“The Irish Experience” was developed as a two-quarter long advanced course with a balance of intensive, comprehensive reading and memorizing works for performance. Taught by Sean Williams, Charles Teske and Patrick Hill, this program gave students a broad spectrum of information and ideas about various aspects of Irish culture. Students were expected to work in cooperation with each other and to share information. They learned the basics of the Irish language, and how Irish speakers conceive of the world. Both quarters included a take-home exam assigned for the seventh week of the program, including intensive “exam workshops” in which the students worked collaboratively on the questions, writing independent answers afterward. In addition, two integrative essays were required in each of Winter and Spring quarters, causing students to bring together disparate elements of the program and discuss larger themes in the context of the various program materials.
The main expressive assignment of each quarter was the final performance, done in small groups centered around program themes. All students maintained a program notebook for both quarters, containing notes of discussions, lectures, language lessons, poems, songs and readings, as well as journal entries. The two weekly seminars formed the backbone of the program; students had to come to seminars with book in hand, ready to critically examine and analyze important aspects of the book and link the book with other program materials. Each seminar included a writing assignment: the first (at the beginning of the week) was a response paper to a question based on the text, and the second was a short integrative paper written at the end of the week which pulled together that week’s new information.
Winter quarter focused partly on ancient Ireland and partly on the early 20th century. The first segment of the quarter dealt with Irish histories. Students used Brendan O’hEithir’s Pocket History of Ireland and Kevin Collins’ The Cultural Conquest of Ireland, together with videos and lectures on history to gain an understanding of historical perspectives. We performed a reading of Brian Friel’s play, “Translations,” (about changing Irish place names into English) and later had the opportunity to see another of his plays, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (about the controlling aspects of shame in community and family). Students were introduced to concepts of orality and literacy, which proved to be one of the most important themes of the quarter. We then shifted into ancient Irish culture with lectures on Celtic and early Christian spirituality and on bardic traditions to illustrate the impact of political and cultural colonization and religious conversion on early Ireland. The ancient Irish epic The Táin (edited by Thomas Kinsella) was paired with Women of the Celts by Jean Markale to present two different textual points of access to ancient Irish culture; in particular, the interaction between men and women as it is portrayed in the legends.
The second half of the quarter began with intensive work on the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Students were asked to learn one of Yeats’ poems by heart, and to learn an early 18th century poem in Irish (“Mise Rafteraí,” by Anthony Raftery). We explored the differences between silent performance and reading out loud, and examined the poems in the larger context of the Irish expressive arts. We then used James Joyce’s Dubliners and Seán O’Casey’s Three Plays (“Juno and the Paycock,” “In the Shadow of a Gunman,” and “The Plough and the Stars”) to understand Irish life at the turn of the century in the heart of the Dublin, from the homes of the rich to the tenements. Leon Uris’ novel Trinity and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington: Irish Feminist by Levenson and Natterstad served as the textual backdrop for our exploration of “The Troubles” (the Irish struggle, lasting from 1913 to 1923, which led to partial independence from England) from different perspectives. All of the program meetings were supplemented with lectures, films, plays, poetry, texts, and songs.
In Spring quarter the program continued filling in the background of modern Ireland. The quarter began with a showing of “The Field,” a film which successfully tied together all of the themes we had discussed during Winter quarter and set the stage for our Spring quarter work. We read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, noting in Stephen Dedalus’ attempts to escape his own Irishness the predicament faced by many young people in Ireland today. Although we spent only a week on the Great Famine of the 1840s, our study had repercussions for the rest of the term. We used Paddy’s Lament by Thomas Gallagher as our primary text, supplemented with stories and songs from the era. We also watched a film (“When Ireland Starved”) which offered drawings and personal accounts of the Famine. One of the results of the Famine was an extended period of Irish emigration to England, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, and we spent the next several weeks trying to understand the many Irish-American experiences and, in particular, what it means to be Irish-American. Our texts for this period were Hasia Diner’s Erin’s Daughters in America (about Irish-American women) and David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (about the creation of racism in nineteenth-century America and Irish-American reactions to it). Our work included a panel discussion on minstrelsy and lectures on various aspects of Irish America from Hollywood stereotypes to music.
We also saw several films dealing with the experiences of the Irish in America: “The Molly Maguires,” “Did Your Mother Come From Ireland,” “The Last Hurrah,” and “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” In order to personalize the emigration experience, students brought in stories of emigration from their own families. The program returned to Ireland by spending a week discussing the current political situation in the North of Ireland. The text for the week was Padraig O’Malley’s Biting at the Grave (about the hunger strikers of the 1980s), and we watched the film “Understanding Northern Ireland.” The week’s discussions included a panel session on Catholicism and Protestantism and a lecture on the music of Northern Ireland. We followed this work with two weeks spent almost exclusively on modern Irish poetry, beginning with the works of Séamus Heaney (using his collection entitled Séamus Heaney Poems 1965-1975) and continued with The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. Students were asked to bring in a poem from each collection to discuss in seminar, and to learn at least one poem by heart. The final text for the program was Rosemary Mahoney’s Whoredom in Kimmage, which led to extended discussions of gender relations in Ireland and Irish America.
The program split into four different in-house modules each Wednesday, and students had the option of signing up for one of the four: James Joyce’s Ulysses (led by Charlie Teske), Hollywood Images of Irish-America (led by Patrick Hill), old-style (“sean-nós”) singing (led by Sean Williams), and the Irish language (led by guest faculty member Michael Drohan). The Ulysses class met each week for three hours to go through the book, discussing the week’s assigned reading. Students wrote a final paper on an aspect of Ulysses that reflected their own reading of the work.
“Hollywood Images of Irish America” was a three-credit film-discussion module. In the module, we met for eight 3 – 3 1/2 hour sessions to view and discuss award winning films around three themes: 1) Family and Gender Relations, where the movies were “Boys Town,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” and “Country Girl;” 2) Law and Politics, where the movies were “Angels with Dirty Faces, and “The Great McGinty,” (both of which were integrated into discussion with the full-program’s viewing of “The Molly maguires” and “The Last Hurrah;”) and 3) God and Country, where the movies were “Going My Way,” “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” and “Cheyenne Autumn.” All students were required to attend and participate in each viewing and discussion. (Any absence had to be made up by a private viewing of the film and a two-page essay on the film.) At mid-term, students were required to write a 5 – 8 page paper, integrating the themes of the films, in relation to each other and in relation to the themes and issues of the full “Irish Experience” program. At the quarter’s end, each student had to write an interpretive essay on the multiple meanings (in Hollywood, in 19th century America, in Ireland, and in current parlance) of the term “Irish-American.”
The singing module was designed to give students an in-depth introduction to sean-nós (“old style”), the centuries-old tradition of singing in Ireland. Sean-nós songs are performed in both the English and Irish languages, and are considered to belong to the most important vocal tradition in Ireland. Performing the songs properly requires breath control, use of a straight, nasal tone, and the execution of difficult ornaments in the melodic line, as well as the ability to pronounce the Irish language. The module began with one easy song in fixed meter and one more difficult song in free meter (both in English) being taught each week, and progressed to three songs per week with at least one song in Irish. Students developed a repertoire of twenty-one songs, among them some of the oldest in the genre. They were required to sing alone in front of their colleagues each week, and their final evaluations were based on a random selection of three songs and one of their own choosing from the list.
The principal objectives of the module in the Irish-Gaelic language were the following: 1) a mastery of the essentials of pronunciation in the Gaelic tongue; 2) development of a speaking knowledge of the language insofar as such could be achieved in ten weeks; 3) an understanding and command of the basic syntax of the language; and 4) a grounding in the elements of Gaelic grammar. The essential focus of the module was learning to speak the language and converse in it. Right from the beginning the class was organized on this basis. The mechanics of the language and its structure received emphasis only insofar as it promoted the achievement of the first two objectives above. The principal texts used in the module were Irish: a complete course for beginners (by Diarmuid O Sé and Joseph Sheils) and Progress in Irish (by Máiréad Ní Ghráda).
The program concluded with a week of collaborative performances created by the students, and included presentations based on the works of James Joyce, an Irish-American student’s dream sequence, an examination of the words and deeds of strong Irish women through history, an enactment of a story about a relationship between a man and a seal-woman, information about fairies, a representation of the events that might take place at an Irish pub, a one-act play about two women’s responses to “The Troubles,” a storytelling session, a presentation on Irish male schizophrenia, a video guide to the Irish-American scene in the Pacific Northwest, and a multi-media presentation dealing with the situation in the North of Ireland. The productions were generally more complicated than those done at the end of Winter quarter, and reflected a greater degree of involvement in program themes.