Over the last few decades the scholarly fields of American Literature, American Studies and Postcolonial Studies have undergone radical transformations. Their core concepts - including identity, race, citizenship, hybridity, and nationhood - have been challenged and redefined in fundamental ways both by creative writers and by theorists. This course - the first of its kind in Ireland and one of only a small number of similar courses in these islands - reflects on those changes and provides an exciting new postgraduate course of study for high calibre students.
This course provides an opportunity to engage in an advanced and detailed way with the literatures of the Americas. It stimulates fresh analyses of a wide range of literatures in English and in translation into English, by canonical, mainstream, avant-garde and marginal writers, and opens up research opportunities in this dynamic field. Students interact with texts in various genres and from different periods in their development of a complex sense of the literatures of the Americas, and the course promotes inter-disciplinarity as a key feature of its pedagogical approach. While the degree is complete in itself, the supervised dissertation of up to 20,000 words helps to lay a foundation for doctoral research in Postcolonial and/or American literary studies.
Read less
