SIUC Department of English-Modern British Literature

The Modern British Literature area at SIUC focuses on British and Irish writers of the entire twentieth century, and encompasses multiple approaches to literary studies including critical theory, popular culture studies, gender studies, and literary history. In addition the Irish and Irish Immigration Studies Program at SIUC falls within this rubric in the Department of English.

Courses

Beyond the Core survey courses in English literature, which introduce undergraduates to the most important works from the twentieth century, we regularly schedule upper-level courses in twentieth century British and Irish poetry and prose. These include "Modern British Poetry," "Modern British Fiction," and "Modern British Drama." These three course regularly focus both on the century's major canonical writers of Britain and Ireland as well as many contemporary writers whose work will shape the canon of the future. Moreover, the Irish Studies Program offers courses with a strong literary component, such as "Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature."

Special Topics Courses

Recent courses in Modern literature also include Special Topics courses in Irish Studies, such as: Professor Fanning's "Contemporary Irish Poetry," a graduate seminar which features both Irish and Northern Irish poets from the 1960's to the present; Professor Fanning's "Survey in Irish Literature," featuring literature from the oral tradition of the earlier Irish poets through to the complex narrative experiments of the twentieth century; and Professor Fanning's "Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, 1845-1924," a graduate research seminar, using comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, studying aspects of the cultures of Ireland and the worldwide Irish immigration.

Seminars

In addition to undergraduate and special topics courses, faculty in Modern British literature regularly schedule a range of graduate seminars which emphasize close, scholarly study of specialized areas. Recent seminar offerings include the following:

Professor Fanning's "Contemporary Irish Poetry," a graduate seminar in which raised questions about poetry and politics and the possible voices and roles of poets in times of violence;
Professor Dettmar's seminar on "Irony in the Public Sphere," which explored two parallel developments in the rhetoric of ironic discourse, resulting in irony becoming increasingly covert-unmarked, undecidable, postmodern-but at the same time a mass-market phenomenon;
Professor Fanning's Irish Studies seminar in "Nineteenth-Century Irish immigration to North America, England, Australia, and New Zealand," an interdisciplinary study of the Irish experience of worldwide Diaspora from the later eighteenth century, through the Great Famine of 1845-49 and the land wars of the 1880s, to World War I and the Easter Rising of 1916, with special attention to the Australian penal colony, pre-Famine Irish America, the Famine exodus, the Irish as pioneers of ghetto living in America and England, the experience of prejudice, assimilation, and the transition to bourgeois respectability;
Professor Dettmar's "James Joyce & the Culture Wars," a course that attempted to account for the importance and continuing influence of Joyce's texts, especially Ulysses, both within the field of literary studies and in the larger cultural politics of the twentieth century;
Professor Molino's Pro-Seminar on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was not primarily a study of Joyce's novel, but rather the research methodology involved in writing a critical or scholarly article on a sophisticated literary text like Portrait; and
Professor Molino's seminar on Contemporary British and Irish novels, an exploration of novels shortlisted for and winners of the Booker Prize.

Irish Studies

Irish Studies at SIUC is an interdisciplinary program which unites historical, literary, and sociological studies of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora. Courses in Irish Studies are available at all levels including the Core, and are frequently team-taught by members of the English and History departments, encouraging students to engage in cross-disciplinary investigations of Irish culture. In addition, faculty and graduate students may participate in short-term exchanges with the National University of Ireland-Galway, affording greater opportunity for research and enriching the academic life of both campuses.

Recent PhD Dissertations

Jill Brady Hampton. "Voices Outside the Irish Renaissance"

Charles Cicero Bruce, "Auden's Moral Imagination"

Michael W. Given, "A Sea of Mystery and Meaning: The Fiction of Dylan Thomas"

Kevin Kent, "A Question of Tradition: Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and Bryan MacMahon-A Midcentury Generation of Irish Short fiction"

Patricia L. Ireland, "Blarney Streets: The Staging of Ireland and Irish-America Through the Chicago Manuscript Company"

Matthew Jockers, "In Search of Tir-na-nog: Irish and Irish-American Literature in the West"

Karl N. Kageff, "‘Metaphors of Blood': Aesthetic and Social Responsibility in the Mid-Length Poems of Four Contemporary English and Irish Poets"

Carma Stahnke, "H.D. and the Quest for Equilibrium as Expressed in Notes on Thought and Vision and Illustrated in the Madrigal Cycle"

Karen McLeer, "A Prescription for Double Vision: Reading Forster's Italian Novels as Travel Narratives"

James McWilliams, "Muted Groups in E.M. Forster's Edwardian Novels"

Sunita Peacock, "The Hybrid Language of Anita Desai's Heroines: Finding a Discourse"

Ellen M. Tsagaris, "‘In Small Things Forgotten': The Subversion of the Discourse of Romance in the Novels of Barbara Pym"

Recent MA Theses

Elizabeth Brymer, "From Dependence to Differentiation: The Progression of Elizabeth Cullinan's Irish-American Daughters"

Joan Crabb, "Muriel Spark and the Grotesque"

Victor Paul Hitchcock, "Computer-Stones and Unclear Nuclear: Carnival in Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, and Verbivore"

Karl N. Kageff, "Seamus Heaney's Poetic Preoccupations: The Sweeney Character and Sweeney Astray"

John Kavanaugh, "Thomas More, James Hardimen, William Carelton and James Clarence Mangan: Nineteenth Century Irish Writers in English and the Rise of Catholic Irish Cultural Nationalism before the Famine"

Karen A. McLeer, "No One's Listening: A Study of Language, Power, and Identity in Three Novels by Jean Rhys"

Jack D. Newport, "Thomas Hardy's ‘Poems of 1912-13': The ‘Flame' Burns Again"

Deanna Odney, "Toward a Participatory Culture: Identification in Brian Friel's Translations and The Communication Cord"

Jean Petrolle, "Modernism , Magic, and Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling"

Dionysious D. Psilopoulos, "A Study of Yeats' A Vision and its Relation to the History of Ireland"

P. Nikolaus Schneider, "Samuel Beckett in an Irish Context"

Faculty