Course Title: Irish Modernism
Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tihana Klepač
ECTS Credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 2nd or 4th semester
Status: Elective course
Course Overview: The course places Irish Modernism in the context of nation-state formation and identifies various attitudes towards this historical process and its protagonists as expressed in literary works.
Objective: To highlight the mechanisms that led to the formation of modernism in different English-speaking cultures; to emphasize the necessity of discussing modernity in colonial, national, and gender contexts.
Student Obligations: the final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance (max. 4 unattended classes), preparation for and participation in class, writing small assignments, timely submission of the final paper, and obligatory sitting for midterm and endterm exam. The paper is worth 35%, midterm and endterm exams are worth 50% and other elements of continuous assessment are worth 15% of the final grade. Students must meet all requirements of continuous assessment.
Week-by-weekk schedule:
Week 1
Space and Themes of Modernism
Modernism, modernity, colonial, postcolonial, and semi-colonial culture, the use of literature for political purposes, cosmopolitanism versus nationalism
Week 2 and 3
Irish Culture and Literature at the Turn of the 19th to the 20th Century
Week 4
W.B. Yeats as the Initiator of the Irish Revival Movement (“Easter 1916”, “September 1913”, “The Statues”, “The Second Coming”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Among School Children”)
Week 5
Irish War of Independence
Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman
Week 6 and 7
James Joyce: Dubliners – Semi-Colonial Writing, Personal and National Identity
Week 8
Mid-term exam
Week 9 and 10
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Experiments in Form, Bildungsroman, Kunstlerroman, Personal and National Identity
Week 11 and 12
Elizabeth Bowen: The Last September, on the Process of Writing in Wartime, national identity
Week 13
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Theater of the Absurd, Proto-Postmodernism
Week 14
Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (1960) – Echoes of Modernism, Proto-Postmodernism
Week 15
End-term exam