Reading Through Irish Eyes

After having lived in Ireland for two weeks now, give or take, and studying English here, I’ve come to two conclusions:

• I don’t know anything about Irish literature besides James Joyce, who I’ve barely read. Oh, and Bram Stoker. Dracula can be argued as a metaphor for England’s relations with Ireland, you know.
• A lot of writers I read in my British Literature class were Irish and I didn’t even know.

Out of the six courses I’m taking, only two of them ended up being English courses: Irish Literature in English (or something like that, I think it has about three different names) and Seamus Heaney and Modern Irish Poetry.

It wasn’t until I was trying to prepare a bit for Ireland over the summer that I realized I have no idea who is from that island. In my British Literature surveys, everything was rather grouped together as “British.” I Wikipedia-ed “Irish writers” and was shocked to see Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Moore, and more included. Also, I hadn’t even heard of Seamus Heaney. Seriously. I had no idea Oscar Wilde was Irish. Giant literary fail all around.

I’m sure ethnicity is covered in the introductions to each author in the Norton Anthology, which I do read, but that’s the sort of information that I’m bad at retaining (sorry, English professors). Part of it is definitely my own ignorance in that sense; I fully accept any blame in this situation. But I also wonder if that’s just the way English is taught in American schools. We kind of just call everything “British,” and the context is really just the frame of the time period and whatever literary movement it is. I cannot recall any very strong emphasis on the context of a text in my British lit courses; rather, we spent most time analyzing the words themselves.

I’m not actually upset about this lack of education. Rather, I find it interesting. First of all, my English classes are both survey courses, and there simply isn’t enough time to get into all the fine details. Second, I’m pretty sure we didn’t even make it to the time of the Irish Revival in the late 19^th century. Third, why would we need to really dive into such detail as undergraduate English students in America? I don’t mean this in an arrogant and/or ignorant American sense, but more in the sense that it’s a little reasonable to kind of categorize Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales together as one and North America as the other. The British Isles all have very different histories that often, at least in the case of Ireland and England, involve one hating the other even to this day, but for a general major or survey case, I think one could argue that time necessitates a bit of generalization.

When registering for courses at the end of the summer, I realized that I really did not want to take any ordinary class that I could take back home; for that reason I dropped the 20^th Century Drama class I was in to allow for a different Irish Studies elective. I picked my English courses so that I specifically could learn about Irish literature and about Ireland as a whole, because we all know overall history and literature are intricately woven together.

One of the other titles for Irish Literature in English is about “Reading the Story of Ireland,” so the course is basically exactly what I wanted to get out of an Irish literature class here. We’ve briefly done Thomas Moore and W.B. Yeats so far, and while their large university lecture system doesn’t allow for us to go into much depth so far, I find it fascinating to learn so much about the poets’ connections to Irish political, social, and economic turmoil that was happening at the time. It helps that basically all my classes are teaching me about Irish history and culture, so that information also influences my interpretation of the poetry.

I never got so much out of my British Literature surveys. Don’t get me wrong, I had wonderful classes and professors and did learn a lot. But, looking back on both my American surveys and my British Lit surveys, it’s obvious that there is a bigger lack of contextual knowledge in the latter course—and even more of a lack when the writer is Irish, or something besides straight-up English. We read texts with first an American perspective, and then perhaps a semi-informed English perspective, and after that, I’d say that generally most English students are lost. What’s strange is I never noticed what was missing until now.

In turn, this opens my eyes to how much more in-depth American surveys are in a contextual sense. Reflecting on my readings from the 20^th century—The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, excerpts from Louise Erdrich and Jhumpa Lahiri—it’s clear that we would be totally BS-ing our way through those discussions if we’re weren’t Americans. Everyone knows the basics of racism and of materialism, but then there is the sort of stuff you don’t even register knowing, the kind of stuff that has been absorbed simply by being alive and growing up in a specific country.

It’s a little nerve-racking in my “tutorial,” the seminar part of the course. I keep waiting to “say something wrong” because of my American perspective or lack of knowledge about Ireland. I won’t take for granted the ability I have in an American Literature classroom to connect with the literature anymore, and I don’t think I’ll be able to assume analysis of non-American texts quite as much either. There’s a whole dimension that’s added when not only looking at the context in which it was written, but being aware of everything that came before, and where the country and people of origin are today.