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Two years ago, when taking a class on Irish literature, English major Marissa Johnson ’26 noticed a similarity between the work of James Joyce and Sally Rooney, a contemporary writer of popular literary fiction. Neither used quotation marks.

The observation led Johnson to question whether Rooney, famously the author of 2018’s Normal People, which was adapted for television, and who is said by some to be a voice of her generation, was trying to emulate Joyce’s style.

“So, I asked my professor about it, and she told me that most scholars think Rooney is a neo-Victorian author,” unlike Joyce, who is considered a modernist, she said. 

Johnson held onto her hunch, though, and dug into all of Rooney’s books, especially the first, Conversations with Friends, and most recent, Intermezzo, looking at symbols, themes and patterns.

She determined that Rooney really is more of a modernist, and the thesis wound up the subject of a presentation Johnson gave last month in Kentucky at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, an experience sponsored by a grant through the Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry.

“In her most recent text, she actually included a bibliography at the end, where she talks about all the different modernist texts that she cites,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s adviser, Assistant Professor Caroline Hovanec, also presented English research (on short-story writer Grace Paley) at the conference. 

The pair described the conference as multiple talks happening at once, panel-style, where presenters read their essays to the audience. Hovanec said Johnson might have been the only undergraduate presenting this year.

Johnson said literary research is more subjective than scientific research, which has numbers to back up a claim.

“It’s a lot more intimidating because everyone’s just listening to you talk for like 15 minutes,” Johnson said. “I reread my essay probably 30 times. I was nervous I was going to mispronounce the authors’ names because I had so many secondary sources, and one of my authors had a last name that was, like, six syllables long.”

At the conference, she was on a panel with other presenters. After the first person went, she felt more confident to present.

During her presentation, she got more comfortable as time went on. After, she was asked questions about why she chose the topic, as it had not been looked at in a scholarly way before, along with what research she would recommend to others.  

Looking ahead, Johnson recently met with Hovanec about getting the research published.