UnforgettableLemon
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
So last semester I came up with a few really strong papers. I earned a 4.0 for my first semester in graduate school, and frankly for the first time ever. The two major papers I worked on treated W.B. Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion" and the second was on latent homosexuality in twentieth century Irish novels.
If you haven't figured it out yet, my primary interest is twentieth century Irish literature. The Yeats paper was fun, because I looked at some recent dissertations treating Yeats's greater European influences. Namely, his conceptualization of the soul as influenced by Dante and his appropriation of Shakespeare to both assert his dual heritage and evoke sympathy for the Irish people by relating them to the peasants of Shakespeare's day. He borrows a lot of Shakespearean conventions, as well as classical ones, in "On Baile's Strand," which is one of the works reflected upon in "Circus Animals. . ." The other two, "The Countess Kathleen" and "The Wanderings of Oisin," draw on Irish mythology and folk tales, but each presents a call to cultural, rather than military or political, nationalism in its own way.
This was fun, but I don't really know if I could expand it.
The other one I could have a field day with. I looked at Stoker's Dracula, Kate O'Brien's Land of Spices, and Colm Toibin's The Master and studied the authors' presentation of repressed sexuality, both explicit and implicit in these novels. I could easily expand this to include more novels and authors, or I could look at plays, etc. I'm not sure how this particular instructor feels about this, though, as he's big on the Master's thesis being entirely new work.
So here I am in semester number 2, no closer to a concrete idea. I'm taking Three Centuries of American Poetry and The Romantics, which aren't really helpful to me in my interests. I am also, however, taking "The Structure of the English Language," which is a phonetics/grammar class in which we are to apply phonological theory to the interpretation of literature. Well, I'm considering Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow," and if it works well, I may take a linguistic approach to his (very small) body of works. I was looking for publications on Behan in the library today, and I could find no articles more recent than the late 1980s and only one book, a biography, in as much time. So it seems like this is a pretty open field compared to Yeats or Joyce, or even Sean O' Casey.
Does it seem reasonable?
If you haven't figured it out yet, my primary interest is twentieth century Irish literature. The Yeats paper was fun, because I looked at some recent dissertations treating Yeats's greater European influences. Namely, his conceptualization of the soul as influenced by Dante and his appropriation of Shakespeare to both assert his dual heritage and evoke sympathy for the Irish people by relating them to the peasants of Shakespeare's day. He borrows a lot of Shakespearean conventions, as well as classical ones, in "On Baile's Strand," which is one of the works reflected upon in "Circus Animals. . ." The other two, "The Countess Kathleen" and "The Wanderings of Oisin," draw on Irish mythology and folk tales, but each presents a call to cultural, rather than military or political, nationalism in its own way.
This was fun, but I don't really know if I could expand it.
The other one I could have a field day with. I looked at Stoker's Dracula, Kate O'Brien's Land of Spices, and Colm Toibin's The Master and studied the authors' presentation of repressed sexuality, both explicit and implicit in these novels. I could easily expand this to include more novels and authors, or I could look at plays, etc. I'm not sure how this particular instructor feels about this, though, as he's big on the Master's thesis being entirely new work.
So here I am in semester number 2, no closer to a concrete idea. I'm taking Three Centuries of American Poetry and The Romantics, which aren't really helpful to me in my interests. I am also, however, taking "The Structure of the English Language," which is a phonetics/grammar class in which we are to apply phonological theory to the interpretation of literature. Well, I'm considering Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow," and if it works well, I may take a linguistic approach to his (very small) body of works. I was looking for publications on Behan in the library today, and I could find no articles more recent than the late 1980s and only one book, a biography, in as much time. So it seems like this is a pretty open field compared to Yeats or Joyce, or even Sean O' Casey.
Does it seem reasonable?
