Abstract
In asking the question How does fiction realize character transformation? this thesis seeks to explore how a story believably presents (enfolds and unfolds) a character who experiences transformation. The two components of this thesis, analytical and creative, work together in different ways to understand this potential capacity of fictional narrative.The analytic component seeks to understand narrative’s capacity for transformation through building a theoretical apparatus called affective emplotment. Affective emplotment—informed by narrative hermeneutics, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Hanna Meretoja, and affect theory, particularly the Deleuze-Spinoza line as developed by Brian Massumi—migrates the focus of affect theory into the storyworld itself in order to trace character transformations. With a close reading of the 1941 Irish novel The Land of Spices by Kate O’Brien, this component arrives at what affective emplotment can provide narrative analysis: a way of registering a story’s processual and involved dynamics, facets which help generate fictional transformational arcs and narrative becomings.
The creative component is a novel, Things That Grow and Things That Fly: Summer and Lee’s Alphabet Book of Wonders. Set from March to July of 2020 during the global pandemic, this novel is about a woman named Summer, who spends lockdown on a boat on the River Shannon in Ireland. The story is alphabetically structured, with each letter having three parts: an acrostic poem written by Summer, a “non-fiction” entry written by her grandmother Lee years before in Texas (about things that grow or fly), and a prose section narrating Summer’s story, which by the end, sees Summer finding the courage to read her grandmother’s book and to start writing poems again.
| Date of Award | 2021 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English (Ireland) |
| Supervisor | David Coughlan (Supervisor), Michael Griffin (Supervisor) & Donal Ryan (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- Affect Theory
- Kate O’Brien
- Novel
- Creative Writing