Irish Life in Irish Literature: Autobiographies

Course Description

The founding fathers of autobiography studies, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, put forth the theory that autobiography comes to the fore in times of cultural crisis, dislocation, and reorientation, when a creative clash of civilizations takes place (as, for example, in late antiquity and during the Renaissance). Against the background of the struggle for cultural and political identity and independence during the Irish Renaissance/Irish Literary Revival/Celtic Renaissance (c.1880-1922), Irish autobiographers undertake what Stephen Dedalus, speaking as James Joyce's autobiographical persona, describes as forging “in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (Incidentally, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], from which this quotation is taken, is recommended as a general introduction to this course.) Critics have maintained that the close identification between personal and national aspirations is indeed the single most important defining feature of Irish autobiography, and the motif of the quest for individual as well as national identity constitutes a 'central metaphor' of the self, a focus, an organizing principle. In this lecture course we will study the autobiographies of major Irish writers (W. B. Yeats, George Moore, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey, Sean O'Faolain; Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Edna O'Brien) and consider the ways in which they reflect the political and cultural history of Ireland in the twentieth century (thereby covering prominent themes such as Irish nationalism, the building of the nation state, the search for a national theatre, post-independence Ireland, the Civil War, DeValera's Gaelic Catholic Rural Ireland, censorship).

Recommended reading:

Rolf Breuer. Irland: Eine Einführung in seine Geschichte, Literatur und Kultur. München: Fink, 2003.