Courses

Irish Language Courses

Beginning Irish I

No prior knowledge of the Irish language required. An enjoyable introduction to modern Irish where energetic teachers in small classes teach basic language skills and prepare students to conduct conversations and read authentic texts. Extensive use is made of role-play and interactive teaching methods. Irish 10101 is a superb opportunity to learn a new language, explore Irish/Celtic culture, and investigate the linguistic politics of the only minority language offered at Notre Dame. In addition to satisfying the language requirement of the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Science and the Keough Global School, Irish satisfies the popular Irish Studies/Irish Language and Literature minor requirements.

Beginning Irish II

Second semester of instruction in the Irish language. More emphasis will be placed on reading simple texts in Irish.

Intermediate Irish I + II

These courses follow on IRLL 10101 and 10102 with attention to more advanced grammatical structures, speaking and reading. You will hone your linguistic skills and also delve into some short twentieth-century texts in Irish. In addition, you will learn something about Irish culture and music.

Sample Irish Literature and Culture (IRLL) Courses

Irish Literature and the Politics of Language

This course explores the cultural politics of the Irish language from the sixteenth century to the present. Irish is an official state language of the Republic of Ireland and an official language of the European Union but it is also a minority language within its own country. How does a situation like that come about and how do people react to it? Through reading a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts of different genres, we will examine these questions and the manner in which they shape aspects of literature produced both in Irish and in English. All materials will be read in English.

While Irish forms the focus of this course, the issues and debates affecting the language may be applied to similar contexts throughout Europe and the world. The United Nations judges that some 50% or so of the world's languages are currently “endangered” to varying degrees, that is, in danger of dying out or somehow under threat. Therefore, we will also look at the position of Irish today within this global context.

Sex and Power in Irish Literature: From Warrior Queens to Punk Poets

This class looks at the masterworks of Irish tradition and their twentieth-century comic (and not-so-comic) revisions, paying particular attention to how they engage with questions of gender. We ask both how women are represented by others and how they choose to answer back. Of particular interest are verbal performance by "women" - that is, compositions by known women poets, storytellers and singers AND works purporting to be by women or adopting the voice or perspective of women...which turn out to be some of the most significant and compelling, culturally central and enduring texts in all of Irish literary tradition. We will consider key genres of Irish verbal art in a wide range of compositions from medieval to contemporary. We will be helped along by relevant literary, anthropological and cultural criticism. How do women speak? How do "women" speak? Are these works subversive of our expectations or conservative in their relation to the status quo? How can we acknowledge and deconstruct misogyny not as inevitable but as historically and contextually conditioned and subject to demystifying critique? What vantage can we gain on Irish literary history by asking these historical, theoretical, and political questions? How do tradition and the canon look when we view them through a gendered lens? What kind of impersonations might we engage in when we read…and write? Genres considered include courtly love poetry, contemporary feminist verse, oral lament, modern love poetry, bardic verse, storytelling, early modern allegorical poetry, folk song, medieval allegory, and contemporary comic verse, all read in English.

The Hidden Ireland

The Ulster Princes, Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell, left Ireland for the continent on 14 September 1607, unknown to the Dublin authorities, and without seeking the necessary permission from James I. O'Neill's secretary, Tadhg Ó Cianáin, took notes during their travels and wrote them up into a coherent narrative in Rome sometime during 1609.

Travels to Medieval Holy Lands, Otherworlds and New Worlds

One of the most popular genres of medieval literature was the travel tale, and Celtic, Norse and British authors created an exciting range of stories about far-flung, fantastical , and holy or heavenly places, and the experiences of quite normal people in these often really abnormal places. While these texts generally stage transformations, meetings, and confrontations with new peoples, landscapes, and ideas at geographically remote sites, the narratives typically lead audience members to reflect on issues of identity and belief that are actually very close to home. Analyzing the role of travel and visits to different worlds across several types of texts (legendary histories and origin accounts, hagiographies, adventure and voyage tales, sagas, pilgrimage accounts, etc.) we will identify several of the universal attributes, styles, compositional goals and motifs found in travel literature.

Modern Irish Classics

This survey course introduces students to a wide range of classic 20th- and 21st century-Irish texts; novels, short stories, plays, poetry and films. We will analyze each text from a cultural, historical, and theoretical perspective and the overall course will familiarize students with the broad strokes of Irish culture and allow them to explore Irish literature in its broader context.

When Irish Eyes Are Smiling: The Irish Comic Tradition

Fantasy. Humor. Ribaldry. The Macabre. The Grotesque. Wit. Wordplay. Satire. Parody. This course will read diverse examples of the long and fertile comic tradition in Irish literature (in Irish and in English), from medieval to modern, in order to enjoy a good laugh, get an alternative take on the Irish literary tradition, and think about the politics of humor. Authors will include unknown acerbic medieval scribes, satiric bardic poets, Swift, Merriman, Sheridan, Wilde, and Flann O'Brien.

The Irish Short Story

This course introduces students to the themes, motifs, approaches, and various forms common to the Irish short story as well as the critical debates associated with the genre. We begin with a survey of the literary history and cultural politics of Ireland in the nineteenth and the emergence of the Irish short story and compare it to the American and French story, before considering the relationship between folklore and literature and the origins of the modern short story form. Having discussed various theories of the short story, we proceed to examine the interactive relationship between orality and print culture, tradition and modernity, native and foreign, natural/authentic and artificial/other. Stories are read primarily as literary texts that shed light on evolving cultural, political and social conditions and provide incisive insights into the Irish literary and cultural tradition. This course is an ideal introduction to literary criticism and cultural studies. No prior knowledge of Irish or Ireland is required. All texts will be available in English.

Storied Landscapes: From Ireland to Chicago

Storytelling allows us to make a place, and a past, come alive, and it is through narrative that certain people, locations, and experiences lodge themselves in our memories. How, and why, do we reshape our own environment to convey certain stories about our past, our accomplishments, and our collective experiences? Why is it that road-trips loom so large in American cultural memory, and what do they have in common with other placelore stories, such as those featuring Native Americans, Irish saints and TV characters like Northern Ireland’s “Derry Girls”? How can words, sounds and imagery be used to map out and draw us into new and often fantastic virtual geographies? In this class, we will think about how stories gain power by being anchored in evocative depictions of specific places, both real and imagined. We will examine verbal and visual stories, from medieval manuscripts like the Book of Kells and tales of St. Patrick’s travels around Ireland, to contemporary animation (Song of the Sea), murals from Northern Ireland, place-based television series (Derry Girls) and Chicago-based road-trip films (The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). We will contemplate how icons of ancient Ireland were used to create new spaces in Chicago, and we’ll look at the massive 1893 World’s Fair that put a newly rebuilt Chicago on the world map, as well as dramatic histories of Chicago and some of its murderous inhabitants (Devil in the White City). We will also turn to regional storytelling traditions and will study songs and stories about “home” composed by those who experienced diaspora and migration.

Modern Irish Poetry

This course will use translations into English to chart the development of Irish Language Poetry in the 20th and early 21st century from rather meagre beginnings as an instrument of the language revival movement to become a fully fledged and highly sophisticated art form. The main poets of this period will be richly represented, and some lesser known talents will also be discussed in terms of sociological context. Though taught in English, the course will include detailed close analysis of key texts in the original Irish. This will be useful to students studying Irish, but knowledge of Irish is not mandatory for the course.

Celtic Literature: The Stories of Medieval Ireland and Wales

In this class, we will read and analyze a range of poetry and prose composed in medieval Ireland and Wales. The readings (in English translation, but with attention to the original Latin, Irish, and Welsh languages – no experience with these languages necessary!) will allow participants to gain insights into the medieval cultural contexts that produced stories as diverse as those of pious saints like Patrick, Brigit and Brendan, warriors like Finn mac Cumhaill, Cú Chulainn and some fierce Welsh giants, shape-shifting poet-prophets like Taliesin and Amairgein, otherworldly women and powerful queens such as Rhiannon and Medb, political leaders such as King Arthur, and humorous and satirizing social poetic commentators like Dafydd ap Gwilym. At the end of the semester, we will also consider the presence of Celtic literature, myth, and tradition in contemporary pop culture. Requirements will include an exam, multiple writing exercises, oral presentations, and 1-2 longer papers.

Irish Language & Culture 1600-1900: Anglicization or Modernization?

From the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century to today the hegemony, and later the survival, of native Irish culture in the Irish language has been challenged by English language culture. This course seeks, by analyzing primary sources in Irish (available to students in translation) in their historical context, to chart this process over time. The course also seeks to ask questions about the extent to which the Irish Catholic population resisted or collaborated in the process of anglicization that took place. Was the 'Sacsa nua darbh ainm Éire' /(New England going by the name of Ireland) culturally alien to the Irish population that resided in it.