Postgraduate Course: Poetry and Northern Ireland (ENLI11151)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course appraises poetry in the North of Ireland from the 1930s to the present. It includes the Troubles period and its aftermath but also takes a look at how earlier poets dealt with the ongoing upheaval of the twentieth-century more broadly. So while political violence in Northern Ireland since the 1960s is one key concern of the course, there is also an examination of how the pressures of war, the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, urbanisation and modernity impact upon poetry and its role in society. In terms of form, the course appraises the pressure put upon the lyric ¿I¿ in times of social convulsion and change, the use or appropriation of traditional forms such as the sonnet in poetry from the North of Ireland, the search for appropriate models by which to express or understand the context in which poems are written, and the transnational influences upon the poets covered. The role of the poet is discussed in relation to whether this is a private or public concern, as well as the capacity of poetry to stray from conventional wisdom. Attention is given to how poetry and politics may or may not approach one another. Thematically the course also focuses on issues such as pastoral and urban aesthetics, identity and pluralism, gendered subjectivities, and history and myth. |
| Course description |
Week 1 Louis MacNeice
Week 2 John Hewitt
Week 3 Seamus Heaney
Week 4 Derek Mahon
Week 5 Michael Longley
Week 6 Paul Muldoon
Week 7 Medbh McGuckian
Week 8 Ciaran Carson
Week 9 Alan Gillis
Week 10 Leontia Flynn; Miriam Gamble (selections provided via Learn)
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
| Students will acquire an understanding of how poetry deals with the demand to ¿say something¿ in a public manner in times of social unrest. Students will be able to analyse the ways in which poets on the course balance the demands of personal creativity and public obligation; in so doing, students will be able to articulate their views on whether poetry should have such public obligations. Students will gain an awareness of how specific poetic forms are deployed in a Northern Irish context and students will therefore develop their ability to understand how and why particular forms accrue meanings and resonances in certain contexts. Students will gain knowledge of debates about whether poetry should be the mouthpiece of a society or its critical conscience; students will be able to enhance their sense of the interplay between politics and aesthetics.
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Reading List
Primary Texts
Paul Muldoon, ed. The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Ciaran Carson, The Ballad of HMS Belfast
Alan Gillis, Hawks and Doves
Secondary Reading
Brandes, Rand. ¿The Dismembering Muse: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Kenneth Burke¿s ¿Four Master Tropes¿¿ in John S. Rickard, ed. Irishness and (Post)Modernism (London: Bucknell University Press, 1994), pp.177-94.
Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-79 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981).
Brown, Terence. Ireland¿s Literature: Selected Essays (Gigginstown: Lilliput Press, 1988).
Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Clyde, Tom, ed. Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987).
Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Corcoran, Neil. Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999).
Corcoran, Neil. Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986).
Coughlan, Patricia. ¿¿Bog Queens¿: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney¿ in Toni O¿Brien Johnson and David Cairns, ed. Gender In Irish Writing (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp.88-111.
Deane, Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1985).
Deane, Seamus. General ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol.1-3 (Derry: Field Day, 1991).
Docherty, Thomas. ¿Ana-; or Postmodernism, Landscape, Seamus Heaney¿ in Anthony Easthope and John Thompson, eds. Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp.68-80.
Eagleton, Terry. Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998).
Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995).
Frawley, Oona. Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in Irish Literature (Dublin: Irish Academic Press).
Gillis, Alan. ¿Ciaran Carson: Beyond Belfast¿ in Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly, eds. The Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), pp.183-98.
Graham, Colin. Deconstructing Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988).
Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980).
Kearney, Richard. Postnationalist Ireland (London: Routledge, 1996).
Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Kendall, Tim. Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1996).
Kennedy, Liam. ¿Modern Ireland: Postcolonial society or Postcolonial pretensions?¿, Irish Review 13 (Winter 1992/1993), pp.107-21.
Kirkland, Richard. Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).
Kirkland, Richard. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996).
Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993).
Lloyd, David. Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).
Longley, Edna. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994).
Longley, Edna. Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1986).
McDonald, Peter. Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
O¿Donoghue, Bernard. Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
Pelaschiar, Laura. ¿Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction¿, Irish University Review 30.1 (Spring / Summer 2000), pp.117-31.
Pelaschiar, Laura. Writing the North: The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998).
Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Wills, Clair. Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | PaNI |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Aaron Kelly
Tel: (0131 6)50 3071
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Sophie Bryan
Tel: (0131 6)51 1764
Email: |
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