SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK
National University of Ireland, Cork
MA in ENGLISH
2016–17
Irish Writing and Film: Theories and Traditions
MA in Irish Writing and Film: Theories and Traditions
Welcome to the Irish Writing and Film MA!
This programme introduces you to an exceptionally rich body of cultural texts whose breadth and diversity continues to generate scholarly debate. You will be given an authoritative introduction to key texts from the eighteenth century to the present; will be encouraged to engage with some of the most influential critical and theoretical models currently being applied to Irish literature and film; and will develop independent research in the field under expert guidance of UCC academics. Writers who are studied include Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, John McGahern, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Colm Tóibín. Classic films set in Ireland, such as Man of Aran and This Other Eden, are studied alongside the work of such notable new Irish filmmakers as Lenny Abrahamson.
The course also lays the foundation of study at higher degree level. It introduces the required subject-specific skills (e.g., use of databases, bibliographies, archives) as well as developing generic skills (writing, referencing, presentation skills) that will be useful as you embark on a scholarly project or career.
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact the course coordinators:
Dr Heather Laird
; ext 2583
O’Rahilly Building (ORB) 1.66
Dr Maureen O’Connor
(On sabbatical leave January 2017 to July 2017)
; ext 2586
O’Rahilly Building (ORB) 1.75
COURSE STRUCTURE
The MA is comprised of five taught modules (Part 1) and a dissertation (Part 2), which together form 90 credits. The credits are broken down as follows:
EN6009 Contemporary Research: Skills, Methods and Strategies 10 credits (compulsory module)
FX 6010 Irish Cinema: History, Contexts, Aesthetics 10 credits (compulsory module)
EN6049 Gothic to Modernism 10 credits
EN6048 Gender and Sexuality 10 credits
EN6047 Irish Culture: Colonial, Postcolonial, Transnational 10 credits
EN6017 Dissertation 40 credits
EN6009 Contemporary Research: Skills, Methods and Strategies
Period of Study: September to March
Hours of Study: 1 X 2 hour seminar per week plus related self-directed study
This collaborative module aims to equip MA students for the development and implementation of a research strategy through the acquisition of a range of research skills. It is designed to prepare students to present academic research in a variety of forms to a professional standard. By means of team-teaching and self-paced interactive work, the module will familiarise students with appropriate bibliographic styles, and with research techniques, methodologies and approaches to information resources. It will enable students to develop further their existing skills in formulating and communicating research ideas in the contemporary networked scholarly environment.
Further details will be announced in introductory sessions. Please be sure you purchase in advance The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edn. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009, and bring it to the first class.
Total Marks for this module: 200. Online Research Journal (3,000 words, developed from student blog), 60 marks; Literature and IT Review (1,000 words), 20 marks; in-class assignments, 50 marks; Research Presentation (1,500 words), 60 marks; Preparation, Attendance, and Participation, 10 marks.
FX6010; EN6049; EN6048; EN6047
Period of Study: September to March
Hours of Study: 2 x 2 hour seminars per week plus related work
EN6049, EN6048 and EN6047 are each examined as follows: Continuous Assessment 200 marks (1 x 3000 word essay/assignment, 180 marks; Preparation, Attendance, and Participation, 20 marks). Total Marks 200.
FX6010 is examined as follows: Continuous Assessment 200 marks (1 x 3000 word essay/assignment, 150 marks; 1 x Presentation, 1500 words, 50 marks). Total Marks 200.
EN6017 Dissertation
Period of Research and Supervision: March to September
Following the taught course, students write a thesis of 15,000–17,000 words, on a topic agreed by the student, his/her supervisor(s), and the MA co-ordinators.
Length of dissertation: 15,000–17,000 words
Submission deadline: 1 September 2017 to the School of English Office
Irish Writing and Film
Module Outline
1. FX 6010 Irish Cinema: History, Contexts, Aesthetics (Compulsory Module)
The course will present a range of films across the history of the sound period. Attention will be paid to different political and cultural moments as a national film industry struggled for foundation in Ireland. Alternative perspectives on “Irishness” will be presented in non-native productions (especially from British and American production companies), and various narrative and aesthetic tendencies will be traced in an indigenous cinema as it developed from the beginning of the 1980s. From this period the course will look at a series of trends that developed in Irish cinema until the suspension of the Film Board in 1987, during the years of its deactivation, and then following its reactivation in 1993. By considering aesthetic, sociological and historical contexts, students will analyse a number of contemporary indigenous films and will acquire knowledge about the changes in the relationship between the written and the filmed text.
Readings in relevant theoretical background, which will be provided.
Films
Man of Aran, d. Robert J. O’Flaherty
Odd Man Out, d. Carol Reed
The Quiet Man, d. John Ford
This Other Eden, d. Muriel Box
Rocky Road to Dublin, d. Peter Lennon
The Butcher Boy, d. Neil Jordan
The Matchmaker, d. Mark Joffe
Adam and Paul, d. Lenny Abrahamson
Once, d. John Carney
2. EN6049 Gothic to Modernism
“Nothing in Ireland is ever over”, remarked Elizabeth Bowen. This module addresses connections between gothic and avant-garde forms across a long century of extraordinary formal innovation and aesthetic achievement in Irish writing. The period under discussion saw revolution, Union, famine, war and a bitter struggle for political independence, and produced texts that respond to their moment in astonishingly innovative ways. Yet conventional periodization itself is called into question by the module’s framing of fictional, dramatic and poetic texts which move between romantic, gothic, realist and modernist modes and which present a series of strong challenges to conventional literary history. The module addresses texts which are thus fully involved in their own turbulent moment, but also open up breaches between past and present and which enable the return of a repressed past. The kinds of stylistic and formal innovation which emerge from such encounters are a particular concern here. Questions and topics to be addressed include: form, history, style, identity, sectarianism, class, gender, bodies, material culture and technology.
Readings in relevant theoretical background, which will be provided
Edmund Burke. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, selection to be provided
Gerald Griffin. “The Brown Man”, and “The Buried Legs”, which will be provided
James Clarence Mangan. Selection of poetry, which will be provided
Sheridan Le Fanu. In a Glass Darkly, any edition
W.B. Yeats. Selection of poetry and Purgatory, which will be provided
James Joyce. “The Dead”, which will be provided
Elizabeth Bowen. “The Back Drawing Room”; “Mysterious Kor”, which will be provided
Samuel Beckett. The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber & Faber, 2006 [used copies
available on Amazon]
3. EN6048 Gender and Sexuality
“All nationalities are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous”, Anne McClintock argues, “dangerous …in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence”. Gender and sexuality mark a critical juncture of history, politics, the body, the individual, and the state in Irish culture, a nexus of anxiety and interest in the ongoing project of defining “Irishness”. Historically Ireland has been figured as female, both in colonial discourse and nationalist iconography, while in the twentieth century, on both sides of the border after partition, strict sexual norms based on religious values came to be associated with national character. Through discussion of the texts in this section of the course, students will examine the relationship between gender, sexuality, culture, and nation, and the queering of those categories into the twenty-first century.
Readings in relevant theoretical background, which will be provided
Emily Lawless. Grania; or, the Story of an Island. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2012.
Lady Gregory. Grania. Available to purchase as a photocopy.
Kate O’Brien. The Land of Spices. London: Virago, 2002.
Colm Tóibín. The Master. London: Picador, 2004.
Tom McIntyre. The Great Hunger: Poem into Play. Mullingar: Lilliput, 1988.
Marina Carr. Woman and Scarecrow. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006.
Selection of poetry, which will be provided
4. EN6047 Irish Culture: Colonial, Postcolonial, Transnational
Edward Said has argued that “one of the main strengths of postcolonial analysis is that it widens, instead of narrows, the interpretive perspective”. This section introduces students to the “colonial” as a critical category for reading the interaction of cultural politics and literary production in Ireland. Students will study the work of such seminal anti-colonial scholars and activists as Frantz Fanon, in particular writings that explore the relationship between culture and colonialism, as well as examples of Irish postcolonial criticism. With regard to primary texts, students will consider work written from a number of imperial/colonial positions, beginning with early texts by the colonial administrator Edmund Spenser through nineteenth- and twentieth-century essays, poems, drama, and novels, written from both sides of the colonial and sectarian divide, up to contemporary representations of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’.
Readings in relevant theoretical background, which will be provided
Edmund Spenser. Excerpts from A View of the Present State of Ireland, which will be provided
Jonathan Swift. A Modest Proposal (1729) and Drapier’s Letter IV: A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland (1724), which will
be provided
Maria Edgeworth. Castle Rackrent. Intr. by Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Molly Keane. Devoted Ladies, any edition
Brien Friel. Translations. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Multiple copies available in Boole Libarary.
John McGahern. Amongst Women. London: Faber and Faber, 2008
Selection of poetry, which will be provided
Note: Subject to the approval of the relevant MA programme co-ordinators, students may substitute one of the above 10-credit subject modules, apart from FX6010, with a 10-credit subject module from one of the following School of English MA programmes: Modernities: British and American Literature and Film; Texts and Contexts: Medieval to Renaissance.
Essay Schedule and Deadlines
With the exception of the FX6010 module (Irish Cinema), students are responsible for essay titles, and must consult with relevant lecturer at least ten days before due dates.
Essay 1. Irish Cinema: History, Contexts, Aesthetics
Titles available: 16 November. Essays due: 16 December.
Essay 2. Gothic to Modernism
Essays due: 10 January
Essay 3: Gender and Sexuality
Essays due: 9 March
Essay 4: Irish Culture: Colonial, Postcolonial, Transnational
Essays due: 24 April
Course Team and Research Interests
Dr Mary Breen (MB):
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish life-writing; book history; the novel in Ireland from 1800 to the present day.
Professor Claire Connolly (CC):
Irish writing; the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; romanticism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales; Welsh-Irish cultural exchanges; Ireland and cultural theory.
Professor Alex Davis (AD):
Anglophone poetry from the 1890s to the present day; literary modernism and its inheritance; modern Irish writing in English.
Dr. Anne Etienne (AE):
Theatre censorship; 20th-century British drama; Arnold Wesker; contemporary Irish theatre.
Dr Adam Hanna (AH):
Contemporary Irish poetry; law and literature; class and literature; contemporary fiction; Irish diasporic writing; ekphrasis.
Dr Marie Kelly (MK):
Theatre casting; the multiple realities of theatre performance (consciousness, the unconscious and the transcendental); the theatre of Tom MacIntyre.
Dr Heather Laird (HL):
Postcolonial literature and theory; Irish cultural criticism; theories and practices of resistance; law and literature; connections between India and Ireland; Irish Land War fiction; the writings of John McGahern.
Dr Barry Monahan (BM):
The relationship between the Abbey Theatre and film; contemporary Irish cinema, including films by Lenny Abrahamson.
Dr Maureen O’Connor (MOC):
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish women’s writing; the Irish New Woman; theories of comedy and Irish writing; animals in literature; ecofeminism/ecocriticism and Irish literature; the dandy in American, Irish, and British culture.
Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir (CÓG):
Irish women’s writing; Irish and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing; the novel in Ireland; post-colonial writing; and children’s literature.
Dr Éibhear Walshe (EW):
Modern Irish fiction and drama; Irish literary criticism, Irish biography; Irish cultural history; the interconnections between politics, literature and the representations of sexuality.
Irish Writing and Film Timetable 2016-2017
Week beginning / Tuesday 4-6 pmORB 1.65 / Wednesday 11-1pm
ORB 1.65
Barry Monahan
EN6049
Gothic to Modernism / FX6010
Irish Cinema:
History, Contexts, Aesthetics
12 September 2016 / Introductory Class Meeting / No Class
19 September / Theories and Tropes CC / Man of Aran
26 September / Edmund Burke CC / Odd Man Out
3 October / Gerald Griffin CC / The Quiet Man
10 October / Sheridan Le Fanu CC / This Other Eden
17 October / James Clarence Mangan AD / Rocky Road to Dublin
24 October / Reading Week
31 October / W. B. Yeats AD / The Butcher Boy
7 November / James Joyce HL / The Matchmaker
14 November / Elizabeth Bowen CC / Adam and Paul
21 November / Samuel Beckett AE / Once
28 November / Samuel Beckett AE / Presentations
Christmas Break
Week beginning / Tuesday 4-6
ORB 1.65 / Thursday 4-6
ORB 1.65
EN6048
Gender and Sexuality
16 January / Theories CÓG / Colm Tóibín EW
23 January / Theories CÓG / Kate O’Brien EW
30 January / Emily Lawless CÓG / Marina Carr MK
6 February / Lady Gregory CÓG / Tom McIntyre MK
13 February / Contemporary Poetry AH / Contemporary Poetry AH
EN6047
Irish Culture: Colonial, Postcolonial, Transnational
20 February / Theories HL / Theories HL
27 February / Reading Week
6 March / Edmund Spenser HL / Jonathan Swift CÓG
13 March / Maria Edgeworth COG / Brian Friel MK
20 March / Molly Keane MB / John McGahern HL
27 March / Northern Irish Poetry AH / Northern Irish Poetry AH
03 April / Thesis Proposal Presentations
Marking Scale and Assessment