This module offers students the opportunity to engage in intensive study of an author whose work has significantly affected the traditions of Irish literature written in English. Students will read an extensive selection of the authors works in order to understand fully his/her individual development and his/her important contributions to literary history. On successful completion of this module, students will have gained An understanding of the author in his/her political, historical, and cultural contexts; Familiarity with a range of the authors works and with a range of his/her thematic, stylistic, aesthetic, and formal concerns; An understanding of the authors importance in the literary canon; An understanding of different theoretical and methodological ways of interpreting the major author.

This module will function as a critical survey of the work of a major Irish author. Students will study the authors development from early efforts to mature output and will analyse and discuss the authors overall impact on literary history. The module will position the author historically and politically, considering the authors role as a contributor to intellectual history. By locating the author in different theoretical and methodological frameworks, students will have the opportunity to assess and interpret a wide range of the authors work. Example One - James Joyce Addressing the production of Irish cultural and social identities in these texts, students will construct readings of Joyces work using contemporary literary and cultural theory. Focusing on the major fictions of Joyce, the module will also consider his prose and life-writing, and explore the interconnections between these various writings. Joyces literary experimentation provides an opportunity to explore narrative form and technique and so the module will consider the ways in which literary conventions and cultural discourses are challenged in his work. Given the range of new media available in this field as well as Joyces own commitment to film, we will explore a number of methods of reading Joyce from photographs, to archive footage, to the contemporary documentaries about and film productions of his work, to the Joyce hypertext and other online resources.

To analyse in depth literary themes and formal concerns voiced in the work of a major author; To identify and critique literary and theoretical frameworks for reading the major authors work; To enumerate the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the authors work; To select relevant primary and secondary readings to produce well-written and well-documented research papers and essays, appropriate to degree level.

To assess ways in which the work of this author has contributed to and/or disrupted constructions of Irish identities and the past; To assess the major authors contributions to literary history; To appraise the diverse reactions of literary and other writers in the period to key ideological questions such as nationalism, the language question, first wave feminism, and so on; To critique different theoretical approaches to the study of Irish literature.

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This module will be taught as a seminar, with all students expected to engage actively in every meeting, whether the discussion is a debate of theoretical issues or a collaborative close reading of a single poem or prose passage. Students will participate in rigorous discussion of issues and lead class discussion of individual critical works. The major written requirement will be a research paper, which will enable students to compose extended arguments on complex topics, managing the needs of documented, evidence-based writing and creative analysis.