Module Information
Course Delivery
Assessment
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Assessment | Semester Assessment A 20-minute individual orally presented research paper, to be delivered in week 7. Accompanying documentation to include an annotated bibliography, any presentation materials used and an electronic copy of the PowerPoint presentation. Oral Presentation | 40% |
| Semester Assessment | Semester Assessment 6000 word essay | 60% |
| Supplementary Assessment | Supplementary Assessment Resubmit failed or make good any missing elements. In the event of failure in the oral presentation element, a 20-minute written script on a new topic to be submitted, written as if for delivery, to include an annotated bibliography, any presentation materials used and an electronic copy of the PowerPoint presentation | 100% |
Content
WEEK 1 - Introduction; J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
WEEK 2 - J.M. Synge, The Playboy & Caradoc Evans, My People
WEEK 3 - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
WEEK 4 - Dylan Thomas, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
WEEK 5 - Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
WEEK 6 - Margiad Evans, Country Dance
WEEK 7 - W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems
WEEK 8 - R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems
WEEK 9 - Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems
WEEK 10 - Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems
READING LIST
Required reading: [You should buy copies of these texts.]
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (London: Vintage, 1998).
Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997).
Caradoc Evans, My People (Bridgend: Seren 2003).
Margiad Evans, A Country Dance (Cardigan: Parthian, 2006).
Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (London: Faber, 2002).
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2000).
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Dylan Thomas, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (London: Phoenix, 2001).
R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London: Phoenix, 2000).
W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems ed. Timothy Webb (London: Penguin, 2000).
Recommended secondary reading:
Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007).
Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1985).
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995).
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
Katie Gramich, Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).
Jeremy Hooker, Imagining Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001).
Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues: Essays on Anglo-Welsh Writers and Writing rev. ed., ed. Tony Brown (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001).
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993).
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994).
M. Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999).
M. Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
M. Wynn Thomas, (ed.), Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity ed. Daniel G. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
Aims
Too often, the cultural phenomena labelled `Anglo-Irish' and `Anglo-Welsh' have been seen in isolation; Writing Ireland, Writing Wales - part of a wider interest at the moment in Cambro-Irish dialogues -- aims to reveal the cultural currents flowing back and forth across the Irish Sea. What kind of cultural exchanges between these two nations does literature inscribe and make possible? In what direction is the cultural `traffic'? In what ways does Ireland serve as a model for Wales, and vice versa? Examining the chosen texts against the background of (often violent) history, the module is an intervention in the project of `devolving' and recalibrating the locations of culture. The dual aperture of Ireland and Wales represents an innovative way of reconfiguring received axes of cultural power and influence.
Brief description
This module reads the anglophone literatures of Ireland and Wales in concert with each other from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. Canonical and (as yet) non-canonical authors, established and youthful voices, male and female perspectives, and a range of genres (short fiction, poetry, the novel, the journal) are ranged alongside each other so that the response of two Celtic nations to such issues as language, imperialism, cultural and gender identity, landscape and history, can be interrogated and illuminatingly compared. The module ranges from two hard-hitting early-twentieth-century representations of the `peasantry' by Synge and Evans and the complex autobiographical imaginings of Joyce and Thomas, through the cultural tensions and `mixed blood' represented by Elizabeth Bowen and Margiad Evans and the (so-called) `national' voices of Yeats and Thomas, to the troubling long perspectives of Heaney and Clarke.
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 7