To Tell a Story
It is in telling the story of the creation of my thesis that I shall be engaging in an example of Irish cultural rhetorics and displaying the usage of phronesis as a way of orienting myself, my research, and my culture in the wider discipline of rhetoric. Through this project, I hope to display Irish phronesis in rhetoric in action as I explore folklore and storytelling. This non-thesis shall be told and displayed in such a way that is recursive, dynamic, and uniquely Irish.
I began this journey in Irish rhetoric about 3 years ago when I first had my first semester at the University of South Florida. Of course, I did not know it at the time, but taking an Irish-in-America course at the university, opened my eyes to my culture and to a deeper understanding of how culture plays a role in rhetoric, research, and life experience.
Before the University of South Florida, my interaction with my own ‘Irishness’ and culture was relegated to my interactions with my family which consisted of Skype chats overseas and visiting the motherland. My Grandfather, who was the inspiration for this project, was born in Merrion in Dublin County, Ireland in 1941. At the age of 19, my Grandfather and Grandmother immigrated to the United States and settled in Seminole, Florida in the early 1960s. I was born in 1999 between my Irish-Italian Father and my Irish-English Mother. Growing up, my mother always made it a point for me to connect to my heritage and my family overseas.
When my mother was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s she visited Ireland countless times reinvigorated family ties and maintained the connections that my digitally illiterate Grandparents could not. Many of the times my mother went overseas and spent with her own family heavily involved storytelling, ‘Irishness,’ our culture, and our faith. Similarly, my mother passed down these same sentiments to me, but I was remiss in identifying these lessons and important gems of information and cultural value that my mother was handing down to me. Every time she tried to pass off a Frank McCourt book, I didn’t read it, but I had a certain fondness for Irish folklore and storytelling. I didn’t identify with the works of, the great Irish writers, but I identified with the stories of centuries passed, and indeed they were about things that may or may not have happened or be true. Surely, banshees, leprechauns, and bog witches did not exist. Or did they?
Many of the bedtime stories that I grew up with, of course, were also based in Irish Rhetoric, or Irish cultural rhetoric. But once more these were things that I didn’t think about. How could the rhymes, poems, and stories about Dierdre of Sorrows be rhetoric, or even be an example of me being trained in Irish rhetoric? Didn’t everybody’s parents read them stories about the Gaelic version of Santa Claus in poetry? Didn’t everyone’s family use wit, banter, sarcasm, and long-winded stories to communicate seemingly simple stories?
Irish rhetoric, as with most folklore and storytelling, is a callback to the past with the hopes of orienting oneself in the present, and towards a better future. The action of orienting in this case will be explored as phronesis. I shall not simply tell you what phronesis is or is not. I shall demonstrate what it looks like for an Irish American seeking such orientation and cultural revival through research and embodiment.
Project Conception
The conception for this project was oriented around folklore and storytelling. I first conceived of this idea when I took a Black Rhetorics class at the University of Central Florida with Dr. Milu. As I was taking this class with Dr. Milu, I realized that my entire understandings of rhetoric were wildly debased and did not even consider that cultural practices impacted rhetoric and what rhetoric functioned as in cultural contexts.
The conception of phronesis had yet to enter my mind. Instead, I began to wonder about my own culture, one that had survived for so long apart from colonialism, but one I realized I had very little knowledge or understanding of.
As I continued to take classes at the University of Central Florida, I realized that most of the classes in rhetoric and writing that I was taking were geared toward current or future developments in the field of rhetoric and composition. I felt as though all rhetorical scholarship acknowledged history, but that MY history was lacking.
I set out and began to organize my assignments toward researching Irish cultural rhetoric. If there was an assignment that gave me the freedom to pursue my interests, I aligned the research towards Irish folklore as rhetoric. I indexed Irish studies programs in the U.S. along with professors and tried to find geographical hotspots of Irish rhetorical activity. While my research yielded little compared to my classmates, I soldiered on with the hopes of creating a basis for my thesis work which would begin in December of 2023.
During the Fall semester of 2023, I found myself enamored with folklore and the recursive and rhetorical nature of storytelling. Rhetoric in folklore and storytelling began to take form and create the internalized structure for the research that I wished to conduct for my thesis in 2024. Feeling out of my depth, I decided to pursue this lofty project and embark on the journey in research that you see here.
My initial conceptions for this non-thesis project were formed in October 2023 with Dr. Guenzel when I had considered creating a book or some piece of media for the non-thesis work. I wanted something to blend the history with which I was immersing myself, with the technology of modern times. If my digital literacies classes had taught me anything it was that the field of rhetoric was slowly moving towards the digital and online spaces. I wanted to create a project and research that would be relevant, while still exploring the enchanting folkloric stories and history of my heritage.
In 2024 I officially began my thesis hours while under the advisory of my chair Dr. Scott. My original conceptions of this project centered around wanting to tell a story; as a story about my culture, my experience with rhetoric, a call for deeper research in Irish rhetoric and folklore, and storytelling.
Originally, I had desired to create a digital novel or booklet of some kind that looked like a graphic novel exploring Irish rhetoric and composition. As I compiled information and actively met with Dr. Scott my image of the project gradually began to shift and change to accommodate the research I was conducting and the answers that I was receiving.
Several questions began helping me shape this project and the scope that it would cover.
What does Irish folklore rhetoric look like?
What are the main themes of Irish rhetoric and folklore?
What are the main tenets of Irish rhetoric?
What information is pertinent for the audience to know to fully conceptualize what Irish rhetoric is?
How can I create a project that not only explains what phronesis in Irish cultural rhetoric and folklore looks like, but how can I also engage in the process myself?
How can I create a project that is more accessible and hospitable to a wider audience?
Execution
I decided that I wanted to create an online gallery where I could fully display all of the work and artwork that I had created over the course of the semester. I had also decided that orienting a multimodal project online would be a critical example of disseminating information and creating a platform that would be grounded in modern times while still calling back to the past, an essential part of Irish rhetoric (Woods, 2019).
As I began to formulate the basis of the website I was also conducting correspondence and interviews with scholars, professionals, and family members. Initially, the plan was to do a deeper dive and series of interviews with my grandfather. However in January of 2024 as I began the project my grandfather, Patrick Nolan, unfortunately, passed away.
In the wake of my grandfather's passing, I was able to reconnect with family members in Ireland including my cousin Sean and my uncle Deser. The interviews with these wonderful storytellers essentially turned a non-thesis project into a familial project where I was able to reconnect to my heritage, and family, and engage in phronesis first-hand. The wisdom I received from these family members ultimately helped me execute this project and orient myself and my passion for art and history to communicate the traditional wisdom, values, and culture of the Irish.
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