Introducing Ireland through Stage and Screen

This course will examine and analyze representations of Ireland in the theatre and on the screen up to the present. Tracing depictions of the rural and the urban through the lenses of film makers and dramatists, we'll consider how Irishness was made known to the world through the eyes of the homebound and the diaspora. Cinema subjects will range from the early-twentieth-century silent movies through the works of John Ford to Lenny Abrahamson; theatre will begin with the stereotypes of the nineteenth-century through the renaissance led by the Abbey, to the urgent works of todays young playwrights.