“Isn’t it Splendid to Think of All the Things There Are to Find Out?”
- Kaitlyn McNulty
- Apr 15, 2023
- 12 min read
This blog post is particularly special because I will recount and unravel all of my past blog posts, highlighting how they’ve each moved me toward my final thesis “destination”. I thought I’d title this post with another quote from Anne of Green Gables, linking its significance as a “finale” of sorts with the very title of my blog, which I suppose is symbolic of the beginning of the MA program along with the beginning of the blog. I’m going to break down each of my previous posts by teasing out the most important ideas and quotes, trying to find how each played a role in the development of my current thesis topic. The links were most definitely not visible at the moment, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, and the connections are much clearer now upon rereading them.
One major requirement for our posts was that at least two of them had to revolve around research seminars hosted at UCC. I actually appreciated this requirement, because if I hadn’t been given a reason to go to these talks, I don’t think I would have realized how much I enjoyed attending them. Many of my posts actually incorporate elements of the various talks I attended, but I did not focus any of my posts on solely a talk alone. Rather, I used the various lectures I attended as springboards of sorts. Instead of focusing a specific blog post on unpacking and analyzing a lecture, I attempted to connect the major themes or points of each talk to my personal research journey and MA experience. I attended quite a few for the English and Creative Writing department, one from the History department, one from the Italian department, if I remember correctly. The main point I tried to make in my very first post ricocheted off the initial paragraph that revolved around Rita Kelly’s talk.
"After listening to the wonderful Rita Kelly speak today about her work, there is one thing in particular that stood out to me. When writing—and all writing is creating—you must believe in what you are doing. Although much of her work is creative writing, and she displays her beliefs and emotions through short stories and poetry, this mindset can be applied to academic writing as well. I intend to make my thesis something that I am passionate about and something that I believe is important to talk about. I just have to figure out what exactly that topic is."
“ ‘It’s as simple as that’ ”. Kaitlyn McNulty. October 18th, 2022.
In this post, I follow up this paragraph by connecting Rita Kelly’s sentiment about “believing what you are doing” to one of my favorite passages from the novel Stoner. The passage I use is primarily a dialogue between William Stoner and his mentor, Professor Sloane.
My second post had quite an adventurous intention. It was also inspired by one of the talks I attended (the one given from a faculty member in the Italian department) and in it I suggest that I’d like to track my experiences here in Cork and compare them alongside my experiences back in New York.
"This juxtaposition between Joyce’s life in Italy and Ireland—this tale of two cities—made me think about how it may be interesting to document both the intricate and blatant differences between New York and Cork. Although this topic might seem quite personal, and possibly not the most conducive way of working towards a thesis topic, I’d argue that tracking the nuances between these two places may help clarify where I draw inspiration from, where my passions lie, and how they may differ in each respective city. What have I been inspired by after spending the last few months in Cork? What do I desperately miss from New York? Is the separation from the place I’ve called home for twenty three-years causing a part of myself to dwindle? Or is the distance provoking growth in unexpected ways?"
“A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Cork”. Kaitlyn McNulty. October 26th, 2022.
While at the time this sounded like a good idea, it didn’t really grow into anything, and my other blog posts don’t really relate to it. However, if you ever find yourself in New York, I do still stand by the compilation of restaurants and experiences I added to the end of the post.
In my third blog post, I talk quite a bit about my experience teaching high school last year. While initially I found it quite difficult to write a curriculum, create attention-grabbing lesson plans, and speak in front of a room full of people each and every day, I also know that I would not be here, in Ireland, had I not had that experience.
"Along with these moments of self-doubt, I struggled at various points throughout the year to teach myself the material that I would then have to teach my students. The school I worked at had very loose curriculum outlines. This, on one hand, gives you quite a bit of freedom to introduce your favorite novelists and poets to students. But, on the other hand, as someone with fairly little experience and knowledge of what students will be receptive to and what they won’t be receptive to, it can be quite daunting."
“‘The Poet and the Painter’s Utmost Art’”. Kaitlyn McNulty. November 23rd, 2022.
It really pushed me in a way I didn’t know I needed to be pushed and gave me the confidence to apply and actually commit to working towards a master’s degree abroad.
Blog post four, “‘Something Larger Than Herself”, is another example of a thesis idea that led to a dead end. As I read through my old posts, I realize that a majority of them do not connect to what I’ve decided to write my thesis on, which is okay. I needed to go through this period of experimentation in order to figure out what I love—and hate. For some strange and inexplicable reason, I felt it was necessary to focus my efforts on American literature. (I’ll break down a bit later on the doubts I experienced when I considered writing my dissertation on non-American literature.)
At the time, I was reading Carson McCullers’novel The Member of the Wedding, and connected it to another talk that I had attended. The talk was given by Dr. Miranda Corcoran in the English department and Dr. Harris from the History department. It was incredibly interesting, and focused on both historical accounts and modern portrayals of witches. Each detailed the way that young girls, primarily teenagers, were targeted and scorned either in their own societies or through the way they were portrayed in media outlets and television.
“‘I always warm to things that are of Dublin’”, A.K.A blog post number five, is one I particularly enjoyed rereading because it brought back a flood of memories from a day I spent in Dublin. (I uploaded a few pictures a while back from this particular day. You can find time in the portfolio section of my blog.) I took the trip with two very dear friends that I’ve made while being here, and we squeezed a whole lot into one chilly day in December. We ate some great food, enjoyed a lovely stroll around the Christmas market (although I’m now aware I’ll be avoiding mulled wine at all costs in the future) and visited the Museum of Literature.
“However, my favorite part by far was our visit to the MoLI—the Museum of Literature Ireland. I immediately bought tickets to the MoLI after finding out about it. The museum paid amazing tribute to an array of Irish writers, some of whom were writing over a century ago and others who are still writing today. There was a whole exhibit dedicated to Peig Sayers, famously known as the “Queen of Irish Storytelling”. There was another exhibit that revolved around Joyce and Ulysses, and another that focused on YA authors; one of whom I recognized (Louise O’Neill) after attending a Women in Leadership talk at UCC.”
They had a special online exhibition dedicated to Ulysses, a text that I found incredibly intimidating. While it does still scare me a bit, (though I’m a bit more confident now!) I really appreciated that we had the opportunity to break it down and analyze a few chapters of it in our Literary Modernisms module. The online exhibition promoted the collaboration of artists, writers, and academics to partake in a special one hundred year anniversary tribute. I included a video from the site in my original post, but after revisiting the MoLI website, I found some other short films that were just as lovely. I’ll include one for your viewing pleasure down below.
Though my mind was still not yet brimming with ideas that relate to my current topic, I think the MoLI, and the emphasis they put on life-long learning and academic collaboration, was quite inspiring.
The ideas started really cranking around the time I’d written blog post number six, “The image of you lives in a place you’ve never been”. This post begins with my attempt to connect another of the UCC research seminars to my blog. Danny Denton’s discussion and exploration of “places and non-places” in his talk Being Present: how ideas of physical space, place & non-place were used to build the worlds of The Earlie King…and All Along The Echo” served as inspiration for this particular post.
By this point, though I hadn’t quite figured out the texts I wanted to use, I did begin recalling a few of the texts I had read and enjoyed during my undergrad, many of which were Irish. Namely, Lucy Caldwell’s Where They Were Missed (now, sadly out of print) and the poem Selva Oscura by Louis MacNiece. Along with these inklings of nostalgia that would later act as the foundation for my current thesis topic, I also narrowed down the themes I wanted to focus on. (Though I can now only really connect maybe two of the six I discuss in the post.)
“Other topics that interest me, unrelated to Transhumanism, are inheritance and wealth, and memory, place, and perception. I think my ultimate goal is to find a way to incorporate each of these ideas, and work with texts that exhibit all, or most, of these themes. I toyed with the idea of using The Great Gatsby and Breakfast at Tiffany's as texts that I could use in my thesis to exemplify these themes, but decided against doing so. In my upcoming blog posts I'll explain why in a bit more detail.”
“The image of you lives in a place you’ve never been.” Kaitlyn McNulty. February 2nd, 2023.
The climax of my thesis confusion rests within my Wikipedia blog post, which I wrote on Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Such a random choice, but again, I felt inclined to write about American literature as opposed to Irish (even though I typically enjoyed it more and tended to read it more frequently). To be fair, though, the Wikipedia page really did need some work done to it, so I’d consider this little blip to be one with a positive outcome. The page for the movie was filled with information, but the page dedicated to the novella was lacking. So, I added a little section about the plot as well as the setting.
"What surprised me the most was how little was written about the text. Recognized as a fairly popular work of fiction and an even more popular movie, the page was devoid of information about plot, character, and setting [...] I decided to add a section that gave a more detailed description of the setting, and I added a more structured breakdown of the plot. I was very happy to find out that the Wiki-session was a bit flexible in that we did not need to finish all of our edits during class time. I spent most of the class session adding information to the setting section, and began the section for the plot later on that day."
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the UCC Wiki-session” Kaitlyn McNulty. February 28th, 2023.
I included a very interesting video, that I’ll also post here, that talks in detail about the striking differences between the novella and the movie.
I reread the novella for this assignment, and while I quite enjoyed it, I knew upon my reread I would not want my thesis to be entirely dedicated to it. At this point, I had been considering finding common ground between Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Great Gatsby looking at themes surrounding the stereotypical “American Dream” or the falsification of extreme wealth or identity for the means of survival. While this could’ve materialized into something quite interesting, it didn't feel right. I was afraid I would become bored of it, or I wouldn’t be passionate enough about it to write an entire dissertation that surrounded those two texts.
At this point, the anxiety-induced heart palpitations were beginning because — time check! — February had dwindled down to its twenty-eighth day, and lil ol’ me still did not have a thesis. BUT! Spoiler alert: it all works out. (I mean, I still have to write it so I don’t want to speak so soon, but in regard to actually coming up with an idea, it all worked out.)
Anywho, I’m on the phone with my dad, and being that he always serves as a voice of reason and/or wisdom, this little chat ushered me to the threshold of thesis clarity.
"I told him that at this point, I had no idea what I was going to do, but my time to figure out a topic was slowly dwindling. He mentioned that he had a cousin who is a professor of Women’s Studies and History at a university in Maine. He suggested that I give her a call—maybe she would have some tips about how to develop a strong idea.
I agreed this could help, so I set up a Zoom call with her. The conversation turned out to be a lovely one. We talked a bit about the PhD process, and her own journey from undergraduate to postgraduate studies. When I got around to explaining to her that I was pretty lost about what to do for my thesis, she, in response, simply asked me two such questions, and somehow, it shed a light on everything:
“Well what did you most enjoy during undergrad? Why did you decide to go to Ireland for your degree?”
The answer was sitting right in front of me the whole time and I chose to ignore it. Most of my undergraduate English classes surrounded Irish literature, and the love I gained for it from those classes was a huge factor in my coming here."
“‘What do you love and why are you here?’” Kaitlyn McNulty. March 8th, 2023.
It was at this moment that I really started to reflect on why I had chosen to be here and what I was truly interested in reading and writing about. I then developed a rough thesis idea that I brought to Dr. Maureen O'Connor to chat briefly about. I received an initial stamp of approval from her and decided to take it to a few other faculty members to get their feedback and ideas. This in turn led me to discover some great fiction that I hadn’t yet read, along with some very helpful literary criticism. After doing some preliminary research and reading, I decided that it would be best for my presentation for the annual mini-conference to revolve around something related to my thesis idea. I wrote about this in a brief blog I posted a few days after the mini-conference.
"For me personally, I felt it would be beneficial to present on a topic related to my thesis; I figured that receiving feedback, good or bad, at this stage in our research process would be instrumental in the success of the final product."
“Mini-conference 2023” Kaitlyn McNulty. April 10th, 2023.
I thought it’d be best to focus on one major text, rather than speedily trying to examine all the texts I was hoping to use in my thesis. I decided to use Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz and attempted to examine the ways that the main character, Gina, performs certain identities in both her romantic and familial relationships. I concluded that many of the ways that Gina acted in the roles she felt obligated to fill often reflected outdated gender roles, or perpetuated harmful ideas about women that ultimately conflated beauty standards and physical attractiveness with their worth. There are some very insightful interview with Enright about the novel. Below I'll include quote from Enright on The Forgotten Waltz that I found quite interesting:
I was quite nervous for the mini-conference; in my blog I stated that it was especially intimidating because it felt like a sort of final step for all of the hard work we had put in that year. Though I was nervous, I actually quite enjoyed the way that the mini-conference kick-started my research and reading, and allowed me to receive feedback from faculty as well as from my peers. (I also quite enjoyed being a chair for the final panel!)
This blog has been an interesting exercise, and looking back, I can appreciate how it let me track my thesis journey, my writing, as well as my time spent here in Ireland. Prior to this, I don’t think I really grasped the importance of writing in a public forum about things that are traditionally deemed “academic”. As I begin to really plunge into my thesis — and long after I’ve finished it — I hope that I’ll keep up with this blog as a way to strengthen my writing and to find common ground with others who are interested in the same topics as I am. It is, indeed, so splendid to think about all the things there are left to find out.
Works Cited:
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "It's as simple as that". October 18th, 2022. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/it-s-as-simple-as-that
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "A Tale of Two Cities, New York and Cork". October 26th, 2022. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/a-tale-of-two-cities-new-york-and-cork
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "The Poet and the Painter's Utmost Art". November 23rd, 2022. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/the-poet-and-the-painter-s-utmost-art
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "Something Larger Than Herself". December 6th, 2022. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/something-larger-than-herself
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "I always warm to things that are of Dublin". December 20th, 2022. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/i-always-warm-to-things-that-are-of-dublin
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "The Image of You Lives in a Place You've Never Been". February 2nd, 2023.
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "Breakfast at Tiffany's and the UCC Wiki-session". February 28th, 2023.https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/breakfast-at-tiffany-s-and-the-ucc-wiki-session
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "What do you love and why are you here?". March 8th, 2023. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/what-do-you-love-and-why-are-you-here
McNulty, Kaitlyn. "Mini-Conference 2023". April 10th, 2023. https://kaitlynmcnulty2.wixsite.com/what-lies-around-the/post/mini-conference-2023
Comments