LIT5185-0001 – Spring 2027 – Gontarski

While British writers increasingly retreated from the formal radicalism associated with high modernism, Irish writers sustained, extended, and transformed modernist experimentation throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Writing in and against English (both nation and language), within the pressures of colonial and decolonial history and linguistic estrangement, Irish modernists forged what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously theorized as minor literature: writing that deterritorializes language and genre, politicizes aesthetics, and destabilizes authorship.

This seminar examines Irish Modernism as an ongoing if conflicted project rather than a closed historical moment. Focusing on James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett, the course traces how narrative recursion, ontological instability, cognitive exhaustion, and formal failure become defining aesthetic strategies as this Holy Trinity of Irish writers seems to have issued a license: “Go forth and experiment!" The final unit extends Holy Trinity modernism into post-Beckett fiction and drama, with particular attention to Brian Friel, Marina Carr, and Enda Walsh, situating contemporary Irish theatre within its modernist afterlife.

The course emphasizes intensive close reading, theoretically informed discussion, oral presentation, and sustained research writing appropriate to graduate-level scholarly work.