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.