Irish Studies Courses at SIUC

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History 405: History of Ireland since 1600: Professor Fanning

A survey of the history of Ireland and the Irish diaspora since 1600. Coverage of the major events and themes in the history of Ireland in the modern period, with special attention to the experiences of emigration and immigrant destination.

Course Books:

T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History. Fourth Ed. Roberts Rinehart, 2001. ISBN: 1-58979-002-2

Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History. Longman, 2000. ISBN: 0-582-27817-1

Charles Fanning, ed., The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction. Second Edition, Dufour Editions, 1997. ISBN: 0-8023-1315-9

James S. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine. Sutton, 2002. ISBN: 0-7509-2928-6

Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville's Journey in Ireland, July-August 1835. Translated and Edited by Emmet Larkin. Washington: Catholic U of America Press, 1990. ISBN: 0-8132-0719-3

Charles Fanning, ed. Irish History Readings. Course Pack of Supplementary Readings. Available at 710 Bookstore.

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ENGLISH 555 IRISH STUDIES Professor Dougherty

Topic: Ireland in Theory

One scholar, Theodore Allen, has attributed our modern understanding of the concept of race to the Irish colonial encounter; another scholar, Robert J.C. Young, has attributed the modern meaning of culture to the Irish experiences of Anthony Trollope. Historically, then the Irish situation has produced theory as well as being produced by it. In this course, we will examine theories of Ireland and Irishness. We will begin with a discussion of the creation of the field of Irish Studies, then go on to examine historical theories of Irish identity proposed by Giraldus Cambrensis, Edmund Spenser, the Irish antiquarians, Thomas Carlyle, Daniel Corkery, and Matthew Arnold. We will then read contemporary works of theory by such authors as Margot Backus, Elizabeth Cullingford, Stephen Howe, David Lloyd, and RF Foster, exploring issues of race, gender, sexuality, the body, historical revisionism, language, and colonialism.

This course will require one twenty to twenty-five page literature review and one oral presentation. The reading load will be heavy but intensely interesting, and it is highly recommended that incoming students read a basic history of Ireland, such as The Oxford History of Ireland, prior to taking the course.

Required Texts:

Giraldus. The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis. Revised and edited ed. Bell.

Corkery. Hidden Ireland. Gill and MacMillan, Ltd.

Connolly. Theorizing Ireland. Palgrave MacMillan.

Allen. The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. Vol. 1, Verson.

Cullingford. Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. University of Notre Dame Press.

Smith. Irish Women’s Studies Reader. Reissue ed. Attic Press.

Backus. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Duke University Press.

Feldman. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press.

Howe. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford University Press.

Foster. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland. Oxford University Press.

Lloyd. Ireland After History. University of Notre Dame Press.

Cleary. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Cambridge University Press.

Cronin. Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Cork University Press.

Bourke. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Penguin.

Kirby. Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. Pluto.

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English 448: IRISH LITERATURE: Professor Dougherty

Course description: In this course we will examine British and Irish writing of the nineteenth century purporting to represent Ireland and the Irish. Undergraduates will take a midterm and a final and produce two papers; graduate students will write a standard seminar paper. Student attendance and participation will also play a role in determining final grades.

Course Books:

Edgeworth/Owenson, Two Irish National Tales: Castle Rackrent/The Wild Irish Girl. ISBN: 0618084878

Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0192835920

Bram Stoker, Dracula: Complete, Authoritative Text With Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critics. Bedford Books, 2001. ISBN: 0312241704

Norman Jeffares and Peter van de Kamp, Irish Literature Nineteenth Century, volumes 1-3. Irish Academic Press, 2005-2006. ISBN: 0716533588, 0716528002, 0716528053, 0716533332, 0716533340

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English 494: IRISH FILM: Professor Dougherty

Course description: This course will focus on Irish film in its cultural context(s), focusing particularly on films of the last twenty years. Films will include: Man of Aran, The Quiet Man, Odd Man Out, The Long Good Friday, The Field, The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Hush-A-Bye-Baby, Some Mother's Son, The Boxer, The Nephew, Bloody Sunday, and others.

Undergraduate students will take a midterm and a final, write a long paper, and give an oral presentation. Graduate students will write a standard seminar paper and give an oral presentation. Student attendance and participation will also play a role in determining final grades.

Course Books:

Timothy Corrigan. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. 6th ed. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN: 0321412281

Martin McLoone. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. British Film Institute, 2000. ISBN: 0851707939

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IRELAND'S GOLDEN AGE: AD 400-800: Professor Fanning

English UHON 351i
English UHON 351o
English UHON 351u

Interdisciplinary study of early Irish society and culture, including the following areas: the pre-Christian polity of small kingships, druidic religion, the Brehon legal system, folklore and mythology, the bardic poets and their epic cycles; the Christian missions of St. Patrick and others; Irish monasticism as religion, philosophy, architecture, art (metal work, calligraphy, manuscript illumination, poetry); the Viking invasions as the end of an age, the precedent of incursion and violent colonization from outside Ireland.

Course Activities will include readings in both primary (translated) and secondary sources; slide viewing of art, architecture, monastery and town plans, archeological finds; practical experiments in calligraphy and illumination--Celtic half-uncial script, knots, animal shapes; writing short essays and a longer research essay.

Tentative list of books to be purchased

ԇ John T. Koch, ed., The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe & Early Ireland & Wales. Second Ed. 1995. Celtic Studies Publications, 66 Summer Street, P.O. Box 37, Malden, MA 02148.

ԇ Kenneth Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany. New York, Viking Penguin.

ԇ Nora Chadwick, The Celts. New York, Viking Penguin.

ԇ Thomas Kinsella, The Tain. New York, Oxford University Press.

ԇ Lisa M. Bitel, Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.

ԇ Nerys Patterson, Cattle-Lords and Clansmen: The Social Structure of Early Ireland Second Ed., Notre Dame, U of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

ԇ Early Irish Culture, selected by Charles Fanning. Spiral-bound illustrations, available at 710 Bookstore.

Some short essays; 1 research essay.
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English 448: IRISH LITERATURE: Professor Dougherty

A survey of literature of Ireland from the present day to the early Christian era. Beginning with contemporary Irish poetry, short stories, and drama and extending backwards to 400, we will read works by such authors as Seamus Heaney, William Trevor, and Brian Friel; Edna O'Brien and Elizabeth Bowen; Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Synge and O'Casey; Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Moore; and Swift, Sheridan adn Goldsmith. We will conclude with an examination of early Irish literature in translation.

Course books:

Anthony Bradley, ed. Contemporary Irish Poetry. Berkeley: University of CA Press, 1998.

Richard J. Finneran, ed. The Yeats Reader. New York: Scribner, 2002.

John P. Harrington, ed. Modern Irish Drama. New York: Norton, 1991.

Thomas Kinsella, ed. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

John T. Koch, The Celtic Heroic Age. New York: David Brown Co., 2003.

Harry Levin, ed. The Portable James Joyce. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Colm Toibin, ed. The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction. New York: Penguin, 2001.

William Trevor, ed. The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

Requirements:

Graduate students: one ten page paper due around midterm, one twenty page paper due at end of term.

Undergraduates: two five page essays, midterm and final. Attendance and participation will also account in determining final grades.

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English 393: SPECIAL TOPICS IN LITERATURE: Professor Fanning

Topic: Robert Frost and Irish Poetry: Transatlantic Influences

No poet has been more important to the Irish than Robert Frost. His versions of pastoral early and late have provided for three generations of Irish poets examples of ways in which their own rural/agrarian backgrounds could be used fruitfully in "modern" verse. This seminar will first evaluate for our time Frost's body of work, and then explore what twentieth-century Irish nature and pastoral poetry owes to Frost's example. The Irish poets will be Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon.

Frost. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Eds. Poirier and Richardson. Library of America, 1995.

Kavanagh. Collected Poems. W. W. Norton, 1977.

Montague. The Collected Poems. Wake Forest University Press, 1999.

Longley. Selected Poems. Wake Forest University Press, 1999.

Heaney. Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.

Muldoon. Poems, 1968-1998. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002.

Requirements:

1. Two essays, one on Frost (10 pages) and one on Frost and an Irish poet (20 pages).
2. Occasional short response papers throughout the semester.
3. A final examination of two hours during the examination period. Essay questions based on the entire semester's reading

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English 555: Special topics in literature and English: Professor Fanning.

Topic: Irish and Irish Immigration and Ethnicity in America

Note: A reading course in Ireland and Irish Immigration studies.

Readings: Fanning, ed. The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction.

Fanning, ed. New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora.

Fanning, ed. Chicago Stories of James T. Farrell.

Kenny. The American Irish: A History.

Bayor and Meagher, eds. The New York Irish.

Winch. Irish Musicians/American Friends.

Course Pack. Available at 710 Bookstore. Fanning, ed. Irish Diaspora Readings.

Interdisciplinary study of the Irish experience of diaspora from the later eighteenth century, through the Great Famine of 1845-49 and the land wars of the 1880's, to World War I and the Easter Rising of 1916. Study also of the mid-twentieth-century cultural and artistic manifestations of Irish ethnicity in the United States, with special attention to the Depression Era, 1929-1940. Sources will include documents and artifacts from history, literature, oral history, personal letters, journalism, theatre, music, radio shows, comic strips, cartoons, and the other visual arts.

Requirements: Occasional short response essays to various topics. In addition, the culmination of this seminar will be an original research essay

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English 579: Studies in Modern Literature: Professor Dettmar.

Topic: Joyce's Ulysses, Inside and Out.

Readings: Joyce. Ulysses: The Corrected Editon. Ed. Gabler. Random House.

Ellmann. James Joyce.

Kenner. Ulysses. Rev. Ed.

Kelly. Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon.

Pierre Bourdieu. The Field of Cultural Production.

In this seminar we will devote ourselves to a careful reading of James Joyce's epochal novel Ulysses, reading the book from two different "direction," if you will: "inside-out" and "outside-in." We will carefully read the novel itself with the aid of various interpretative tools, along the lines of New Critical model of "close reading": our firsst and most important goal will be to read the text carefully, slowly, and communally, so that we feel comfortable that we have understood. At the same time, we will be reading Ulysses from the outside in: using a cultural studies orientation, we will examine the strange history of this very strange novel, exploring the ways that Ulysses helped to shape the literary, cultural, and educatiional institutions responsible for its dissemination.

Requirements: Short weekly (approx. 500 word) response papers. One oral presentation. Seminar paper (15-20 pp.)

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ENGLISH 593 SPECIAL TOPICS: Professor Fanning and Professor McEathron

Topic: "Blake and Yeats"

Yeats. A Yeats Eader. Ed. Finneran. Scribners Poetry, 1997.
---. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition. Ed. Finneran. Macmillan, 1989.
Ellmann. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. W.W. Norton, 1978.
Blake. Blake's Poetry and Designs. Eds. Johnston and Grant. W. W. Norton, 1979.
---. The Illuminated Books of William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Eds. Lincoln and Paley. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Ackroyd. Blake: A Biography. Ballantine, 1997.

In his pioneering study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, Northup Frye says that "there are so many symbolic constructs in literature, ranging from Dante's Ptolemaic universe to Yeats' spirit-dictated Vision, that one begins to suspect that such constructs have something to do with the way poetry is written." This seminar will consider the literary achievement of William Blake (1757-1827) and Willam Butler Yeats (1865-1939) as their bodies of work emerged from the context of their attempts to creat coherent cosmologies. For both, a crucial catalyst was the historical urgency of wholesale violence--the Napoleonic Wars for Blake and World War I and the Irish Revolution for Yeats. Both were multi-faceted artrists who, in addition to their accomplishments as lyric poets, experimented with a variety of forms and literary genres, and both were concerned with the published book as artifact. We will have the opportunity to examine and consider these artifacts--for Blake the paintings and engravings through which he illustrated his own poetry; for Yeats the wonderful collection of first editions held in Morris Library. We will examine as well Yeats' own understanding of their shared visionary lineage, through his essays on Blake and his 1893 edition The Works of William Blake. There is much to compare, assess, and speculate upon here, to the benefit of our understanding of both artists.

Requirements: Several shorter essays/reports to the seminar, plus a long research paper involving both Blake and Yeats.

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ENGLISH 579 SPECIAL TOPICS SEMINAR: Professor Fanning

Topic: Irish-American and Jewish-American Writing: Comparative Literary Ethnicity

Description: Comparative Study of the literature of these two immigrant/ethnic cultures.

Organization and writers: Immigrant generations/the nineteenth century: Early and less-known writers from both cultures, including Mary Anne Sadler, Kate Cleary, Finley Peter Dunne, Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Emma Lazarus.

1920s and 1930s: Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz.
1940s and beyond: Edwin O'Connor, J. P. Donleavy, William Kennedy, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Howard, Alice McDermott, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Colum McCann. Autobiography: Mary McCarthy, Maureen Howard, Alfred Kazin, Kate Simon.

Requirements: Two essays of 15 pages each, one due earlier and one later in the semester. These will be responses to specific texts and will be due on the days when those texts are discussed in the seminar. Also, a final examination of two hours consisting of essay questions based on the entire semester's reading.

Saul Bellow, ed. Great Jewish Short Stories. Dell (Laurel Editions).
Charles Fanning, ed. The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction. Second Edition, Dufour Editions.
Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes, ed. Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader. Syracuse University Press.
Abraham Cahan. The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories. Dutton/Signet.
Henry Roth. Call It Sleep (Introduction by Alfred Kazin). Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (Introduction by C. Fanning). University of Illinois Press.
Saul Bellow. Seize the Day (Introduction by Cynthia Ozick). Penguin Classic.
William Kennedy. Ironweed. Viking Penguin.
Bernard Malamud. The Stories of Bernard Malamud. NAL Dutton (Plume Books)
Cynthia Ozick. A Cynthia Ozick Reader. Indiana University Press.
Philip Roth. The Ghost Writer. Random House/Vintage.
Colum McCann. Songdogs. Saint Martin's Press.

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ENGLISH 579 STUDIES IN MODERN LITERATURE: Professor Dettmar
Topic: The Irony in the Public Sphere

Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony. University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Browning. Men and Woman and Other Poems. Everyman, 1990.
Coupland. Generation X : Tales for an Accelerated Culture.St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Ellis. American Psycho.Random House, 1991.
Hutcheon. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Routledge, 1995.
Rorty. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Swift. A Tale of a Tub and Other Satirical Works. Dover, 1996.
Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes.Viking Critical Edition. Viking.
Leyner. Et tu, Babe. Random House.
McCabe. The Butcher Boy.Delta Books.

Irony has been an important force in artistic discourse for centuries, if not millennia; it's hard to know how one could make any kind of sense of many of the Canterbury Tales, for instance, without a recognition that the storyteller's version of reality wasn't to be accepted at face value, or mistaken for Chaucer's own. But within our century two parallel developments in the rhetoric of ironic discourse have combined to make the kinds of large-scale public misreading of irony that we see in Randy Newman and Amstel examples above--or in countless other contemporary examples, from TV's The Simpsonsand Beavis and Butt-head, to problematic literary texts like Bret Easton Ellis' American Pyscho and Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, to the confusing, ironic career reversals of bands like R.E.M. and U2, to the over-the-top, "ironic" screen violence of films like Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, or even the Scream series. In the late twentieth century, irony has become increasingly covert--unmarked, undecidable, postmodern--at the same time that it's become a mass-market phenomenon; and the politics of the resulting mass confusion are both unsetttling and, to this point, only rarely considered by cultural critics. When irony becomes a populist, and not just a coterie, discourse, its misinterpretation has important public ramifications. An eighteen-year-old student who miscontrues the irony of Book IV of Gulliver's Travels in an Introduction to Literature course is a real concern for his teacher; an important part of what literature teachers must do for their students is to help them see that even when literary texts choose to "tell all the truth," they often choose to "tell it slant." But how much more troubling, potentially, is the ironic use of the swastika in U2's 1995 Zoo TV tour, or Morrissey's use of skinhead inconigraphy during his recent shows? The "point," in both cases, is not to praise but to bury racist and homophobic ideology; but how easily this critique can be mistaken for its other, especially in the relatively undertheorized discursive space of the stadium rock concert.

Miscellaneous films: (Pulp Fiction; Natural Born Killers, Wayne's World, etc.; The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-head; music video, rock-umentary, and concert footage).

Requirements: Weekly response papers, 20%; Report on class presentation, plus five-page write-up, 35%; seminar paper, ten-fifteen pages, 45%.

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ENGLISH 555 IRISH STUDIES SEMINAR. Professor Fanning.

Topic: Nineteenth-Century Irish immigration to North America, England, Australia, and New Zealand.

Interdisciplinary study, with emphasis in history and literature, of the Irish experience of world-wide 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. 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. This course will also be available as "History 584: Colloquium in Social Science History."

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ENGLISH 593 SPECIAL TOPICS SEMINAR. Team-taught by Professors Fanning and Riedinger.

Topic: The Medieval Lyric in England and Ireland.

Study of the inception and early development of traditions of lyric poetry in Ireland and England, c. 600-1200 AD. Previous knowledge of the early languages is not required. However, we will work towards understanding the poems not only in translation, but also in the original Old Irish, Old English, Middle Irish, and Middle English.