Latest Module Specifications
Current Academic Year 2025 - 2026
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Description This module deals with contemporary novels, poetry and drama from across the English-speaking world. The themes of nation, race, gender, identity and sexuality are addressed against backgrounds that include rural and suburban Ireland, 19th-century Canada, the West Indies, civil-war and post-9/11 America, and the fictionalised trenches of Pat Barker’s World War I novel, Regeneration. Old and new Englands and Irelands jostle one another in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy. This module aims to prepare students for the proliferation of English literatures that are encountered in our time. It also introduces students to a different form of academic writing as it involves the completion of a dissertation instead of a final examination. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Learning Outcomes 1. Critically assess the concept of postmodernism and its relevance to literary analysis 2. Analyse the characteristics of contemporary writing in English 3. Critically appraise the ways in which late-twentieth-century and contemporary literature interrogates the concept of identity 4. Evaluate the contribution and distinctive features of ‘world literature’ to literature in English in a manner that demonstrates an awareness of recent thinking in the field 5. Use advanced critical, analytical and research skills to write a dissertation, which reflect an Anglophone contemporary or late-twentieth-century literary topic. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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All module information is indicative and subject to change. For further information,students are advised to refer to the University's Marks and Standards and Programme Specific Regulations at: http://www.dcu.ie/registry/examinations/index.shtml |
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Indicative Content and Learning Activities
PART 1: MODERN AND POSTMODERN Unit 1: Introduction Unit 2: Samuel Beckett: Working Through Media Unit 3: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Unit 4: Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming Unit 5: The Movement and Confessional Poetry Unit 6: Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn and Carol Ann Duffy Unit 7: Contemporary British and American Poetry PART 2: HISTORY AND FICTION Unit 8: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Unit 9: Pat Barker’s Regeneration Unit 10: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo PART 3: WORLD LITERATURE IN ENGLISH: POST-COLONIAL THEORY Unit 11: Post-Colonial Theory Unit 12: Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman Unit 13: Modern Irish Poetry Unit 14: Contemporary Irish Poetry Unit 15: Derek Walcott’s Omeros Unit 16: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland PART 4: IRISH FAMILY DRAMAS Unit 17: John McGahern’s Amongst Women Unit 18: Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy Unit 19: Anne Enright’s The Gathering | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Indicative Reading List Books:
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Other Resources None | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||