First Mandatory Task (of Three)

Your initial task: read the short story: Colin Barrett’s “Whoever Is There, Come On Through,” which first appeared in 2018. The tale’s unidentified, third-person narrator interrogates the period from November 2016 through January 2017 as it played out among a community of disparate people — from six to seventy years of age — living in the remote western periphery of Ireland, close to the Atlantic Ocean. Economic opportunities are few, and such modern challenges as drug abuse, fast food, and consumer capitalism abound.

You can access Colin Barrett’s “Whoever Is There, Come On Through” (2018) as a printable PDF by clicking the icon above. Alternatively, you can read it by clicking here.

 Second Mandatory Task (of Three)

Your second task: complete and submit — via Folio, before the deadline — the single Write Now (i.e. written homework) exercise about the focal literary text. Refer to your syllabus and/or the course Folio page to check the submission deadline. No late work is accepted.

Due to your instructor’s “second job” as director of the university’s Center for Irish Research and Teaching, he has been challenged to create a Write Now exercise to accompany Barrett’s short story, “Whoever Is There, Come On Through.” He has determined not to include such an exercise on this occasion, but he will award each student full points nonetheless.

Please be very mindful of the following statements, which appear on the course syllabus.

Do your own work. Students may not collaborate on the production of responses to Write Now quizzes (i.e. homework exercises). When grading, we pay close attention to similarities between submissions. A student found to have copied or otherwise relied on another student’s work (on even one occasion) — or found to have committed plagiarism — will receive an “F” for the entire course and, in addition, will be reported to the University for a hearing that may result in suspension or expulsion from GS.

Third Mandatory Task (of Three)

Your third task: study the instructional content. In order to render the lectures as clear as possible, your instructor has captured their essential material in written form, presented immediately below as a PDF: Written Account of Barrett Material. Consider this document your primary resource when studying the focal text. Terms that have particular importance appear in highlighted form.

EXAM WORDS

When preparing for your exam about this work of literature, ensure that you are fully up to speed with the following data (all of which receive explanation in the written account):

Wild Atlantic Way ••• The Stinging Fly; Young Skins (2009); Homesickness (2022) ••• Glanbeigh; River Moy; Belleek Woods; The Heads ••• consecution; “Give the characters … the best [lines]” ••• Flannery O’Connor (Savannah, GA); William Faulkner (Oxford, MS) ••• bure ••• “the ledge of himself”; ligature ••• Ashleigh = ash-tree meadow; Nugent = new settlement; Murt = sea-navigator ••• Maxol; Jack & Jones; Lionel Messi (#10 for Argentinian national soccer squad) ••• Jesus (St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 6): “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” ••• in all four canonical gospels: Jesus’s feeding of five thousand people with five bread loaves ••• currency: technology that will one day disappear (according to Jamie) ••• Marx: money as a general equivalent and a social relation; metal money as the definitive form of money; credit as “the authentic money of capitalism” ••• George Floyd: $20 bill ••• Eric Garner: cash sales of single cigarettes (“I can’t breathe”) ••• gypsies; Romani ••• travelers; “nackers”; na lucht siúil ••• dole ••• men’s shed; “Shoulder to Shoulder” ••• without “cop” ••• end-of-men crisis; Fight Club (novel) by Chuck Palhniuk; incel; Cheerio ••• flaithiúlacht ••• mizzle: type of rain; disappearance ••• “fair play” ••• Shane McGowan and The Pogues; “The Sickbed of Cuchulainn”; “song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks” ••• “Let’s Get Lost” (song) by Chet Baker (“prince of cool”) ••• orkhis ••• White Chocolate ••• Celtic Tiger; FDI ••• Fintan O’Toole; Mary Robinson ••• meitheal ••• upstairs-bathroom window versus school uniforms ••• pistachio shell splitting