English in Ireland: Language and Literature, 5 cr

This is a seminar covering key issues in the linguistic and literary history of English in Ireland and the role of bilingualism in that history. Topics presented and discussed will include the social and literary history of English in Ireland, linguistic variation and change in Irish English, and the ways in which English has changed and evolved in Ireland over the centuries. Once a marginal colonial language in Ireland, in the past century and a half, English has become the first language of the majority of Irish(wo)men, and the vehicle of a world-class national literature.

We will read and analyze extracts from English-language literature in which the influence of

Irish Gaelic is discernable in the variety of English used by the author, and those in which it is not.

We will also discuss what writing in a colonial language has meant from the perspective of a

number of Irish authors and poets from the late nineteenth century to the present and how the promise of a Celtic Revival fueled national and regional fantasies. Authors may include: Lady Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and Eimear McBride.