Ireland Must be Important …

Abstract

When it came to the choice of an MA course at University College Dublin in 1969, for me and for almost all my friends who had graduated with a BA in English, there was only one real option—Modern English and American Literature. One or two specialists, of course, would choose Old and Middle English or Linguistics, but these were unloved by the bulk of us, who had resented being required to devote what felt like a disproportionate amount of time to them during our undergraduate years. The only other possibility was Anglo-Irish Literature, but this was almost automatically rejected. It consisted, as we perceived it, of uninspiring courses in such matters as Anglo-Irish speech patterns, the Abbey Theatre, short stories, and Nineteenth Century novelists, with even the risk of the dreaded Irish language, remembered with distaste from its compulsory imposition at school, making an appearance. Dullsville, in short. Anyway, Anglo-Irish Literature, as we saw it, was meant for Americans, and mainly Americans took it. No, Modern English and American Literature was where the action and the intellectual stars were. It promised access to the great world, to the world of contemporary and even avant-garde fiction and poetry, of the nascent but already inspiring literary theory—Writing Degree Zero had just appeared in translation in a cheap paperback: I read it with great excitement and without understanding a word— and of political consciousness—an important issue at the time; a world, in short, far removed from the provincialism, narrow perspectives and cultural isolation of our origins. And from these origins we could not get far enough away.