123224 SE Literature Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2016W)

Ireland has a rich literary tradition in all genres. One of the less frequently discussed, yet unjustly neglected genres is that of short fiction. Often considered the novel’s ‘poor cousin’, the short story, in fact, is an immensely rewarding, often self-reflexive, form that likes to challenge its reader. In this course we are going to discuss short story poetics as well as the Irish tradition of short fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries and aim building bridges between literary texts and concepts taken from cultural theory. Although James Joyce isn’t exactly a ‘contemporary’ writer, it would be absurd to discuss Irish short fiction without taking a look at Dubliners (1914). One of its stories is going to provide the basis for a narratological analysis - which will help us sharpen our tools at the beginning of term. Although Freud famously maintained that the Irish, in his opinion, were impervious to psychoanalysis, we are going to discuss a Lacanian approach to another of the stories collected in Dubliners. If Joyce can be considered the ‘father’ of the 20th century Irish short story, Elizabeth Bowen is probably the best candidate for ‘mother’ of this narrative tradition, whose perspective on class and gender at the mid-20th century will be valuable to explore, before zeroing in on short stories published by writers between the 1940s and the early noughties. Themes of focus will be choice, submission, entrapment, empowerment, violence, love, betrayal, politics, imagination, abuse and the uncanny, and we’ll try to assess how the stories centred on these contribute to, or evoke and cross out, or provide alternatives to traditional narratives of Irishness and the Irish.