SHUM 4857 - Dictation, Disenchantment, and Irish Modernism

(crosslisted)
(also ENGL 4070)

Fall. 4 credits.

Limited to 15 students.

D. Keane.

This seminar will consider how the three primary meanings of “dictation”—the exercise of political dictatorship; the act of dictating (for transcription); a dictated utterance—provide a reflexive entry point into the field of Irish modernism. Course readings will examine the logic of rationalization and mimesis that underpins this nexus of dictation, especially as it was materialized in political and institutional contexts marked by uncertainty over the mechanisms of democratic polity and the rise and success of dictatorial forms of authority. By following the evolution of the practical interactions of dictation machines, radio broadcasting, and print media in the period, we will trace a course from anti-colonial agitation against imperial coercion through the rise of fascism to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when the dynamic features of a new media environment could not entirely dispel the central concerns of the preceding decades. Primary readings will include works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, Louis MacNeice, Flann O’Brien, and WB Yeats, among others.