Syllabus
Schedule:
Week 1, February 19: Introduction
Week 2, February 26: Marina Carr — Portia Coughlan (1996)
Week 3, March 4: Emma Donoghue — Stir Fry (1994)
Week 4, March 11: Stacey Gregg — Shibboleth (2015)
Week 5, March 18: Anne Enright — The Green Road (2015)
Week 6, March 25: NO CLASS
Week 7, April 1: NO CLASS
Week 8, April 8: Amy Conroy — I ❤️ Alice ❤️ I (2010)
Week 9, April 15: Sara Baume — A Line Made by Walking (2017)
Week 10, April 22: Deirdre Kinahan — Rathmines Road (2018)
Week 11, April 29: Claire Keegan — Small Things Like These (2020)
Week 12, May 6: Rosaleen McDonagh — Walls and Windows (2021)
Week 13, May 13: Jan Carson — The Last Resort (2021)
Annotation
The seminar will introduce students to some of the female Irish writers dominating the anglophone literary scene in recent years, bring attention to a variety of issues that they address, as well as outline the ongoing discussion of Irish women’s writing in literary studies. Furthermore, it aims to suggest some trends emerging in contemporary Irish women’s writing, including a preoccupation with space and place, a tendency to reappropriate age old imagery, a focus on character driven writing, and an opening up of themes such as social inequality, gender identity, trauma, and plurality of experience.
The course will start with an introductory session giving a brief summary of Irish women writing’s history and the status of women writers in Ireland now. Selected works of fiction and drama will be discussed in the following ten weeks. Each session will feature a brief introduction to the author and her works, a student presentation on one of the assigned texts, and a discussion aided by prompt questions (posted beforehand by the lecturers and students in a Moodle forum).