Undergraduate Course: Representing Northern Ireland (ENLI10339)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines cultural responses to the social change and upheaval which framed the Troubles and the Peace Process in the North of Ireland. It focuses upon fiction and filmic narratives. The course addresses how the role and function of art are placed under duress yet may also offer dissent and imaginative possibilities in times of political violence and antagonism. Attention is given to popular cultural representations and the ways in which the conflict and its aftermath were mediated to a wider audience internationally. The form most employed in popular culture was the thriller and the course looks at the supposed division between what became known as "Troubles Trash" - or nominally low cultural representations of the conflict - and avowedly more "serious" or High Cultural responses. Themes addressed by the course also include: the relations between art and politics; place and identity; gender politics; critical theory such as postcolonialism and postmodernism; trauma and memory; capitalism and modernity. |
| Course description |
Seminar Schedule
Week 1
Gerald Seymour, Harry's Game; Patriot Games (FILM: screening provided)
Week 2
Glenn Patterson, Burning Your Own
Week 3
Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle
Week 4
Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man
Week 5
Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie
Week 6
Glenn Patterson, Fat Lad
Week 7
Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street
Week 8 ESSAY COMPLETION WEEK
Week 9
Seamus Deane, Writing In the Dark
Week 10
Bobby Sands, Writings From Prison; Hunger (FILM: screening provided)
Week 11
Bloody Sunday (FILM: screening provided); Photography and the Archive (selections from Belfast Exposed Gallery provided via Web CT)
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
| Students will acquire an awareness of contemporary Northern Irish culture with specific reference to how art relates to social and political pressures. Students will learn how to evaluate the ordering processes of fictional and filmic narratives and the material which they seek to manage. Students will come to appraise identity politics and a critique thereof and they will gain a sense of how art may function as dissent or intervention. Students will be able to address issues in Northern Irish culture with a wider understanding of the pressures of modernity and postmodernity.
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Reading List
Primary Texts
Seamus Deane, Writing In the Dark
Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle
Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street
Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man
Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie
Glenn Patterson, Burning Your Own
Glenn Patterson, Fat Lad Bobby Sands, Writings From Prison
Gerald Seymour, Harry's Game
Secondary Reading
Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-79 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981).
Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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).
Eagleton, Terry. Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998).
Foster, John Wilson. Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991).
Graham, Colin. Deconstructing Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Hughes, Eamonn, ed. Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991).
Hughes, Eamonn. '"Town of Shadows": Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction', Religion and Literature 28.2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1996), pp.141-60.
Hughes, Eamonn. '"What Itch of Contradiction?": Belfast in Poetry' in Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly, eds. The Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), pp.101-16.
Kearney, Richard. Postnationalist Ireland (London: Routledge, 1996).
Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Kelly, Aaron. The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Kennedy, Liam. 'Modern Ireland: Postcolonial society or Postcolonial pretensions?', Irish Review 13 (Winter 1992/1993), pp.107-21.
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. (De-)Constructing the North: Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003).
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).
Patten, Eve. 'Fiction and Conflict: Northern Ireland's Prodigal Novelists' in Ian Bell, ed. Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), pp.128-48.
Peacock, Alan J. ed. The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993).
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).
Smyth, Gerry. The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto, 1997).
Storey, Michael L. Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Aaron Kelly
Tel: (0131 6)50 3071
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Anne Mason
Tel: (0131 6)50 3618
Email: |
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