Abstract
This creative-practice thesis explores the interplay of memory and setting in the short fiction of Colum McCann, with a view to illuminating my own collection of short stories.
In Chapter one I have chosen four fundamental aspects and two functions of setting to analyse how McCann uses setting to evoke memory in his first short story collection Fishing the Sloe-Black River.
The ways in which McCann experiments with narrative time to create diverse settings in his novella ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking,’ are the focus of Chapter two. In that chapter I argue that McCann’s use of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration provides an inventive means to depict character experience and memory. Given McCann’s recurring references to memory, I assert that his novella can be defined as a ‘fiction of memory.’ I also explore the role of figurative language in McCann’s evocation of memory in relation to setting, and illustrate how the epigraphic inclusion of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ affects the narrative content of the novella.
In Chapter three I examine the function of the exegesis in creative practice research, which is followed by an exploration of the parallels between the critical theories of T.S Eliot, Harold Bloom, Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin. I then offer a commentary on my creative process, and discuss my novella Dear Billie, in relation to McCann’s novella Thirteen Ways of Looking, and the hypertextual connections of my short story ‘Falling Softly, Softly Falling’ in juxtaposition with James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ and McCann’s ‘Sisters.’
Chapter four summarises the discoveries of my critical and creative research by looking at how the methodological approach of ‘bricolage’ informed my knowledge as a creative practitioner and researcher. Finally, it reflects on creative-practice researcher Bradley Haseman’s appeal for the recognition of performative research to be considered as a research outcome in its own right. Therefore, in Chapter five I consider the outcome of my creative component to be my collection Nothing to Say I was Here, which, like McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking, comprises a novella and three short stories.
By assuming a creative-practice research approach, it is my intention to offer a writerly interpretation of McCann’s short fiction in order to demonstrate the interconnection of memory and setting, and finally, to explore how this has enriched my own creative process.