Sleeper Hits of the Irish Studies Classroom

Editors’ introduction: The classroom—for all of our preparation, and for all of our care in choosing course materials—remains an unpredictable space. As anyone who has ever taught can attest, some texts (including some texts that we dearly love) will fall flat, and others will surprise us by how well they ignite the students’ interest. With that in mind, we polled members of the editorial board with this question: What book or text has proven unexpectedly valuable for you and your students in an Irish Studies classroom? For our many academic readers in particular, we hope that the varied answers below will help to bridge the gap between scholarship and the realities of a daily teaching life.

nicholas allen: An easy call: Kevin Barry’s 2015 novel Beatlebone. It tells the story of John Lennon’s attempt to reach the uninhabited island he bought in Clew Bay and is an incredible feat of ventriloquism. A darkly beautiful pen portrait of the western coast around Westport, it is also a sketch of Liverpool and of New York; funny, savage, and radical, it is Barry’s best work yet. Beatlebone dissolves the idea of Ireland into a series of watery images on board boats, in lashing rain and, to a degree, through tears. Like a vulgar W. G. Sebald, Barry is a brilliant writer, whose melancholy rests just below the shiny surface. A great book all ’round.
University of Georgia

andrew auge: I don’t know if it qualifies as a “sleeper hit,” but my decade-long experience of teaching Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees has been fruitful. Our classroom focus is generally on the six stories of the volume that Doyle originally published in the multicultural monthly paper Metro Éireann from 2000–2004. As one of the first Irish literary responses to the influx of immigration during the economic boom of the 1990s, Deportees provides a lens for examining issues associated with mass immigration both in Ireland and the United States. In the first two stories, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Dinner” and “Deportees,” Doyle gives us a framework for the formation of an authentic interculturalism at both the micro- level of personal relationships and the macro- level of society as a whole. The latter is addressed in the title story where Jimmy Rabbitte, of Commitments fame, attempts to establish a new and diverse musical group reflective of twenty-first-century Ireland. The story of the Deportees’ formation evokes the challenges and rewards involved in fashioning an intercultural society, one in which cultural differences are not annulled, but coordinated and harmonized in pursuit of a mutual goal.

Discussing the broadly satirical story “57% Irish”—in which Doyle skewers a narrow ethno-nationalism—forces the students to confront the still potent myth that national identity is rooted in a volkgeist, a kind of spiritual ethnic essence. The volume’s penultimate story, “Home to Harlem,” posits an alternative to the rigid essentialism exposed in “57 % Irish.” In casting the hyphenated identities of the United States as a paradigm for a more accommodating sense of cultural identity, this story lets me end the semester with a discussion of what it really means to be Irish American, an identity that many of my students proudly claim.
Loras College

james séamus blake: At the beginning of my Irish Literature course at New York University, I emphasized the reality of two literary traditions: Irish Gaelic and English. The students were initially attracted to “The Dream of Oenghus” (Aislingi Oenguso) since it seemed to them like a fairy tale of love. In the classroom, the students discovered it was far more than a fairy tale. The preponderance of the human-god-animal transformations and the inability of the gods to answer questions encapsulates reincarnation but is also the underpinning of the long-lived apperception of the Aisling [vision], creative productivity lasting well into the encroachments of modernity. This mentalité co-existed alongside the Christian binaries of body and spirit, or of this life or the afterlife.

Aislingi Oenguso allows students to glimpse a worldview before colonial projects, mechanized by capital and profit, worked to disintegrate...