The Game: A Novel & The Poetics of Sporting Space in Irish Fiction

This PhD in Creative Writing consists of an exegesis and a novel, The Game.
The first section is an exegesis entitled ‘The Poetics of Sporting Space in Irish Fiction’, that critically explores the recreation of sporting space in The Game. My doctoral research interrogates the geography of sporting sites in Irish fiction. It considers sporting spaces as those places in which people gather in pursuit of play or for the consumption of sport and examines the ways in which sporting spaces are implicated in the politics of memory, and how they serve as literary embodiments of memorial consciousness. My exegesis explores the literary elision of cultural remembrance and sporting space. My artefact and exegesis, respectively, construct and deconstruct the sportscape in an attempt to understand the significance of its architecture for creative writers. The exegesis identifies where The Game fits in to the Irish literary sportscape landscape and offers critical self-reflection on the creative architecture that underpins The Game. The second section is a novel entitled The Game. Set against the backdrop of Gaelic sport, The Game seeks to explore the complex interactions between the sportscape and human experience. Taking sport as a cultural text through which we gain insights into the meta-social fabric of society, my novel, The Game, uses sport and a sporting site through which to create a narrative that is flavoured by contemporary social mores. The novel functions as a creative exploration of the literary construction of the sportscape in terms of narratology and spatial theory. Further, the novel is a creative exploration of the contestation of space in sports literature. The Game centres on two Gaelic football games: the All-Ireland football final 2011 and the All-Ireland semi-final 2022. Both games featured Dublin and Kerry and were played at the Gaelic Athletic Association's (GAA) headquarters, Croke Park. The Game explores Croke Park and its agency as a site of cultural remembrance and authority. Further, it explores family trauma through the prism of sporting events, and offers a narrative that suggests that rituals and connections, such as those afforded by sport, are vital to the family unit in existing within contemporary society. My PhD in Creative Writing goes some way to mapping Ireland using the coordinates of its literary sportscape. It asks what the implications are for creative writers who pitch the coordinates of sporting sites to the page. My original contribution to knowledge is an addition to the atlas of the Irish literary sportscape through my novel, The Game, and also through my exegetical research that generates insights into the poetics of Ireland’s literary sportscape.