A 1-credit class that will meet the final six weeks of winter semester, to introduce students to the culture and history of Ireland. The major text will be J.C. Beckett’s A Short History of Ireland, accompanied by 3 lectures on Irish history and the development of Irish literature. We will also view 3 films on Irish subjects (Michael Collins, The Field, The Commitments). Students will take a 1-hour final exam on the historical material, including geography and chronology questions.

This course will focus on the development of the rich traditions of Irish poetry, paying attention both to major historical themes and specific poets. We will devote three weeks to the study of the Irish language, culminating in student translations of several medieval Gaelic lays (short poems); concurrently, we will read a wide range of medieval and early modern Irish poetry in translation, attending to the tension between pagan and Christian elements, as well as the movement from oral to written poetry; such early forms as the lorica, the aisling, the ballad, and the song will be emphasized. These readings will coincide with site visits to numerous medieval sites throughout the southwest of Ireland. We will then turn in week four to Ireland’s greatest poet, W.B. Yeats, and will devote a week to detailed readings of his greatest lyric poems, concurrent with our tour of the Yeats country and properties. In addition, throughout the term we will concentrate on the greatest late 20^th-century Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, reading a significant range of his work and treating such themes as the uses of the Irish past, particularly myth and legend; belief, despair, prayer, and sin in poetry; fragmentation, paralysis, and silence; the figure of the artist; attitudes toward the Irish landscape, people, and culture; and the political crises of nationalism, colonialism, and revolution that dominate Irish thought. Students will take a number of language quizzes and write a five-page essay on Yeats’s poetry and its relation to Irish place.

An intensive engagement with the landscape and culture of Ireland past and present. Readings will be coordinated with our site visits, and will include such topics as: The Blasket Island literature (Tomas O’Crohan, The Islandman and Peig Sayers, An Old Woman’s Reflections: The Life of a Blasket Island Storyteller); the Aran Islands (J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands); the West of Ireland in folk and fairy tale (Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs, Poets and Dreamers, A Book of Saints and Wonders, The Kiltartan Poetry Book, and Cuchalain of Muirthemne); Joyce’s Dublin (James Joyce, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Irish drama, keyed to current showings at the Abbey, Peacock, and Gaiety theaters in Dublin and the National Folk Theater in Tralee; and Irish poetry (selected poems based upon or composed in various sites). Students will write 6 short interpretive essays on various cultural "texts" (be they architectural, botanic, historical, literary, dramatic, or otherwise).