Instr:                Andrew  Kincaid
Office:              TBA
e-mail:              TBA
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:          TR   12:30-1:45    CRT 368

Course Description

As the twentieth century drew to close, Ireland -- its people and its culture -- found itself in an unusual position.  After centuries of underdevelopment, famine, emigration and military conflict, the country, by the 1990s, was suddenly in the midst of an unprecedented economic and cultural boom.  Many high-tech companies have sprung up across the state.  Meanwhile, from Roddy  Doyle to Riverdance, from Frank McCourt to the Cranberries, Irish culture and history, at home and abroad, have become increasingly palatable to international tastes.  Dublin, the nation's capital, has reinvented itself as a cosmopolitan
European city, while in the north of the island a thirty year campaign fought between the IRA and the British Army has ended.  Ireland, it would appear, has finally overthrown the burden of its deeply nationalist past and embraced with
open arms the new global order.

This course will examine how contemporary Irish novelists have chartered, represented and critiqued this transformation.  While paying significant attention to the themes and legacies of previous Irish writing (an anti-realist prose style, an emphasis on the short story, an obsession with the national question), we will concentrate on the development of the Irish novel from the
1960s to the present.  While the geographic focus of the course is on Ireland, the issues raised will be broadly comparative:  we will discuss literary and cultural themes which will be relevant to an understanding of other regions of the world, especially those which are currently categorized under the rubric of postcolonial.  For example, we will ask, How do contemporary novels look back and remember a violent and troubled history?  What role does literature play in promoting the rights of minorities in a country known for its religious and moral conservatism?  What kinds of stories are contemporary Irish novels
telling, and how do these narratives differ in content and form from those told before?  We will also read the novel in another way, too, not primarily as a literary text but as a cultural commodity;  that is, we will examine the relationship between the culture industry (in a country increasingly reliant upon tourist dollars) and literary tourism, between the popularity of common literary tropes (poverty, nostalgia, family) and the economics of cultural stereotyping.  We will also read works of popular fiction which draw upon The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Students will come out of the class with an
increased awareness and interest in Irish literature, and will be better equipped to draw connections between different national literatures as well as between literature and contemporary global and economic trends.

During the class we will read selected pieces by authors who wrote before the time period that most concens us, in order to establish key themes and historical events.

These will include Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Maria Edgeworth.

We will then turn to the post-indepence writing of Peader O'Donnell, Flann O'Brien, and Sean O'Faolain.

Turning to the 1960s and beyond we will read, Dermot Bolger, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor, Nuala O'Faolain, Colin Bateman, Maeve Binchy, Frank McCourt, and Patrick McCabe.