Irish Identity
Term: Spring 2021 - Full Term (02/01/2021 - 05/11/2021)
Grade Mode: Letter Grading
CRN: 57064
Times & Locations
Start Date | End Date | Days | Time | Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
2/1/2021 | 5/11/2021 | TR | 5:10pm - 6:30pm | ONLINE |
This interdisciplinary course explores the historical causes and literary effects of emigration from Ireland to other regions in the North and South Atlantic. It will consider the political and economic conditions of Ireland itself, but more fundamentally, it will ask how Irish identities are first formed dialectically through contact with indigenous “others” and then nostalgically constituted through the experience of migration. Focusing on the situation of Ireland before the Great Potato Famine of the nineteenth century and the migrations associated with it, it will examine the problem of Irish ethnic and intellectual identity both in Ireland and in its diaspora by attention to the category of “Irishness” in a variety of media (writing, music, film), disciplines (literature, history, politics, economics), and genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama). By emphasizing migration, loss, and homelessness as the space from which “Irishness” is constituted, English 444 teaches a universal lesson about modernism and its tendency to sentimentally reinvent heritage. In short, students can take away from this course a more general understanding of the processes by which cultural and individual identity is constructed.
ENGL 444 classes may not be taken by ENGL department majors for credit towards their major requirements.
This course satisfies HUMA within DISC.
This course satifies INQ within DISC.