English 100

Other Readings and Media

M. Beckett: Give Them Stones; C. Carson: Belfast Confetti; S. Deane: Reading in the Dark; B. Friel: Translations; S. Heaney: North; J. Johnston: Shadows on Our Skin; B. MacLaverty: Cal; J. Montague: The Rough Field (6 th edition); B. Moore: Lies of Silence; and a small course reader. [This book list is fairly solid, but you may want to come to the first class before you purchase all of these books.]

Description

This course will explore contemporary Northern Irish literature and its relationship to the political strife, social turmoil, and sectarian violencethat have characterized life in Northern Ireland since the late 1960�s, euphemistically known as �The Troubles.� We will gently immerse ourselves in the political and cultural forces in Northern Ireland , but our main focus will be on Northern Irish literature of the past thirty years. We will consider the relationship between art, violence, and terrorism, think through some of the particularities of Irish history and the role of Irish writers in that history, and approach larger theoretical questions about representation, narrativity, and form. While we will spend the bulk of our time on recent poetry and fiction, we will thicken our investigations by looking at additional cultural materials, such as films (probably The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, and Bloody Sunday), paintings, photographs, maps, murals, and music. There will be two shorter papers (approx. 5 pages) and one longer paper (approx. 10-12 pages) assigned during the semester.