English - Doctoral Theses
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Item Converging for a moment: an overview of immersion in imaginative space in The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow and All Along the Echo(University College Cork, 2024) Denton, Danny; Gilson, Jools; Corcoran, MirandaThis PhD Thesis by Prior Publication is comprised of two parts: the creative component and the critical component. The creative component consists of the novels I have published to date: The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow (2018) and All Along the Echo (2022), supplied separately. The critical component is contained in this document, along with a brief appendix. The critical component is entitled “Converging for a moment: a critical overview of immersion in imaginative space in The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow and All Along the Echo.” It explores the life experiences, practice processes and thematic concerns (often intertwining) that produced the creative component, with a focus on the importance of language, materiality and embodiment in real and imagined spaces. Drawing on writing by Marc Augé, Dora Massey, Virginia Woolf, Sondra Perl, Guy Debord and Lisa Clughen, among others, senses of place, and indeed felt bodily senses, and how writing can approach them, form a fundamental core of that exploration. The thesis also discusses the roles of the reader and the writer in conjuring imaginative work. Using a wide frame of reference, appropriate to the life, work and research of a fiction writer, the aim of the critical component is to chart a path through my life experience and my writing process to my published work, with a focus on theories of place and non-place as a lens for that path. Excluding its prelude, introduction and conclusion, the critical component is formed of four major parts. “The Terms” explains what writing means to me, as an act, and from there builds in how that affects the process by which my work can be produced. “The Process” deals with the evolution of my writing process, with a focus on its materiality and physicality. “The Ideas” probes concepts of place and non-place as presented in Marc Augé’s Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1997), and “The Work” links these theories about writing and place to my life experience, my creative practice and, ultimately, the creative output that forms the creative component of the thesis.Item Activism and the authorial persona: narratives of addiction, depression and abortion in the writings of Marian Keyes(University College Cork, 2024) Butler, Maria; O Gallchoir, Cliona; O'Sullivan, James; Irish Research CouncilPopular Irish author Marian Keyes has sold over 30 million books, yet she has received little critical attention compared to her literary contemporaries. This study addresses this gap by examining Keyes’ work in the context of the rapid socio-historic changes that occurred in Ireland over the course of Keyes’ publishing career. The goal of this research is to analyse how Keyes utilises her writing to agitate for social change, focusing on her depiction of three significant Irish loci of shame: addiction, depression, and abortion. In doing so, I argue that literature can function as a tool to shift readers’ societal perceptions, thereby facilitating activism through literature. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “impression”, I posit that the entirety of the textual and extratextual object (contents, paratexts, and our impression of the author) forms a lasting impression on readers. Therefore, this thesis investigates how Keyes’ writings, branding, and authorial persona collectively contribute to her social activism. By examining the interplay between emotion (affect), cognition, and branding, I demonstrate how Keyes encourages readers to reconsider traditionally shameful topics. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for this analysis, integrating the affective and cognitive literary approaches I apply to Keyes’ writings. This is followed by an examination of Keyes’ branding and the impact of her personal history on her readers. The subsequent chapters delve into specific themes: addiction (Chapter 2), depression (Chapter 3), and abortion (Chapter 4), each illustrating how Keyes’ personal experiences and public persona influence and contribute towards her activism. The study concludes that Keyes’ combination of emotional influence, cognitive education, and potential for reparative reading invites readers to reconsider the source of their shame and judgment, increasing social equality.Item Aura and chaos: computational creativity and contemporary art practice(University College Cork, 2023) Bourne, Catherine; Murphy, OrlaThis thesis addressed my aims and objectives by interrogating the potential of AI and digital fabrication technology as a tool and conceptual device in contemporary art practice. It explored the gap in knowledge and the dynamics of human-computer interaction between artists and computational creative systems, as well as the need for techniques and models that can capture and interpret complex artistic contexts. Computational creativity faces challenges in capturing subjective and aesthetic aspects of art, these are deeply personal and influenced by emotions, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Integrating these elements into computational systems poses a unique challenge, as it requires addressing ethical and cultural considerations such as respecting cultural sensitivities, avoiding biases, and promoting inclusive artistic expressions. Understanding and addressing these issues is crucial for the ethical and creative use of computational creativity, specifically AI, in artistic practice.Item Absences & Presences: towards a Detective Gothic(University College Cork, 2024) Connolly, John; Walshe, Eibhear; Denton, DannyAbsences & Presences: Towards a Detective Gothic comprises two main sections. The first, extending from pp.6-193, is a critical/ biographical study that discusses various literary, cultural and social influences on my writing, the validity of ‘Detective Gothic’ as a descriptor for my work, and defends my fiction’s engagement with the uncanny, an engagement that runs counter to traditional thinking about the rationalist roots of the mystery genre. The second section, pp 194–281, is the creative component, consisting of three short stories that draw upon some of the ideas and themes arising out of the critical/biographical section and the research for my earlier critical anthology Shadow Voices. The introduction to that volume forms part of the supporting material in the Appendices, in addition to a draft of my essay on Irish crime fiction for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Irish Novel (which draws on my academic research), and one further short story originally intended for the creative section but excised for reasons of length. The critical section contains eight chapters. Chapters I and II examine the Irish literary, cultural, and political factors that influenced, directly or indirectly, my formation as a writer, with reference to the career of the Irish detective writer M. McDonnell Bodkin. Chapter III looks at British crime fiction, principally mysteries of the twentieth century’s ‘Golden Age’, and how it reflects a particular mode of thinking about criminality and its victims. The chapter also sets that thinking against my personal experiences as a journalist, which fed into the conceptions of law and justice subsequently explored in my novels. Chapter IV contrasts the British approach to crime writing with the American, and includes critical examinations of two key Ross Macdonald texts, leading into a discussion of Macdonald as a Gothic novelist. Chapter V expands upon this discussion to consider the hauntological elements of Macdonald’s work and how those elements also arise in my fiction. Chapter VI returns the focus to Irish writing, using Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu as a starting point for a discussion of the supernatural, occult, and horror in crime fiction, and how their presence may run contrary to orthodox assumptions about the genre. Chapter VII continues this theme but focuses on hybrid modes of writing, tracing a path from Le Fanu and Uncle Silas to my novels, and arguing that the combination of detection and the Gothic in my work marks it as both distinctly Irish and faithful to the origins of the genre. Finally, Chapter VIII considers the influence of childhood OCD on my writing, as well as the connection between fairy tales and the Gothic, and how that connection manifests in my novels and short fiction. N.B.: I have elected to capitalise ‘Gothic’ throughout for consistency, though when quoting from other sources I have not capitalised where lower case is used.Item Whitman, Ginsberg, and the Long Line(University College Cork, 2023) Sabbadin, Elisa; Jenkins, Lee; Allen, Graham; Irish Research CouncilThis thesis explores Walt Whitman’s long lines, Allen Ginsberg’s long lines, and the line of the long line in American poetry. As a frame of reference for the long line, the thesis discusses open form. Whitman and Ginsberg did more than herald the first and the second free verse revolutions: they initiated and promulgated the tradition of open form – organicism, in Whitman’s early term. Their long lines were a conscious stylistic choice, shaped so as to encode domains which extended beyond form: politics, society, and, above all, spirituality. Or was it perhaps the other way around: that in exploding the constraints of poetic content, these poets accordingly shaped the long line? This thesis explores the long line in various senses: in its implications, origins, and, crucially, in the exchanges which occur, in Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s poetry, between form, content, and meaning. The long line emerges as a form in which surface boasts meaning, and through which the meaning which moulded it may be glimpsed; as a place of playfulness and contradiction, at least in the hands of Whitman and Ginsberg, perhaps the two most playful and contradictory American poets; and as a phenomenon both carefully crafted and, simultaneously, wild at heart. Just as Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s personas and personalities were larger than life, the long line is larger than the page: it is a line that hungers, eats, digests, expels, unravels, fertilises, orgasms, dissolves, evades, and merges. As the democratic Romantic and the democratic Beat were ‘everyone’s poets,’ the long line is also appropriately an ‘everything line’: it adds, includes, transforms, eludes, overcomes boundaries, embodies organicity, and multiplies its layers. However, this thesis shows that, in spite of its break with conventional form and its ostensible formlessness, Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s long line is solidly built – take Ginsberg’s description of Howl as “really built like a brick shithouse” (Morgan 133). Far from being a formless representation of formless concepts, the long line is an informed formal choice. The long line is a largely unnoticed form, and one which has received scant scholarly attention. This thesis elevates the long line as the premise of an underground American poetics which employs it as a socially and spiritually charged medium, and complements the formal tradition of the long line with attention to an alternative critical tradition which, in particular in Ginsberg’s case, accompanies its emergence and development. Whereas close reading has been traditionally associated with apolitical ways of reading, and extra-literary contexts have been effaced by formalist traditions, this thesis explores how form informs, shapes, and embodies content, showing that poetic form is inherently political.