GLS 512: The Renaissance of Scottish Culture
Instructor: Ele Byington
The current phenomenon of Scottish cultural rejuvenation and preeminence (with Glasgow its City on a Hill) is seen through the lens of recent developments in Scottish literature as necessarily connected with analogous developments in economics, politics, and the arts, all interacting with each other to produce the renaissance.
The last two decades have witnessed a near-explosion of Scottish culture in all the principal sectors of national activity, economic, political, and artistic (preminently in literature). With the discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil providing an economic base, the people of Scotland have reclaimed automony in the political sphere - e.g., the establishment in the year 2000 of the first Scottish parliament in three hundred years - and asserted a vigorous independence/leadership in the artistic sphere that has received international attention.
There has occurred in the past twenty years an assertion of their worth by Scottish writers, and a determined rejection of their previously inferior status that has astonished the literary world. Flaunting their working-class affiliations, their urban experience (particularly that of Glasgow), their nationalism, their Scots language and dialects, novelists, poets, dramatists, and directors have taken an in-your-face attitude towards elitist proprieties (e.g., language) and stereotypes (the bagpipe-tartan-kilts and kailyard images). This literary and artistic ferment has made Glasgow almost incandescent with artistic acheivement and a City on a Hill.
Such a phenomenon does not occur in cultural isolation, and, like comparable developments in Elizabethan London and Paris after W.W.I., results from a concatenation of multiple factors. The central focus of the course will be upon recent Scottish literature, but that will be viewed as necessarily connected with analogous developments in business/industry, politics/history, and the other arts. The questions the course addresses are: How do these presumably different cultural enterprises relate to each other, and how do they interact in complex, interdependent ways to produce a Glasgow Renaissance? Through an examination of the relevant literature, histories, memoirs, the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman (the major Scottish newspapers), and - while not a requirement and in the Spring semester only - a trip to Glasgow over Spring Break.
Last Update: February 10, 2008
