Expand+Enrolment & General Information
Students are encouraged to enrol as early as possible. If you enrol late, the class may be full or may have been cancelled due to low numbers.

You can enrol in person (at the Access and Lifelong Learning Centre i...

Hide-Enrolment & General Information
Students are encouraged to enrol as early as possible. If you enrol late, the class may be full or may have been cancelled due to low numbers.

You can enrol in person (at the Access and Lifelong Learning Centre in the James Joyce Library Building), Monday - Friday 9.00am - 1.00pm and 2.00pm - 5.00pm.

Enrol by credit or debit car over the phone (01) 716 7123 or online www.ucd.ie/all/study

The course below will be available for Spring, and will be listed in more detail in our Spring programme. You can book for either term from August 8th 2017.

Cancellations
Lifelong Learning courses are offered subject to sufficient numbers. Where there are insufficient registrations, the course will be withdrawn.

Expand+Introduction
Our Lifelong Learning courses cover a range of topics from Art History through to History, Literature, Philosophy and Writing. The courses are open to all and provide a chance to explore a subject without concerns about assessment. Thes...

Hide-Introduction
Our Lifelong Learning courses cover a range of topics from Art History through to History, Literature, Philosophy and Writing. The courses are open to all and provide a chance to explore a subject without concerns about assessment. These courses are part of a long tradition in University College Dublin (UCD), and follow the legacy of the university’s founder Cardinal John Henry Newman, who wished to make higher level education accessible to a broad sweep of Irish people.

Today, UCD remains committed to widening participation in higher education, in all its forms, whether to accredited formal learning programmes or informal open learning provision. We believe the rich intellectual resources of the university should be available to all. Our commitment is reaffirmed when we hear the important role learning plays in enhancing people’s lives, whether through providing intellectual stimulus and new friendships, or as an opportunity to sample a topic before further study.

The programme is developed in collaboration with tutors, UCD schools and the broader UCD community. Student feedback informs the type of courses we offer and the style of teaching promoted. Student evaluations have indicated that learning is enhanced through discussion, group work and participative approaches, and by getting out and about to learn on the move. Many of our courses now include field trips or gallery visits, which bring course material to life and provide a social learning opportunity. Further course details are available online at www.ucd.ie/all/study.

We hope you find a course that suits your interests!

Your Tutors
UCD Access and Lifelong Learning is privileged to work with a highly expert and committed group of tutors who are recruited not just on the basis of their subject expertise, but also for their demonstrated interest in adult learning. You can read about your tutor’s qualifications and areas of expertise online where we have included a short tutor biography alongside the course information.

Reading & Booklists
Booklists are available online alongside course descriptions. For the majority of courses, the booklist contains suggested reading for those interested in investigating the subject further. Your tutor can guide you as to which reading might be most suitable.

Booklists for literature students are more critical as classes are based on particular set texts. We recommend that initially you acquire just the first text listed as the list will be discussed with your tutor in class.

Expand+Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story. Memoirs are both historical documents and literary narratives; creative works and social rec...

Hide-Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story. Memoirs are both historical documents and literary narratives; creative works and social records.

This module asks questions about the relationship between how we remember and how we articulate or represent memory and memory making. It draws on literary, historical, philosophical and creative approaches to individual and communal memory practices and considers how such practices change over time. A key focus is the interrogation of the memoir as history and the memoir as art. We analyse the subjective processes of selective memory making that are shared across literary and historical memoirs as well as examining how an individual life story generates broader historical meaning in wider national contexts and traditions.

This course will assess these questions by focussing on Timothy O’Grady’s and Stephen Pyke’s I Could Read The Sky (1997). ‘Every book, like every blackbird, is different,’ writes John Berger in his introduction to this compelling and important fictional memoir. And there is no book quite like I Could Read The Sky: it is a collaborative text that combines historical archival work, a lyrical narrative by Timothy O’Grady and black-and-white documentary photography by Steve Pyke.

At its most basic, it tells the story of one man’s journey from the West of Ireland to the towns and cities of England, a history of Ireland’s complex migration patterns and an individual account of love and loss and regret. The book is told as an act of memory: the narrator finds himself alone at the end of the twentieth century, looking back across decades of a life lived between our two islands. The full force of the collision of dislocation and belonging that afflicts the emigrant is everywhere apparent in the written and visual text. Music becomes a focal point for this collision throughout the text as a binding tie to home and fundamental expression of emigrant traditions abroad.

This experience of Irish emigration is both fictional and a creative expression of historical reality. It is the memory of one man and the history of a people. Our purpose is to tease out these apparent contradictions and to come to some conclusions about what constitutes memoir, memory work, history and fiction.