| Kommentar |
Erste Sitzung: 21. April 2015
Die Anmeldung findet im Rahmen des allgemeinen Verfahrens der Fachrichtung 4.3 statt. Bitte beachten Sie die Mitteilungen auf der Website der Fachrichtung und die Aushänge.
In this seminar, we will study three contemporary Irish novels, all of which address highly contemporary concerns. In their different but equally fascinating ways, these three texts comment upon Irish society during the Celtic Tiger years, a period of extraordinary economic growth (which met its famous and fatal end in the crisis of 2008). While John Banville complained in 2010 that “with the Tiger dead and buried under a mound of ever-increasing debt, a silence [was] falling over the land”, a cohort of Irish writers has recently started to vocally engage with the social changes effected by unrestricted capitalism and its ugly by-products. With the benefit of hindsight – in the wake of epic banking failures and the recent recession – these writers address issues such as greed and poverty, home and homelessness, economic migration, rural tradition and its urban overthrow, and the changing faces of a nation dependent on the dynamics of a globalized marketplace. Topics discussed in this seminar include: social satire, identity formation, sexuality and gender, social and spatial (dis)belonging, globalization, and constructions of the past.
Texts (please buy no other than the editions below):
Hamilton, Hugo. Hand in the Fire. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. ISBN 970-0-00-732483-5
Kilroy, Claire. The Devil I Know. London: Faber, 2013. ISBN 978-0-571-28343-9
Ryan, Donal. The Thing About December. Dublin: Black Swan, 2014. ISBN 978-0-552-77357-7
Please, make sure to have read Donal Ryan’s novel before the start of term. |
