Topics in Irish Literature:

This course will examine how imaginative writers grappled with the crisis in Northern Ireland, and within the broader crisis in Irish and British culture and politics. We will examine a variety of genres in order to answer the question of how social crisis can prove generative of, and destructive to, literary culture. What were the cultural pre-conditions for the outbreak of the crisis, and how were these expressed in writing before 1968? Why did poetry flourish in the worst years of the conflict, and in what ways did poets express their own relation to the different communities on the island? How was violence brought within the field of representation across literary genres? With what different tools did popular culture, popular literary genres, film and folk music and punk rock, relate to the conflict? How has the literary culture of Northern Ireland changed in the period after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998? How has a place with such local conditions of crisis been represented against wider global trends such as neoliberalism, globalization, and migration? We will consider a range of theoretical reflections on the state and crises of legitimacy, the rise of mass surveillance practices, internment and imprisonment in the context of global human rights discourse, and post-colonial theoretical concepts as applied to a developed European economy and a late-imperial/post-imperial state.