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Undergraduate Wins Fenner Undergraduate Research Award
The idea for Senior Josh Steskal's undergraduate thesis came to him like a vision. "I fell asleep with a book of poetry and woke up with a great idea," he said. "I wrote it down and went back to sleep."
If only all great ideas came that way.
With the help of Dr. David Herman, Steskal applied for and won the Fenner Undergraduate Research Award in support of his brainchild, a project that blurs the line between the imagined and real in narrative. In section one of his proposed thesis, Steskal will create an imaginary travel log detailing his trip to Italy, complete with euros, ticket stubs, and receipts. In section two, the narrator of the travel log will admit to the fictionality of the trip, saying he "grew up poor in the hills of Kentucky," and is unable to afford the trip. This, too, will be ultimately exposed as a fiction. Steskal will use the $500 award to make the imaginary trip to Italy a reality, further complicating the layers of truth and fiction in his thesis. Steskal will visit Italy between Summer and Autumn Quarters.
"Josh’s study raises a number of crucial issues [of narrative analysis]," said Dr. David Herman. "How do we draw the line between fictional and factual accounts of events? What is the relation between theories of narrative and the production of actual stories, whether fictions, historical or autobiographical accounts, or travel narratives? And more generally, what are the relations among memory, imagination, and narrative?"
"These are all vitally important questions," continued Herman, "and Josh’s project has the potential to illuminate these and other issues centrally connected to the study of stories and storytelling. In short, Josh's sophisticated, theoretically nuanced way of conceptualizing his study is already a major accomplishment for an undergraduate student, and Josh's fellow students, not to mention specialists in the field, will benefit from his research project once it is completed."
