminar “Postcolonial Irish Drama – I: Brian Friel and Tom Murphy”.
AN2… The Irish Short Story
An introduction to the Irish short story, which holds a prominent place in Irish literature, the course is designed to follow the development of the Irish short story from the oral tradition, fairy and folk tales through early-twentieth-century masters to contemporary masterpieces, often through comparison between earlier and later stories.
AN 25401 Yeats and Poetic Drama
As theatre director and scholar James Flannery said, Yeats’s drama is so innovative and unique that it is not for the twentieth but for the twenty first century. In this seminar we will discuss several of Yeats’s plays in the context of his contemporary theatre, focusing on their specific poetic, mythic, visionary, symbolic qualities, and their theatricality, as well as try to understand how poetic (not necessarily verse) drama functions. For the sake of comparison and contrast, we will read some poetic plays of T. S. Eliot and to illuminate Yeats’s ideas on the theatre, a few of his essays will also be included.
AN27622 From Page to Stage and/or Screen. Synge and Beckett Acted Out
The course aims to discuss plays by Synge and Beckett as written and as acted out. It exposes students to theatrical and filmic presentations and answers the frequent request that we also watch the plays we discuss in the various drama courses. Since every performance is adaptation and interpretation, this introduces students to issues of adaptation, and some basic considerations of stagecraft, transformation written text to theatrical or filmic text. Students will become more aware of the formal features of drama and the use of stage space, stage design, props, costumes, colours and light, the actors’ movement and gestures and the wider spatial possibilities of film.
Since some of the plays are available in stage performance, others in two different performances, one theatrical the other filmic, there will be opportunities to discuss the transformations between the different media and their intertextuality. Such issues will be introduced and problematized as authenticity, fidelity to the original, directorial inventiveness in emphasizing the contemporary relevance and the responsibility of the director towards the author and the original work. The close reading of both the literary text and its either stage or filmic adaptation, will hopefully lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the plays themselves and may contribute to help the students to become more sophisticated theatre-goers and film-watchers.
AN2… Forms of the Absurd
The course focuses only on one main trend/tendency in modern English drama, that of the "theatre of the absurd", although, as the plays to be discussed will suggest, this label is only very loosely fitting in most cases. Discussions will include plays by S. Beckett, H. Pinter and T. Stoppard, with an occasional comparison with Eastern- and Central-European absurd or absurdist plays.
AF 52401 Drama-translation criticism
With the help of some translation theories we will try to establish the most important requirements of a good literary translation, which will become the basis for the practical drama-translation criticism. Close study of existing translations of twentieth-century Irish plays – two different translations of the same play when available – will constitute the core of the course, much of which will take the form of students’ individual work and tutorial advising, supervising, and evaluation.
AN … Post-World-War-Two British and Irish Drama
This series of lectures introduces post-World War II British and Irish drama by outlining the most significant tendencies, trends, and dramatic forms as well as discussing the most prominent playwrights while attempting to point out some important differences between British and Irish sensibilities and dramatic forms.
AN … Post-1945 British Poetry and Drama
Team-taught
The drama lectures in this lecture course give an introdoction to the most prominent trends, forms, and playwrights in British and Irish drama after WWII, including the “angry young men”, Brechtian influences, political theatre, the “Theatre of the Absurd”, feminist theatre, the “second Renaissance” of Irish drama, and so on.
AN2… 19th-Century English Literature
A follow-up seminar to the lecture course on 19th-century English literature which will discuss some of the authors and works referred to during the lectures. Through a selection of Romantic poems, Victorian and turn-of-the-century novels and poems, we will attempt to discover the main tendencies in, and the essential features of, English Romanticism, Victorianism and the turn of the century.
AN2 … Introduction to English and Irish Modernism
A follow-up seminar to the lecture course on 20th-century English literature, discussing some of the authors and works referred to during the lectures and/or those on the reading list for the comprehensive exam at the end of the second year. Through reading and discussing a selection of poems, plays, novels and essays, the seminar attempts to explore the conceptual and technical innovations as well as some thematic elements of Modernist literature.
PhD courses
Twentieth-Century Irish Drama – Colonial, Post-colonial, Post-post-colonial?
A dominant purpose in founding the Irish National Theatre was to participate in the cultural decolonization of Ireland, to raise the consciousness of the Irish people in ways that would lead to their establishing a modern nation state. Unlike other colonial nations, however, Ireland subverted England’s culture from within and in the process redefined English literature itself. Examining twentieth-century Irish drama inevitably raises issues of nationhood, national and cultural identity, coloniality, post-colonialism, post-post-colonialism and so forth.
Twentieth-century Drama and Theatre in English: Theory and Practice
Team-taught
A few exceptionally significant aspects of twentieth-century drama and theatre in English – British, Irish and American – will be studied, without any attempt to cover all the most important phenomena. Starting with a broad introduction to the ontology of drama and theatre, the course will continue with analysing the effect of European drama and theatre in the late 19th – early 20th centuries (Checkov, Ibsen, Strindberg, the French symblists etc) and of the European avant-garde on the British and American drama with special attention to the work of G.B.Shaw, W.B.Yeats, J.M.Synge, T.S.Eliot, S. Beckett, E.O’Neill, T.Williams, A.Miller, E.Albee, and S. Shepherd. Such most distinctive twentieth-century drama forms as the psychological realistic, the poetic visionary, the mythic, the absurd, the grotesque, will be studied. Irish drama as the reinvigorating force in English-speaking drama at the turn of the century and as a distinct voice throughout the twentieth century will be discussed in terms of theatrical space and place and the Irish storytelling tradition. Post-colonial theatre and drama within and without the English-speaking world will also feature as a contemporary development.