This blog will be an ad hoc accounting of the “travel” portion of a
course titled “Irish Literature, Drama and Culture” offered in the Summer of
2012 by my UMass Boston colleague Robert Lublin and me. A specialist in
Theatre, Robert is Chair of the Performing Arts Department at UMass Boston.
The past three summers he has taken students to London for a total
immersion in the world of theatre there; with London hosting the Olympics this
summer, that was not an option this year . . . so Robert concocted a course
that would end up in Dublin (another city with a great theatre tradition).
He recruited me to join him in the enterprise and the rest is
history . . . and literature . . . and politics . . . and culture . . .
On Friday we’ll hit the ground running with the travel portion of
the course (which will include an excursion to the Aran Islands, off the west
coast of Ireland): the 10 students enrolled in the course, Robert, and I will
have made our separate ways to our digs at Trinity College in the heart of
Dublin . . . and on Friday evening we’ll have our first official event—an
outing to the legendary Abbey Theatre. More on that on this blog either
on Friday night or sometime on Saturday.
In the meantime . . . here’s how the on-campus portion of the
course was designed to prepare us all for what lies ahead in Ireland; I’ve
adapted this from our course syllabus:
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Aptly,
if not inevitably, a central focus of this course involved the importance of place in the Irish
imagination. Self-evidently, Ireland is a “place of writing”—a place
where writing happens—and an
essential part of the study abroad dimension of this course will entail our
walking literally in the footsteps of many of the country’s canonical and
iconic writers: the literary made literal.
But
Ireland is also a written place in
at least two distinct senses. First of all, it is a place written about, and we will engage with
how writers in the three major literary genres—poetry, fiction, and drama—inscribe place. Just
consider how so many of our titles resonate with place-centeredness: “The Lake
Isle of Innisfree,” The Playboy of
the Western World, Dubliners,
“Going Into Exile,” Outside History,
“The Deportees,” The Lieutenant of
Inishmore. . . . In short, we will be alert constantly to how
the literal becomes the literary in the crucible of the
creative imagination.
Secondly,
and at the same time, we will engage with how that very inscribing of place is
also an imagining or a projecting of place. ”To
Ireland in the Coming Times,” W. B. Yeats titles one of his early poems; “the
centre of paralysis,” James Joyce labels Dublin in one of his letters
describing the concept behind his groundbreaking collection of stories; “Mise
Eire” (I am Ireland), Eavan Boland titles one of her poems after one of Padraig
Pearse’s poems. Indeed, the very first text we will read—Cathleen Ni Houlihan—personifies Ireland
as “Mother Ireland” . . . a phrase that echoes through any number of later
works.
Implicit
in both of those focuses on Ireland as
written place is a third focus: the literary text itself as a “place
of writing.” So as we immerse ourselves in our reading, we will pay
appropriate attention to genre—to the “translation” of a play script from page
to stage, to the stylistic and formal elements of lyric poetry, to how in Irish
hands the short story almost invariably subscribes to the conventions of
literary “realism” (or “naturalism”): we will pay attention, in other words, to
how the very form or mode deployed by an author takes on properties of “place.”
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Often, Boston is referred to in Ireland as “the next parish over.” You can almost see the old country from here!
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