I’m a fourth year English major who transferred from Glendale Community College. I was inspired to pursue English as a field of study because I was always intrigued by the various ways in which novels can be constructed and disassembled to formulate meaning. At my community college, I participated in several undergraduate research conferences, which first sparked my interest in research. In the future, I plan to apply for graduate school to obtain a Ph.D. in English; I’m hoping my senior research project will help steer me towards that goal. I’m also interested in the creative aspect of English, and am involved in the editorial board of Westwind, the school’s literary arts journal. In my research I am studying arrested development and nostalgia in The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Randle McMurphy and A Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius Reilly because I want to find out in what ways their adolescent self-absorption translates to political self-interest, in order to help my reader understand how their ideology of individualism fosters social alienation and disrupts the political sphere of post-World War II America.