Defense Intro

Defended 11/10/2021

Good afternoon. Welcome to my defense.

As an introduction, I want to talk about four things. The process, my challenges, what I’ve learned, and possible extensions.

First though, I want to thank everyone here for their role in getting me to this place.

It has been a bit of a long road. I originally enrolled here at K-State in 2005 and then left in 2007 without finishing everything I needed to do to graduate.

So that even though my academic interest went in different directions, and I started to build a career and work through other degree programs, not having this finished hung over me and was a great regret in my life.

I was excited when I emailed Professor Eiselein in back 2018 about what it would take to re-enroll and found out that there was a process that I would be able to do to graduate. It turned out to be a longer process than I had hoped — in my mind I would just bang out a paper over the summer.

It wasn’t banging out a paper. Instead, it has been a process of discovery. I decided to work on something that I had not had in class during my first foray as a student. This meant that I had to approach texts, criticisms, and theory anew. Reading around Psychohistory I branched off and discovered Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Lem’s Solaris. I read Jameson on Utopia and Csicsery-Ronay Jr. gave me a vocabulary to approach criticism of science fiction in general, and Psychohistory…