About Me
Unlike most English students, I have not always loved reading. In fact, I did not learn how to read until I was nine-years-old, after four years of intensive intervention. Even then, I was much more likely to be telling a story than reading one.
Despite being illiterate, I had excellent taste in hats.
But like many children I was constantly asking my mother to read to me. When she couldn’t read to me, I used an old cassette player which I still own in this age of iPods, along with the small collection of tapes that I listened to over and over again. Most of the tapes contained Greek myths and Irish folk tales, and I listened to them so many times that I began to memorize them. I was studying stories long before I was reading them.
By the time I started college I could read pretty well, and I gravitated towards Modernist literature, to stories that critiqued society, abandoned absolute truths, and seemed to coil around a deeper, darker meaning. James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf replaced my old cassette player. But I still loved the myths and folk tales I grew up listening to. So when I came across elements of ghost stories in “The Dead” by James Joyce, I decided it would be a pretty cool thesis topic. Studying the idea of ghosts in “The Dead” quickly brought me to concepts of memory and the mind. Though I’d never formally studied neurology or cognitive science, I had seen a lot of TED Talks and decided to integrate some cognitive theory into my paper. Which, I learned, is the Next Big Thing in English. Horray!
I’ve learned quite a lot while writing my thesis, particularly about the history of Ireland and James Joyce as well as cognitive theory, metaphor, and memory. I hope that you enjoy the website, and that it is enticing enough to make you want to actually read my thesis. Or, at least, I hope it is informative enough for you to convincingly pretend that you have.
