Exercises in style: A critical analysis of Dermot Healy’s stylistic development and a short story collection as a creative response
Doggett, Eamon
Doggett, Eamon
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Publication Date
2024-03-28
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
This practice-based research combines literary criticism and creative writing to explore how style reflects the writer’s evolving sensibilities. The academic research analyses the stylistic development of the prose of the Irish writer Dermot Healy (1947-2014), while a new short story collection responds to this artistic vision and offers its own exercises in style. In particular, the critical section narrates the evolution of Healy’s literary style, ranging from the introspective and tightly woven stories of Banished Misfortune (1982) to the conversational and spare prose found in his final novel, Long Time, No See (2011). Using close reading examples, autobiographical sources and literary theories, this research tries to open various windows to illuminate the many windows Healy’s fiction opened to the world in his unerring ambition to explore new subjectivities and forms of expression. The creative section tries its own exercises in style through a short story collection, Unforgiving Shapes. These are primarily stories of young men trying to find solace in a world at odds with their desires. Grounded in the belief that realism can continue to unearth new complexities of the human condition by focusing on everyday life, these stories explore familiar themes, such as father-son relationships, communication struggles, sexual longing, and ambition. But they do so through distinctive voices and forms that work together to speak towards something inexpressible about our existence in the world. A reflection piece analyses the relationship between the critical and creative elements from the researcher’s perspective. While acknowledging some disharmony between these elements, it ultimately posits that they are unified by their shared fascination with how literary style can both be influenced by and influence our ways of perceiving and thinking about ourselves and the phenomenal world
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Publisher
NUI Galway