Writing the Irish Revolution: Yeats, Syn

‘Writing the Irish Revolution’ is a course that sets out to interrogate what the literature of witness could mean, how it could range from O’Casey’s plays – some of which were performed even as the violence raged outside a theatre run by Lady Gregory and Yeats – to Yeats’s own poems that were filled with both argument and ambivalence. And could range also from private diaries written in the heat of the moment to subsequent testimony composed with deliberation.

The course examines one strand in the Irish Revolution that was the Irish Literary Renaissance, and it studies how literary texts – poems, translations, plays, travel writing – created an atmosphere in Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century that led in ways both direct and oblique to insurrection. The outcome of such scrutiny should include a recognition of the porous, unstable nature of the literary text in a colonial crisis, in a time of deep political ferment.