Comparative Literature (M.Phil.) website - Options
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Options in Michaelmas Term (Autumn Semester)
Option 1: Culture and ConfinementCoordinators : Caitríona Leahy (Germanic Studies) & Sarah Smyth (Russian & Slavonic Studies)
This option examines representations (text, images, films) of confinement and/or narratives of survival. The course examines personal testimonies by men, women and children, fictionalised and documentary accounts of enforced incarceration in the modern world. Texts studied will include works by French, German, Irish, Israeli, Italian, Russian, Spanish writers, film-makers and photographers.
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Option 2: Dantean Echoes
Coordinator: Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Italian)
We examine the influence of Dante on subsequent writers, and some aspects of Dante's own influences. Intertextual, semiotic, and broadly cultural approaches are offered, allowing wide scope for a variety of comparative approaches. Various lecturers present authors from different national cultures and historical periods - drawn from writers such as Spenser, Milton, Pound, Pasolini, Beckett, Heaney, Carson and Ross Macdonald.
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Coordinator: Peter Arnds (Germanic Studies)
This course introduces students to the genre of mythical realism and its significance in connection with the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically colonialism and totalitarianism. We will discuss a set of key texts in light of a range of cultural theories and explore important contemporary concerns such as trauma, migration, and memory through the prism of the mythical realist novel. This genre is of paramount significance in our age of political and religious turmoil and global migrations. Focusing on a comparison of works of this genre will show not only how history repeats itself incessantly without fail, but also how any one culture or nation cannot live in ignorance from the fates of other cultures or nations. Students will learn how to compare and critically analyse a set of symbolically complex literary texts. They will be able to apply cultural theory to these texts, place both genres within their broader social, political, cultural and historical context, and also debate key issues surrounding the relationship between art, politics, and society. They will have gained a deeper understanding of how art can criticise and subvert official doctrines, how art can be in the service of such democratic values as tolerance, pluralism, and multiculturalism.
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Options in Michaelmas Term (Autumn Semester)
Option 1: Literature and Exile
Coordinator : Ciaran Cosgrove (Hispanic Studies)
This option examines literary representations of exile, to be understood not only in the usual sense of enforced or voluntary physical displacement, but also in the sense of cultural and linguistic displacement, or other representations of deracination. Texts from a variety of sources will be used: from Homer and Ovid, Dante, Milton and the Bible, to aspects of German, Spanish and Latin American exile literature of 1930s and 1940s, to Beckett, Brodsky and Borges. Other areas may be Native American literature, American expatriate writers, evacuees/refugees in children's literature. Theoretical and biographical writings on exile will also be encompassed.
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Option 2: Utopia and Science Fiction
Coordinator : Roberto Bertoni (Italian)
This option examines some aspects of utopia and science fiction, including a number of texts from antiquity to the present day. Textual, sociological and intercultural approaches are adopted by different lecturers, so that wide scope for a variety of comparative approaches is offered. Authors belong to various national cultures.
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Option 3: Literary Censorship in Ireland and Czechoslovakia 1920-1980
Coordinator : Jana Fischerova
The phenomenon of literary censorship in Ireland and Czechoslovakia is examined through a series of texts (novels and short stories), to see how they represent the social, cultural and political reality they emerged from, and establish why they were or were not banned. Particular attention will be paid to especially 'problematic' themes and genres. The issue of self-censorship will also be addressed. The central focus is on 1930-1970. However, we will also look at the 1920s, when the shape of the Irish censorship of publications system was determined, and at the 1970s when Czechoslovak literature became divided into three kinds (official, samizdat and exile).
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