My thesis will focus on the intertextuality of recurring characters in works of fiction, primarily novels. I will be focusing mainly on the works of James Joyce and how the character of Stephen Dedalus appears in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as a protagonist. I would also like to relate this to Kurt Vonnegut’s use of recurring characters, many minor characters from his most famous work Slaughterhouse 5 also appear as main characters in other novels in his collective works (Mother Night, God Bless You Mr Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions). 

In relation to Joyce I would like to draw on David Hayman’s Ulysses The Mechanics of Meaning (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), specifically the section of chapter 2 “Dublin, June 16, 1904”, Stephen in the Plot where-in-which he provides an depth character description of Joyce’s fictional alter-ego: “Poor, bedraggled, and still unfledged, Stephen has returned to Ireland from Paris where he read much but wrote little. A grounded hawk among wild geese” (24). This will be useful when considering Ulysses as a sequel to A Portrait and displaying the evolution of the recurring central character from the hopeful ending of the Bildungsroman.

For further information on intertextuality I will draw from Graham Allen’s book on the subject itself Intertextuality (Routledge, 2000). From the introduction he examines interpretation of texts and then later in Chapter 2 “The text unbound: Barthes”, in the section “Readerly and Writerly Texts” he writes about the reader’s experience of a text, linear development of a story and the meanings within comparing them to “detectives shifting through the clues sequentially provided by a narrative”. This will be particularly relevant when considering and possibly explaining the appeal of the recurring characters in fiction to readers. What is it about the possible inter-connectivity of a larger fictional world that has not only allowed links to be drawn from one work of a writer to another as in the case of Joyce but has also influenced modern popular culture today.

I will also draw from the casebook on James Joyce Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man edited by Morris Beja (The Macmillan Press, 1973), specifically the “The Artist“ by Harry Levin (1941) which opens discussing the Bildungsroman and characters that serve as a stand-in figure for the writer themselves. This will be useful as A Portrait is considered a semi-autobiographical work by Joyce and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is written using the writer’s own experiences during the Second World War. It will potentially provide useful perspectives to examine Stephen Dedalus as a character within the two texts and then as the alter-ego of the writer himself. I will also refer to Hugh Kenner’s “The Portrait In Perspective“ (1955) which is included in the same collection.

Drawing from The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2004) I will reference John Paul Riquelme’s piece “Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: transforming the nightmare of history” where-in-which the works of Oscar Wilde, an area I am well acquainted with, are referenced early on. I am also interested in making use of Stephen Hero, as the original draft for A Portrait in order to explore the aforementioned development of the character. Examining the writer’s earlier work and observing the changes made for the final novel should assist in writing about development. Also from The Cambridge Companion I will draw from Derek Attridge’s Chapter 1 piece “Reading Joyce”, Attridge points out the influence of Joyce on modern culture, as I have also expressed an interest in, “in television and video, film, popular music, and advertising, all of which are marked as modern genres by the use of Joycean techniques” (1) Specifically I would like to explore this in terms of recurring characters in modern cinema and may return to Graham Allen’s Intertextuality, specifically the section of Chapter 5 “Postmodern Conclusions” and the section “Intertextuality in the non-literary arts” where he discusses the intertextuality of performance.

Having studied the works of Joyce and other Modernists (specifically T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land) as pieces that lend themselves well to live performance in the past it may be insightful to look into that area again for relevant sources pertaining to the writer’s world building and readers’ experiences. I may draw from Penny Farfan and Katherine E. Kelly’s Staging Modernism: Introduction (John Hopkins University Press, 2008) for this route in which they state that “A play, for example, exists both as a printed and performance text” (1). Previously I have made use of this piece when examining Episode 15 of Ulysses, “Circe” as a major turning point for Joyce’s development of characters in the book. I also made reference to Vincent J. Cheng’s piece “Stephen Dedalus and the Black Panther” from James Joyce Quarterly (University of Tulsa, 1987).

To consider Vonnegut’s use of the recurring characters particularly his character Kilgore Trout and his role as a minor character in Slaughterhouse 5 and reappearance as one of the protagonists in the later novel Breakfast of Champions I will also examine the writer’s use of Billy Pilgrim’s fractured timeline detailing their shared experience of the war, drawing from Amanda Wick’s “All This Happened, More or Less”: The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five” (Routledge, 2014). Vonnegut also inserts himself into his works, appearing in the background of the earlier novel and as a creator figure who interacts with Kilgore Trout in the later one. This “meta-textual” writing will also be relevant to the exploration of these characters in works of fiction who serve an autobiographical role for the author, Joyce as a Modernist writer and Vonnegut as a writer in the Post-Modern period.

I will make use of the Boole Library IT services and extensive collections for this project and will continue to search for potentially relevant journal articles and secondary sources.

Bibliography:

Hayman, David. Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning. Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Print.

Allen. Graham. Intertextuality. London. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. 2000. Print.

Levin, Harry.”The Artist.” Kenner, Hugh. ”The Portrait in Perspective”. James Joyce Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A Casebook. Edited by Morris Beja. The Macmillan Press. 1973. Print.

Farfan, Penny and Katherine E. Kelly. Staging Modernism: Introduction. Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Print.

J. Cheng, Vincent. “Stephen Dedalus and the Black Panther Vampire”. James Joyce Quarterly. Tulsa. University of Tulsa. 1987. Print.

Riquelme, John Paul. “Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: transforming the nightmare of history”. Attridge, Derek. “Reading Joyce”. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Edited by Derek Attridge. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2009. Print.

Wicks, Amanda. “All This Happened, More or Less”: The Science Fiction of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. 2014.

“Well that went well”, the consensus from all involved with the 2019 Textualities conference. Head of the School of English Prof Lee Jenkins described it as one of the highlights of the year, that the lecturing staff are always excited to hear what the graduate students have been researching and learn something new themselves. I very much always feel myself adopting the role of teacher whenever I have to give a presentation and that feeling was emphasized with the addition of a lecture podium and a sizable crowd.

Many of us were nervous as the day of the conference approached, it does not matter how skilled/experienced you are with public speaking, the additional weight of an academic grade will not help the anxiousness. However, from the very first panel at 10pm on Friday 22nd of March it was obvious that all our preparation had paid off. As I stated previously we received useful guidance from Dr Anne Etienne, lecturer in drama and theater which involved practicing our presentations in front of each other.

The first panel which I myself volunteered to chair was about “The Monstrous”, the theme was addressed from many different points of view by students from both MAs covering everything from witchcraft in Shakespeare, to Beowulf, to Mary Shelley to modern superhero movies. The enthusiastic Q/A sessions which followed each panel allowed the speakers to shine and engage with other scholars with similar interests.

My own experience was equally positive, though I did experience a minor technical difficulty with my slideshow I was able to recover. As any actor who fumbles a line during a live performance will tell you, minor mistakes are fine as long as the show continues. The whole experience of the conference was an enriching insight into the true academic world we may become a part of someday and even now I cannot believe it is behind us after so much build up since the new year.

On Friday 22nd of March MA students from the Masters in Modern Literature and Film and Masters in Medieval to Renaissance Literature here at UCC will be presenting their research. The event is open to anyone who would like to come along and show support (thus concludes the advertising portion of this post)

This is particularly exciting for me as I have previously mentioned it was attending this very event last year which made me decide to undertake this MA. Public speaking enjoys a love/hate relationship with most people (let’s be honest) though personally I have never been intimidated by it. This is not because I am a social butterfly, I get tongue tied talking to more than one person in a normal setting but for some reason throughout my undergraduate degree I always found myself not only receiving good grades in presentations but enjoying them. My background is in musical theater. In my teenage years I played leading roles in various musicals and concerts so after singing in front of up to 300 people, giving a 7 minute presentation on a topic I am passionate about in front of a room of people (many of whom I will know) is not as intimidating. I enjoyed our preparatory class given by Dr Anne Etienne, a lecturer in drama and theatre thus confirming my personal thought process of comparing an academic talk to a theatrical performance.

This conference is our top priority for the month of March, which is looking to be particularly busy. I look forward to working with my peers to organize and promote the event and hear about their diverse range of fascinating research topics.

The stage is ours.

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Its round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of babies-‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind'”-Kurt Vonnegut

Following on from my previous piece on James Joyce I thought it would be enjoyable to write about my experience studying another writer whose works I admire, particularly when it is a writer that will play a prominent part in my upcoming conference presentation and thesis. Every writer will tell you it is easier to write when you are genuinely passionate about the subject, or as any student who has had to do an assignment on an area they find dull compared to one that fascinates them can tell you in a heartbeat (right after they meet their deadline).

I find myself constantly referencing the final year of my undergraduate degree, though this is with good reason as I feel it was instrumental in shaping my current literary interests. An invitation from the lecturer who had taught the seminar on Ulysses, Dr Heather Laird, was what brought me to last year’s MA in Literature students’ research  conference and lead me to deciding to pursue this Masters in the first place (and here we are). However, it was not initially in a lecture that I first encountered Vonnegut’s name. I have mentioned previously that one of the things I love about being a literature scholar is that a passion becomes your academic field, thus even when I am not studying some book or film for university I am usually spending my free time reading books or watching movies. Over the 2017/18 Christmas holidays I was reading Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One in preparation for the film adaption directed by Steven Spielberg that was going to be released a few months later. The novel is a treasure trove of pop culture references and it just so happened that the protagonist Parzival names his spacecraft after his favorite writer: “The Vonnegut” (naming your spaceship after your favorite writer. I approve). When I read this I knew I recognized the name from somewhere and soon solved the mystery when I looked at my reading list for the following semester, 20th Century American Literature (the module I remember fondly as the best 5 credits of my undergrad) included Breakfast of Champions by none other than a Mr Kurt Vonnegut. Needless to say I was intrigued, any writer whose name appears in a novel which also references Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Blade Runner and more should definitely interest an unapologetic nerd like myself.

The fact that I now consider Vonnegut one of my favorite writers (note the title of this blog post) and am in the process of writing my postgraduate using his works as a key focus should tell you what my first experience of reading him was like (I do not know why I attempted to create some suspense there, must be the inner author peaking through). Breakfast of Champions was brilliant, its satirical but accessible writing style conveys deep themes such as a critique of post-war commercialization and consumerism, the theme of freewill which reoccurs throughout many of Vonnegut’s works and ideas of meta-fiction with the writer himself appearing in the story.

I have since made it my mission to read as many of his works as possible in preparation for my thesis, having read his most famous novel Slaughterhouse 5 over the summer and Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle very recently. I was introduced to Vonnegut through reading I was doing in my own time but I became truly fascinated with his writing through my university studies. I don’t bring my work home with me, its always there. As I continue to read his novels and the articles scholars have already published on them I will most likely write a follow up blog post.

This research seminar was particularly interesting for me as the play of focus The Frozen Deep, a melodrama originally scripted by two great writers of the Victorian era, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens was one of the texts I studied in the final year of my undergraduate degree for the Victorian Literature module taught by Dr Joanna Hofer-Robinson. I have a background in theater so volunteered to help perform a piece from the play in front of the class of 50+ students, a memorable experience but one which very much encapsulates one of the themes of this seminar “Practice-led research”. As an academic discipline Literature more than many others could be accused of not being at all practice based, as a scholar one reads in a library and then writes. However, when it comes to something like drama which by its very nature was not meant to simply be read but performed, spoken aloud to an audience. This is relevant to my own area of study as many works of Modernism such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses have lead themselves spectacularly well to oral performance over the years.

The history of the play itself is as captivating as the narrative as Dickens himself not only took on the role of one of the chief characters Wardour, the vengeful “other man” but was apparently meticulous in its staging as a Christmas entertainment. The play would even go on to be performed for Queen Victoria herself. Dr Hofer-Robinson went on to recount her own experience of co-directing a performance of the play herself at Senate House Library in 2016 to learn more about Dickens and 19th Century theater through practical engagement. She discussed the various acting techniques that were used in Victorian melodrama to elicit a felt response in the audience; gestures and facial expressions used to convey specific emotions such as joy or fear, thus displaying them to full effect without the use of words.

As someone who has worked in theater and has studied drama modules since the beginning of my university career I have a great appreciation for how effective this practice led research could be in gaining a greater understanding of texts. When studying a novel or poem I always get as much out of discussions with lecturers and classmates as I do from my own interpretations. In this sense performing plays, speaking the words aloud as their writer had intended seems the best way of appreciating drama as its own art form. Though it may be a case that some of us may be a little more hesitant to sharpen our rusted acting skills in front of our peers. As Oscar Wilde once said “I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being”

Having given the subject of my thesis topic a great degree of thought over the Christmas holidays (a Master’s degree of thought if you will) I believe I finally have the seed of an idea that I may plant in the soil of my brain and water it with research to make the thesis flower bloom…yes this is the mediocre wordplay and analogy blog post.

In all seriousness the question I asked myself when I genuinely found myself at a loss as to what exactly I wanted to write about was simply this: “What am I interested in?” It is a simple enough query but one I would urge any future students on this or any other MA in Literature program to ask themselves if like me they find themselves, more than anything else spoiled for choice. This is as I have previously mentioned, most likely due to the fact that I completed my undergraduate degree as a BA (Single honors) in English, thus have studied a wide range of literary periods, movements and genres.  However, inspiration came once again from one of the special studies seminars I completed as part of my degree (I have said before that I consider them to have been one of the highlights of the 3 year course for me) specifically the seminar on 20th Century American Science Fiction which I took barely a year ago in my final semester of final year. Science fiction has long been one of my favorite genres of literature and film but it was never something I had considered studying, having the mindset of not wanting to mix texts read for pleasure in my own time with what I was analyzing critically as a scholar (I find myself being reminded of Mr Wemmick from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, my personal favorite of his works) However, as it happened I was drawn to the seminar in question for the wide range of interesting texts being studied and soon realized how fulfilling combining my interests could be.

For so long I have always been fascinated with books, films, series etc featuring time travel. As part of my seminar I presented on a 1960s serial from the long running series Doctor Who, which I felt related to the themes we had been covering and it was great to speak about a personal passion in an intellectual setting. All this came to mind during the holidays when I was considering what my thesis topic should be, how can I recreate the same passion with which I wrote that 7 minute long presentation for the 15000 word piece I must write this summer?

I have found the answer by reflecting on my past experiences and now I look to the future when the seed of this idea will bloom. Write about time travel in literature and film?

Why not?

As part of our research skills module EN6009, both MA classes Medieval to Renaissance and Modernities were tasked with editing pages of Wikipedia relevant to our research area. This was challenging as it brought to light how close we are coming to choosing a solid thesis topic. I had some ideas having given my thesis some degree of reflection over the Christmas holidays and knew it would be best to focus on an area that I have a broad knowledge of and in doing so might contribute something of worth. Recently I have simply been asking myself “What do you like? What interests you? What could you discuss at length?” Simple self reflective questions to be sure but they did in fact lead me to a possible topic of interest which I will explain in greater details in another blog post, essentially it involves the theme of time travel and the works of two of my favourite writers.

However, I found this assignment difficult as I was at a loss as to what I could add/change about entries relating to my areas of interest as all pages already seemed well written and fleshed out. Despite great support/assistance from lecturers it was simply not something I felt able to complete.

Though I appreciate the overall purpose of the assignment, which was to gain experience editing pages of information on areas we are striving to become scholars in, it was difficult to complete for me personally due to the aforementioned lack of ideas and not having my own laptop present, thus left with no other option but to attempt the assignment on my tablet.

As with all assignments successful or not this was a learning experience and has reminded me that at this level of study there will always be assignments that challenge you or put you outside of your comfort zone and the best course of action is simply to see it through and as I have mentioned before, not be afraid to ask for help.

As I come to the end of 2018 I look back on everything I have experienced on the Masters programme so far while looking to the next semester and what it will bring.

Selecting a thesis topic is of course my main priority as we will be presenting on our research interests at the MA conference in March. I feel I am getting closer to deciding on an area that I feel is very worthy of exploration. I am also looking to the 2nd semester modules and am particularly excited about the section dealing with post-modernism and film. Cinema is a life long passion of mine and I always enjoyed getting the opportunity to study film academically, the unique critical language is similar to that used when analysing works of literature but also so different. I always find it challenging to write about film in this way, especially since reviewing movie and television releases for the university paper has been an extra-curricular activity of mine since beginning university, thus a more informal journalistic style of writing is naturally in my head. Undoubtedly I will write a piece in the near future relating to that section of the module as I have looked at the reading list and the films studied may be relevant to my own research interests, as I have made my special interest in book to screen adaptation known previously.

As the festive season is just around the corner I am also looking forward to some time off but as this MA has become such a large part of my life, ideas will no doubt be going through my head even as I sit down to open presents (mostly books)

I will return in early January to UCC and this blog ready to begin 2019: The year I complete my Masters in Modern Literature and Film

At the beginning of the MA our class was given a list of the staff members of the UCC School of English which included each of their individual research areas and interests. As someone who was an undergraduate at this very university last year I was familiar with most of the lecturers and have taken many of their classes. Thus I did not hesitate to get in contact with them early to discuss possible thesis topics, though I admit I had very few real ideas at this early stage.

Dr Miranda Corcoran, with whom I had studied American Literature and a special studies seminar on science fiction written in the era post-World War 2, and Dr Joanna Robinson who lectures on Victorian Literature were both extremely helpful. I got a sense of what the thesis writing process would be like and began to appreciate that while 15000 words may seem long, focusing on a single topic in such depth will make use of every single word. Seeking advice from lecturers with such a broad range of interests brings to light the main issue for me in choosing a thesis topic; after studying such a wide variety of works in undergraduate, it is more difficult now to narrow my focus.

With the advice they gave me, along with reading recommendations that could prove useful to the interests I spoke to them about I feel more confident that eventually I will settle on a topic I wish to write on. I would advise all of my classmates and fellow graduate students to take the time to speak to your lecturers outside of class.