Irish Educations with Philip Geheber

The ‘With Books’ option includes all titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore. Please allow 2 weeks for shipped books to arrive.

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Meeting Dates:
3/8, 3/29, 4/19, 5/10, 5/31
Online via Zoom

How do we become ourselves? In what ways do influences beyond our control, like family, school, church, state, gender, and history, mold us into the particular adults we are? And what happens when an individual’s desires and goals conflict with their society’s ideals? The novelistic genre of the Bildungsroman zeroes in on questions like these as it narrates a protagonist’s cognitive, psychological, and moral development, and in this reading group we will explore three exemplary Irish Bildungsromane: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013). In addition to focusing on the shifting Irish tensions that these novels navigate, from the Victorian period to the late 20th century, we’ll also engage with their stylistic innovations that dramatize the experience of being educated in Ireland at these moments.

Reading List:

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue by Edna O’Brien
• A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Participants should read Parts I and II of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in advance of the first session.