
The Ways We Read: Different Theories of Literature
A Residential Course on Literature with Professor Mary McCay
Fee: 1,400 euros (includes tuition, meals and accommodation)
Claire Keegan is honoured to be hosting Professor Mary McCay’s six-day course exploring the different perspectives on both the critical and the creative processes involved in understanding literature and in creating it.
As an undergraduate in New Orleans, Claire Keegan was inspired to write by Professor McCay, who opened up the world of literature and its possibilities through her teaching and mentorship. Claire will be attending and making significant contributions to this course daily.
This course will introduce different ways in which reading creative works changed as different critical theories developed, and it will help writers focus on how they hone their own creative processes. We will discuss how the silenced voices of women and minorities challenged the canon and how we as writers are influenced not only by personal experience, but also by larger political and social movements. We read and write, not in an attic room but in a large and complex changing world.
To book your space or for further information regarding the course please contact clairekeeganfictionclinic@gmail.com.
The Texts
Novels:
Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Billy Budd, a novella by Herman Melville
Plays:
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
Equus, by Peter Shaffer
My Beautiful Laundrette, by Hanif Kureishi
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee
Essays:
“What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Langston Hughes
“A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality” Steven Epstein
“The Meaning of the Phallus” Jacques Lacan
”The Archetype of Literature” Northrop Frye
“Tradition and Individual Talent” by TS Eliot
“One Is Not Born a Woman” by Monique Wittig
“The Laugh of Medusa” by Helene Cixous