ENGL 4161/5161
Advanced Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Elizabeth Collison/ Jarred Marlatt
A workshop in advanced fiction writing, taught in an intensive (short term) format, in residence. The goal if this course is to assist aspiring writers in developing and becoming more instinctive at the craft of writing fiction. Close attention is given to story structure and syntax and craft elements including character, conflict, setting, and point of view. Students should have prior experience in creative writing or receive the written consent of the instructor. The course consists of four primary activities:
- Writing stories (three per student)
- Reading and discussing stories
- Critiquing and annotating your classmates' work
- Attending and participating in student readings
Each student will produce and workshop three short stories over the course of the semester. Their work will be carefully read, considered, and commented on by the instructor and other writers in the class. Workshop participants are expected to offer detailed critiques on other writers’ work and to engage in lively and useful workshop discussion. Additional reading may include craft essays and/or published short stories.
The first two story submissions for the course must be submitted by 11:59 pm on Friday, May 22 in advance of the start of the program. This will enable the reading and critiquing of these stories prior to arrival in Ireland.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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HIST 2991: The Road to Irish Independence
Instructor: John Ware, University College Cork
An overview of Irish history in the 19th and 20th centuries, concentrating on the pivotal events of 1912-1923.
The complex and contentious issues of Irish nationalism are made accessible to the overseas student, who not
only may have no grounding in Irish history, but may be entirely new to the study of history overall.
The necessary narrative history is reinforced by examination of the primary pictorial and documentary
sources.
Outline of contents:
• Conquest and Union: the historical background
• The Green Flag: the rise of Irish nationalism
• Famine and Diaspora: politicising bitterness
• Violence versus constitutionalism, Republic versus Home Rule
• The Home Rule crisis
• The First World War
• 1916: the triumph of failure
• The War of Independence
• Troubles and emergencies: independent Ireland from 1922
• The Six Counties: the unfinished business
Click here to view a course video ad.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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ENGL 6174
Intensive Nonfiction (Travel) Writing
Instructor: Adam Karlin
Course Description:
A workshop in graduate travel writing, taught in an intensive (short-term) format, in residence. Intensive Travel Writing is intended to assist aspiring writers to become better and more instinctive at their craft. Close attention is given to: honing descriptive language; the concept of ‘place’ and ‘setting’; relativizing versus essentializing a destination, and publishing in the world of travel media. The course consists of four primary activities:
1. Writing stories (three per student)
2. Reading and discussing stories
3. Critiquing and annotating your classmates' work
4. Attending and participating in student readings.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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ENGL 4154
Advanced Travel Writing Workshop
Instructor: Adam Karlin
A workshop in advanced travel writing, taught in an intensive (short-term) format, in residence. Intensive Travel Writing is intended to assist aspiring writers to become better and more instinctive at their craft. Close attention is given to: honing descriptive language; the concept of ‘place’ and ‘setting’; relativizing versus essentializing a destination, and publishing in the world of travel media. The course consists of four primary activities:
1. Writing stories (three per student)
2. Reading and discussing stories
3. Critiquing and annotating your classmates' work
4. Attending and participating in student readings.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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ENGL 4380/5380
Irish Literature & Culture
Instructor: Mary Breen
Course Description:
This intensive reading course emphasizes primary texts and their representation of Irish culture and landscape over the last one hundred years. We will read many of the major Irish works of fiction and nonfiction of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will also pay attention to the complex and innovative narrative techniques that the authors employed in the construction of their novels and autobiographies. The class will give a general introduction to all of the novels, their structures and central themes, and also the historical and cultural settings from which they emerge. Students will be graded on two papers (one short, one long) a class presentation, and a journal recording the student’s reflections on the excursions.
Required texts may include stories, novels, memoirs, and excerpts by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Molly Keane, Samuel Beckett, Colm Toibin, Seamus Deane, and John McGahern.
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ENG 4391/5391
Special Topics: Contemporary Irish Writers: A Selection of the Best
Instructor: John Ruff
No five-week course can adequately survey the crowded landscape of contemporary Irish literature--there are too many great writers winning all the most important international prizes (which has been the case since the days of Yeats, Joyce and Becket). But we can sample five or six to explore for ourselves what makes them important and distinctively Irish, thematically and formally. Since we will be in Cork, acclaimed poet Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin, born there, will be on the reading list. Anna Burns, who just won the Booker Prize for her novel Milkman, set in Belfast during the time of the Irish Troubles, is a good bet, as is a book of short stories by Claire Keegan (who was herself an undergraduate in New Orleans). We will read a book of poems by Paul Muldoon or Eamon Grennan, a play by Brien Friel, and a novel by Colum McCann, Roddy Doyle, or Kevin Barry. With luck, there will be time for critically-acclaimed films by Irish filmmakers, Jim Sheridan for sure, there may be others.
In this discussion-based course, students will keep a reading journal on each of the writers we explore, take a turn providing for the group biographical, historical, and cultural context for a writer of their choice, and write one longer 10-12 paper of critical analysis on that text they find most compelling.
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ENG 4391/5391
Special Topics: The World of Dubliners
Instructor: Leslie White
The fifteen stories of Dubliners, meticulously crafted in “unprecedented documentary realism,” achieve a “grand cinematic sweep.” My intention,” Joyce wrote, “was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in that order.” Joyce takes the raw material of his childhood and adolescence and invests it with universal magnitude. As Colum McCann writes in his forward to the centennial edition of Dubliners, “Almost all of Irish history seems to be embedded there.” In this course, we will read and discuss all fifteen stories, each emanating from Joyce’s immaculate apprehension of the detail of the city’s life that he had observed as he grew to adulthood. There will be reading quizzes throughout the semester, a take-home exam, and a 5-7 page essay for undergraduates.
In the upper-level version of this course, graduate students will write a longer essay (10-12 pages), will make an oral presentation on a topic of their choice, and will lead one class discussion.
Students in this course will:
• Develop analytical and interpretive skills through reading, discussing, and writing about the fifteen stories of this seminal collection of short fiction
• Gain insight into the collection’s formal and thematic innovations
• Understand social, political, and cultural contexts of Irish history and culture from which these stories emerge and to which many of them respond
Click here to view class syllabus.
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ENG 4391/5391
Special Topics: Irish Emigration in Literature, Film, and on Foot
Instructor: John Ruff
In this course we examine Irish literature in a variety of genres including film and cultural sites in or near Cork and Dublin that treat the Irish experience of emigration and eviction, especially during and subsequent to the Great Hunger of the 1840’s. We may begin with The Countess Cathleen, a verse drama by W.B. Yeats or a short story or two from James Joyce’s Dubliners. We’ll read Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic, Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia, Here I Come, short stories by contemporary Irish writers Roddy Doyle, Clare Cavanaugh, and Kevin Barry or Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea. Perhaps there will be room for another play, Famine by Tom Murphy or The Sugar Wife by Elizabeth Kuti. We’ll read poetry by John Montague and others who gathered around him at University College Cork, and screen two excellent films, John Sheridan’s In American and Brooklyn directed by Jim Crowley.
In Cork we will visit the Nano Nagle Center which was where Irish Catholic education for the poor was born and the Crawford Gallery which showcases a great collection of modern and contemporary Irish art. We will travel to Cobh, the port near Cork from which a vast majority of Irish immigrants departed, also the last port of call for the Titantic, to visit museums dedicated to both those narratives. Students who go on Dublin excursion with tour EPIC, voted in 2019 the best museum in Europe, which is devoted to story of the Irish diaspora. Students in this course will write a personal narrative, two short analytic papers, and a modest research project they will present at the end of the course.
Click here to view a video ad for this class.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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ENGL 2090
Special Studies in Literature and Language: The World of Dubliners
Instructor: Leslie White
* This class counts as a general education course requirement for Humanities.
The fifteen stories of Dubliners, meticulously crafted in “unprecedented documentary realism,” achieve a “grand cinematic sweep.” My intention,” Joyce wrote, “was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in that order.” Joyce takes the raw material of his childhood and adolescence and invests it with universal magnitude. As Colum McCann writes in his forward to the centennial edition of Dubliners, “Almost all of Irish history seems to be embedded there.” In this course, we will read and discuss all fifteen stories, each emanating from Joyce’s immaculate apprehension of the detail of the city’s life that he had observed as he grew to adulthood. There will be reading quizzes throughout the semester, two exams, and a 3-5 page essay.
Students in this course will:
• Develop analytical and interpretive skills through reading, discussing, and writing about the fifteen stories of this seminal collection of short fiction
• Gain insight into the collection’s formal and thematic innovations
• Understand social, political, and cultural contexts of Irish history and culture from which these stories emerge and to which many of them respond.
Click here to view class syllabus.
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