This course enables students to engage in detailed literary study of two major figures in Irish literature, as well as the culture and history that surround Yeats and Joyce. Students will synthesize and evaluate the key issues of Irish literary scholarship through detailed studies of the works, biography and criticism of Yeats and Joyce. They will engage in the reading of the history of Ireland in the late Nineteenth and the early Twentieth centuries. Selected novels, poems, plays, and short stories of the two writers will be examined in the seminar for their aesthetic values, their social and political contexts, their rhetorical and genre strategies, and their connections with the biographical facts of the authors' lives. Students will compile annotated bibliographies, make oral presentations, write short papers, and write one 15 page scholarly essay based on research.

Prerequisites: Any ELIT course and 75 credits