Course Management
The teaching/learning aspects of the module are undertaken through lectures (transmission), seminars (discussion) and independent learning (practice). Besides attending lectures and seminars, you are expected to undertake a substantial amount of independent study based on the reading lists supplied and other resources during the working week or elsewhere in your own schedule.

The preparation of Continuous Assessment essays may also be regarded as an ingredient in the teaching/learning experience and students should feel free to seek guidance and reactions from their lectures and seminar leaders while carrying out this essential part of the assessment process. The essays are submitted at the end of the seventh week, after which comes the Reading Week during which no lectures or seminars will be given.

Teaching/Learning
Lectures
There will be two lectures per week of teaching excepting for Week 1, when the first meeting occurs in the second timetable slot only. In general, an author is introduced in the first lecture of the week while the selected work is examined much more closely in the second, thus preparing you for further study of that work in the context of its author's literary career. The lectures will be given by Dr Bruce Stewart (Module Co-ordinator) with occasional assistance from other lecturers.

Seminars
The seminars are given up to closer readings and balanced dialogue between students and their tutor. Specific study-tasks will be introduced occasionally to focus critical issues and to provide groundwork for the Continuous Assessment Essay and the Sessional Examination. Though seminar attendance is entirely voluntary attendance lists will be kept and consulted whenever a review of the study-history of a given student’s career is required by the examination board of the university. This can be to the advantage of the student where evidence of application assists in securing a good result.

Responsibility for attendence does not entirely lie on the students’ side, however. A well-conducted seminar will clearly recommend itself as a learning event and failure to hold the students’ attention on these occasions may be seen as evidence of insufficient communcation skill, literary knowledge, or preparation on the part of the tutor. You are entitled to expect al these things and may report on any perceived deficit in the appropriate feed-back contexts.

Independent Study
The secondary reading list is not regarded as a mandatory part of the studies programme but you are strongly encouraged to read deeply and judicious among the critics cited (and others, if you find them) in regard to authors and topics that interest you. Only a small selection of the available criticism can be listed here and a still smaller portion has been made available on the short-loansystem of the University Central Library at Coleraine. Additional texts or photo-copies made available during the semester will be indicated at the relevant lectures by the lecturer(s) concerned and will be available to all students on an equal footing.

Work on this module outside of the lecture-hall and seminar-room is essentially self-directed aside from seminar tasks and reading lists and and should clearly outweigh the amount of hours spent in the lecture-hall and class-room by a significant proportion. 100 hours of study throughout the semester is not out of keeping with your commitment to reading, reflection and the organisation of materials on the three modules per semester for which each student has registered. This corresponds to an allotment of 2 hours a day 5 days a week and should only be regarded as a conservative ‘guestimate’ of what an able and committed student will plan for.

You are strongly encouraged to consider the reference works cited on the reading lists as valuable points of departure for wider reading as well as useful measures of critical opinion against which your own interpretation and evaluation of the authors can be pitched. Please do not hesitate to consult your Module Co-Ordinator and the seminar tutor as well as other lecturers for guidance on any matter connected with the Module and particularly their share in it [see Contact Addresses].

Methods of Assessment
ENG507C2 is worth 20 credit points towards an undergraduate degree in the modular system (which also entails the possibility of transfering credits from one university to another). Individual grades are assessed on the basis of 50% for Continuous Assessment and 50% for Sessional Examinations. By coursework is meant the mid-semester essay answering to questions or topics supplied for the purpose in the first weeks of the semester. By Sessional Examinations is meant the written examination that takes place under the auspices of the Examination Office at the end of the semester.
The aggregate of marks from these two sources makes up the contribution of this module to your year’s marks and to your final degree. In this context, Third Year courses can be seen to weigh more heavily than those in first and second year allowing for the averaging method applied in one case and the best mark applied to the other. It is useful to recognise that a poor performance in a Third Year module is less ‘condonable’ as a proportion of the final degree than in any other part of your under-graduate career.

Continuous Assessment
Students are asked to write a mid-term essay of 2,000-3,000 words on a subject listed on the sheet supplied during the first weeks of the semester. While the substance of the essay should correspond to the topic named or indicated, it is a mistake to think that a slavish adherence to the terminology of the question is what is sought from you. Please regard the questions as prompts for a certain kind of discussion which should be conducted according to your best understanding of the texts and as an invitation to share that understanding with the examiner(s).

One way of putting your mark on an answer is to devise a title of your own for the essay and this will be warmly welcomed providing the title is cogent in itself and corresponds in general terms to the nature of the enquiry suggested by the question: "Reading the Irish landscape: History and Nation in the Poetry of John Montague". Students who have completed independent dissertations in English literature at this stage may take to this suggestion more than others and those others must not feel that it is in any sense a requirement or a feature of the assessment system.

You are expected to supply a bibliographical listing of works quoted or otherwise consulted in writing your Continuous Assessment. Marks will be deducted for footnotes and bibliographical details that fail to provide clear indications as to precisely where a given citation may be found if the reader choses to examine it for any reason. The absence of appopriate attributions and citations may be interpreted as a form of plagiarism where material has evidently been borrowed from a given source or author. (It is unnecessary to footnote lectures or other offerings on the part of course-tutors.)

All such references may be formatted in any style you chose providing they are effective and not unduly eccentric but you should not that there are certain logical conventions are observed in critical works of the kind that you are expected to consult. Consultation with the English Style-sheet will help you here, as well a cursory glance that the footnotes and bibliography of any academic monograph or journal.

Sessional Examination
The Sessional Examination at end-of-semester will require the student to answer any THREE out of TEN questions offered. The resultant essays will be marked within the subject and second-marked within the English Division before being put before the External Examiners, whose duty it is to ensure that our treatment of third-year examinees (in particular) is in keeping with the standards established and maintained by the teaching division and the University at large.

As regards subject-matter, each question on the paper will broadly correspond to the topic and treatment of one or other lecture on the schedule, but may not always make reference to all the authors or topics covered in that lecture. A few of the questions posed are designed to enable students to address authors covered at different stages of the lecture programme or to discuss topics of recurrent interest, include questions of theory and definition as regards the subject-matter of the module.

A clearly-worded rubric on the sessional examination paper will instruct you to avoid repeating material already used in Continuous Assessment, and this instruction should be strictly observed since the External Examiners have a brief to inquiry if the internal examiner have checked whether the rule has been obeyed. The point of the rule, quite obviously, is to avoid students seeking marks twicec over of a single piece of work and likewise narrowing the range of subjects covered within the module to a preferred slice of the whole syllabus.

Examination papers are marked anonymously and the identity of their authors only disclosed after first and second marking are completed. It is at this stage that they are checked any such signs of repetition of work already submitted in the Continuous Assessment. It is not, of course, forbidden, to refer to authors treated in the earlier context for purposes of illustrating a different argument or topic. What is intended is specifically that work previously accredited should not be resubmitted. Here the index is more-or-less extensive verbal repetition of previous submissions.

Since any such repetition will incur a severe loss of marks, students are advised to plan their Continuous Assessment and Sessional Examination strategy at the outset with a view to definite avoidance of self-plagiarism of this kind. In the main, however, sessional examinations (like Continuous Assessment) should be regarded as an opportunity to make the strongest showing of your knowledge and judgement of the writers covered in the course, with every other sign of literary skill and intellectual capacity you can muster.

Assessment Criteria
The following criteria will be used to grade written work as set out in the report sheets supplied with students’ papers examined by members of the English Division of School of Languages & Literature:

Lecture Schedule

Reading List

Primary Texts

Samuel Beckett
Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996)
John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (rev. edn. 1970)
Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (1962)
——, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973)
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996)
Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (1990)

Liam O’Flaherty
James Cahalan, Liam O’Flaherty: A Study of the Short Fiction (1991)
Peter Costello, Liam O’Flaherty’s Ireland (1997)
Angeline A. Kelly, Liam O’Flaherty: The Storyteller (1976)
James H. O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty (1973)
Patrick F. Sheeran, The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism (1976)
John Zneimer, The Literary Vision of Liam O’Flaherty (1970)

Seamus Heaney
Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (1988)
——, ed., Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993)
Harold Bloom, ed., Seamus Heaney (1986)
Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney (1982, rev. enl. edns. 1985 1994)
Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (1986)
Henry Hart, Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (1992)
Bernard O’Donoghue, Seamus Heaney and The Language of Poetry (1994)
Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of A Poet (1993)

John Montague
Christopher Murray, ed., Irish University Review, "John Montague Special Issue", 19, 1 (Spring 1989)

Kate O’Brien
Adele M. Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien: A Critical Study (1990)
Lorna Reynolds, Kate O’Brien: A Literary Portrait (1987);
Eibhear Walshe, ed., Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (1993)

John Banville
Joseph McMinn, The Supreme Fictions of John Banville (1999)

General studies
Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets (1995)
Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (1975)
Jolanta Burgoyne-Johnson, Bleeding the Boundaries: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian (1999) [pamphlet].
Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (1992).
John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel, Vol II (1990)
Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (1992)
Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (1992).
John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Revival: A Changling Art (1987)
Michael Kenneally, ed., Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature (1995)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995)
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (1994)
Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (1997)
The Southern Review: Special Issue on Irish Poetry, V, 31, 3 (1995)
Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (1993)
Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993)
Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History - Tradition, Identity and Difference (1990)

Literary histories & reference works
James Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (1983)
Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1982)
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979; 2 vols. 1996)
Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce (1985; rep. edn. 1996)
Christina Mahony, Contemporary Irish Literature (1999).
Patrick Rafroidi & Maurice Harmon eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (1976)
Robert Welch, ed., Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996)

Web Resources
Numerous websites provide information on Irish writers (beware of inaccurate copies and misleading commentaries). For the purposes of this course, your first stop should be The Princess Grace Irish Library Electronic Irish Records [PGIL EIRData] at http://www.pgil-eirdata.org. This gives information on 4,500 Irish authors and their contexts and includes material previously copied from student papers for this module.

To that extent, the website is part and parcel of our teaching/learning experience on ENG507C2. Hence I may ask you to supply disk-copies of CA essays for inclusion on the website. There is no obligation to comply with this request and no ulterior benefit in doing so. Any material copied in this way will be properly accredited and can be cited thereafter as part of your curriculum vitae. The accuracy of references is critical for this process and attention to publication dates, page-numbers and so on is all the more important.

Seminar Timetable
The seminar provides a unique opportunity for developing communication skills, learning through discussion, and deepening one’s understanding of texts while refining one’s response in structured critical debates with others. The seminar topics provided each week in advance are significantly related to the CA essay titles, thus providing a context for the exploration of themes that may be developed more fully or more effectively in the written submission.

All seminars on this module will be conducted by the Module Co-Ordinator (Dr. Bruce Stewart). A provisional list of seminar members will be handed out at the first meeting (1st Feb.) If the time and day do not accord with your plans in regard to other modules you may shift to another seminar among those already scheduled. It would be courteous and adroit to notify the Seminar Tutor or Co-Ordinator of any anticipated absence and the reason for any other non-attendance in the event of unexpected absence.

Contact Addresses
The Co-ordinator can be contacted on any matter relating to the contents or the conduct of the Module at the address below. The telephone numbers of the other lecturers on the module are also listed for your convenience.