Chapter One

Welcome to my first blog post! I suppose I should begin with a brief introduction. My name is Cody Jarman. I graduated from The University of Tennessee at Martin with a BA in English and a BFA in Theatre in December 2015 and, after a brief repose from academia, began the Irish Writing and Film MA program (or, I suppose I should write programme) at University College Cork in September 2016.

I’m Wilde about Irish literature.

My primary goal with this blog is to have a testing ground to work through my research ideas as I move towards the ever-ominous dissertation at the end of my MA. Currently, I am interested in considering the formal similarities between Irish literature and African-American literature. As I have begun researching this project in earnest, I have taken an interest specifically in the ways the African American experience has been used as a kind of rhetorical reference point to describe the damage brought about by British colonialism in Ireland. While I have pinpointed manifestations of this trend in the works of James Joyce and Roddy Doyle, I am currently focusing my research on establishing this trope in the works of other authors (ideally playwrights). Ultimately, I hope to also consider responses to this trend in African-American literature and to use this jumping off point to work towards teasing out a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between these two literary traditions.

However, I do not intend to use this blog simply as an instrument to broadcast my progress on my dissertation. Beyond posts related specifically to my dissertation, I plan on challenging myself to apply some of the ideas and theories I will be exploring in my research in less overtly academic (or at least traditionally literary) capacities. I plan to consider trends in pop culture and current events as they relate to my research in Postcolonial theory and Nationalism, with the hope of always keeping theory in a more immediately tangible context.

I might throw some memes in too, you know, for the lulz.