Graduate Office - Literature and Criticism Course Offerings By Semester

Course schedules are subject to change.  Please see Cathy Renwick for more information.

FALL 2007

ENGL 984 Seminar in British Literature: Literature of the Irish Diaspora and Expatriation     

Dr. Jim Cahalan           

M 6:00-8:45 p.m.

(Ph.D. students only)

Beyond its Irish focus, this seminar will be of interest to students interested in postcolonialism and globalism, nationalism and internationalism, and class and gender—for starters.  This will be an Irish case study of the diaspora—that painful and complex phenomenon also well known to many other historically oppressed peoples, such as Jews and Africans.  It will bring together a number of authors and issues of longstanding interest to me, but within a configuration of a topic that I’ve never specifically taught before, so I’m especially excited about this course.  Since there is not a single definitive book study of this subject, but rather a great many different and invaluable sources, I’ll be using a packet of critical, historical, and theoretical readings to augment and inform our primary works as we go along.  Most of our primary books are novels, and the United States and several of its Irish-American authors will be particularly emphasized, but we’ll also read two nonfictional books—a history and a memoir—and books set in England, Canada, Australia, and even Ireland.  Our two most famous authors were Dublin natives who spent their adult lives, between the two of them, in France, Switzerland, and the city of Trieste (itself a transnational place), so quite a few different countries figure in this course in one way or another.  After all, there are far more Irish people living outside Ireland—even since the economic upsurge called the “Celtic Tiger”— than on that celebrated island itself, which is a bit smaller than the state of West Virginia.  Every week, for example, people living around the world (like me) read the online “Irish Emigrant” (http://www.emigrant.ie/). Though the Irish diaspora began much earlier, all of our works are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 Here follows the first part of my probable primary reading list:  Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the classic novel of preparing for expatriation; J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955, 978-0802150370), complementing Portrait as the wild account of an Irish-American returning to his parents’ country in order to study, supposedly, at Dublin’s then-Protestant university, in contrast to Joyce’s novel set partly at Dublin’s then-Catholic university; Samuel Beckett as Murphy (1938, 978-0802150370) in London before this equally famous Dublin native moved on to France; a quite different, female account of Irish expatriation in London, Edna O’Brien’s Girls in their Married Bliss (1964, 978-0802150370); Australia and the wider world in Thomas Keneally’s The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World (1998); Montréal as seen through the eyes of Irish native Brian Moore in The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960)—and in our major U. S. sequence, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah (1956), William Kennedy’s Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1983), and Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) as well as (after those three U. S. natives) works moving back and forth between the U. S. and Ireland: Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (1996) and selections from Colum McCann, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.  The three books above with ISBN numbers listed after them are books that I’ll definitely use early in the course, so the ambitious can order those particular editions ahead of time, and then you can order the others in September after you make sure I haven’t changed any of the other titles on my actual syllabus, on which I’ll clarify which editions (always the cheapest) to order.  Do NOT  buy Joyce’s Portrait ahead of time or check some edition out of the library; I’ll definitely begin the course with its Dover edition, but it will be available at the IUP Co-op Bookstore (as will all the others) for about $2.00, so there’s no way you can order it yourself that cheaply, I want us all on the same page numbers in each of the books, and if you want to make a head-start you can go buy it at the Co-op store in July or August, if not earlier.  Hold off on the others, the ones without ISBNs, until September; if I change my mind about using any of them (I’m writing this way back on March 26), I don’t want you mad at me.  Always keeping your wallets in mind, I estimate that you should be able to buy our books on Amazon (often used copies) for a TOTAL of about $55, a sweet deal.  I’ll show you a stimulating documentary our first night, and at our last class I’ll show the great Irish-American New York film In America (2002) during the week when you’re writing your papers.   Feel free to email me at Jim.Cahalan@iup.edu  with any questions.  See you at the end of August!

Go Back Top of Page Print Page Get Help