Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
This study is part of two research projects funded by grants from the Regional
Ministry of Culture of the Autonomous Government of Castile and Leon (ref. number
SA012A10-1) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. number
FFI2010-15063).
1
Flannery OConnor, Writing Short Stories, in Mystery and Manners, eds Sally and
Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, 96.
2
Elizabeth Bowen, The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories (1937), in The New
Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994, 152.
See also Julio Cortzar, Some Aspects of the Short Story, in ibid., 246-47.
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See Poes review of Zinzendorff, and Other Stories by L.H. Sigourney, Southern
Literary Messenger, January 1836; his review of Night and Morning: A Novel by
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Grahams Magazine, April 1841; his review of Twice ToldTales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Grahams Magazine, May 1842, are all to be found in
Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson, New York: Library of
America, 1984, 874-91, 146-60, 568-69. Poes articles and passages of his aesthetic
pronouncements on the short story excerpted from his lesser-known reviews are
conveniently collected in May, The New Short Story Theories, 59-72.
8
Poe, review of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales, 571.
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Frank OConnor, The Lonely Voice, Cleveland, OH: World, 1963; Mary Rohrberger,
Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre, The Hague: Mouton,
1966; Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, New York: Longmans,
Green, 1901.
10
Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story, Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1983; The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story, eds
Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer et al., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
11
John Gerlach, Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story,
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985.
12
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See Pasco, On Defining Short Stories, 119; Pratt, The Short Story, 104.
Gerald Gillespie, Novella, Nouvelle, Novela, Short Novel: A Review of Terms,
Neophilologus, LI/1 (January 1967), 117-27; Charles May, Prolegomenon to a
Generic Study of the Short Story, Studies in Short Fiction, XXXIII/4 (Fall 1996),
461-73. For definitions based on generic expectations, see Andr Jolles, Formes
Simples (1930), rpt. Paris: Seuil, 1972.
29
See Joyce Carol Oates, The Beginnings: Origins and Art of the Short Story, in
The Tales We Tell, 46-52; A.L. Bader, The Structure of the Modern Short Story,
and Norman Friedman, What Makes the Short Story Short?, in May, The New Short
Story Theories, 107-15 and 131-46.
30
Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, 51-52;
Alberto Moravia, The Short Story and the Novel, in May, The New Short Story
Theories, 147-51.
31
OConnor, The Lonely Voice, 87.
32
May, The Reality of Artifice, 72.
33
Leslie Marmon Silko, Earth, Air, Water, Mind, in The Tales We Tell, 92.
34
Lauro Zavala, De la Teora Literaria a la Minificcin Posmoderna, Cincias
Sociais Unisinos, XLIII/1 (January-April 2007), 86-96.
35
Ian Reid, Generic Variations on a Colonial Topos, in The Tales We Tell, 83-90.
28
the fusion of the trivial and the significant, and the eschewal of
explications.36
In the 1980s, some critics doubted that a definition of the short
story was possible. But while Mary Louise Pratt considered this an
hopeless enterprise,37 Charles May hoped to provide a possible
definition of the discipline through Wittgensteinian family
resemblance theories, which assume existing clusters of qualities,
family traits and dominant characteristics.38 According to the Russian
Formalist Boris jxenbaum, the short story is a primary elemental
form which maintains its strong ties to myth and whose characteristics
are compression and concentration: The story is a riddle. In his
view, the novel and short story are not only different in kind but also
inherently at odds. While the short story is a fundamental,
elementary form, the novel remains synchretic. The discrepancy
between the two is marked by the essential disparity between short
and long forms: the story is a problem in posing a single equation
with one unknown; the novel a problem involving various rules and
soluble with a whole system of equations with various unknowns in
which the intermediary steps are more important than the final
answer.39
Generic considerations of the short story focus on its split
allegiances to the narrative and the lyric.40 The short story shares with
the novel the medium of prose, yet it also makes use of poetrys
metaphorical language, its strategies of indirection and suggestion. So
although the novel and the short story resort to the same prose
medium, their artistic methods are different.41 The short form
possesses both the peculiarities of storyness and narrativity and the
intensity, tension, compression and suggestion of the lyric mode. The
short story blends the brevity and intensity of the lyric with narrative
36
10
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11
Pratt, The Short Story, 99-101. See also Pasco, On Defining Short Stories, 12426; Wendell Harris, Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the
Short Story, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 182-94.
47
Raymond Carver, On Writing, in ibid., 277.
48
See also Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories, eds Robert Shapard and James
Thomas, Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1986.
49
Cortzar, Some Aspects of the Short Story, 246.
50
May, Why Short Stories Are Essential, 14.
12
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13
Jos Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and
Culture, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, 23. See also May, Chekhov
and the Modern Short Story, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 214-16.
57
May, Chekhov and the Modern Short Story, 211.
58
Anton Chekhov, The Short Story, in May, The New Short Story Theories, 198.
Ernest Hemingway formulated his omission theory thus: If a writer of a prose knows
enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the
reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as
strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg
is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things
because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing (Ernest
Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, New York: Scribner, 1932, 192; also in Ernest
Hemingway on Writing, ed. Larry Phillips, New York: Scribner, 1984, 77).
59
John Barth, A Novel Perspective: Its a Short Story, in The Tales We Tell, 2.
14
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May, The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction, 138-43; May, The Reality of
Artifice, 1-2.
61
Cortzar, Some Aspects of the Short Story, 247.
62
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books,
1968, 83-109.
63
Mary Rohrberger, Where Do We Go from Here?, in The Tales We Tell, 205. See
also Valerie Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (1983), rpt. London:
Longman, 1995, 193; May, Why Short Stories Are Essential, 16-18.
64
In The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction, May rightly observes that the
short story is closer to the nature of reality as we experience it in moments when we
are made aware of the inauthenticity of everyday life, those moments when we sense
the inadequacy of our categories of conceptual reality (May, The New Short Story
Theories, 141). See also May, The Reality of Artifice, 52.
15
Maurice Shadbolt, The Hallucinatory Point, in May, The New Short Story
Theories, 269.
66
Cortzar, Some Aspects of the Short Story, 246.
67
OConnor, Writing Short Stories, 90.
68
Eudora Welty, The Reading and Writing of Short Stories, in May, The New Short
Story Theories, 163.
69
May, Why Short Stories Are Essential, 16.
70
Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850), in Melville: Pierre, Israel
Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, ed.
Harrison Hayford, New York: Library of America, 1962, 1154-71.
71
Pratt, The Short Story, 99; Robert F. Marler, From Tale to Short Story: The
Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850s, in May, The New Short Story Theories,
172.
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They thus make artistic conventions and artistic devices the subject of
their fiction. Writers such as the postmodernists John Barth and
Donald Barthelme, or the minimalists Raymond Carver, Robert
Coover, or Tobias Wolff, among many others, brought about a revival
of the short story genre in the eighties. One of the newest and most
interesting twenty-first-century manifestations of the short story
comes with the emergence of minifiction and minifiction sequences,
which expand even further the original hybridity of the genre.
Oscillating between modernist forms of writing and postmodernist
ones, minifictions mark a new phase in the evolution of the short
story. Flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, micro-story, short
short, postcard fiction, prosetry and short short story are new forms
that distinguish themselves by extreme brevity proliferate.92 Situated
at the boundary between the literary and the nonliterary, narration and
essay, narration and poetry, and essay and poetry, minifictions also
integrate extraliterary elements and so demand a reformulation of
canonical genre boundaries and definitions. Hybrid, protean and
fragmentary, minifictions introduce a new simultaneity of genres and
have been read alternatively as prose poems, essays, chronicles,
allegories or short stories.
Minifictions represent, as Lauro Zavala observes, a new form of
writing and reading the world and mark the beginning of a new
sensitivity. Distinct from the tradition of the short story, minifiction
is at the same time the latest expression of the genre. Its most notable
development is occurring in the Spanish American context, which
presents a vigorous and flourishing literary tradition of genre
experimentation related to serialization and fragmentation suggesting
new ways in which it may go in the future.
Looking ahead into the twenty-first century
This present collection of articles provides significant theoretical
foundations for a re-evaluation of the short story as well as
reconsiderations of accomplishments of short story writers and their
artistic legacy. Its aim is to explore the main theoretical issues raised
92
Thomas James, Introduction, Sudden Fiction: American Short Stories, 11-14; Flash
Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, eds Tom Hazuka, Denise Thomas, James Thomas,
New York: W.W. Norton, 1992; Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short
Stories, ed. Jerome Stern, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
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The articles are divided into four sections. The first group includes
essays concerned with the The Beginnings of the Short Story and the
Legacy of Poe. Antonio Lpez Santos analyzes Chaucers narrative
formulas and structural elements in The Nuns Priests Tale and
The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale that pave the way for the
structure of the modern short story. Erik van Achter considers the
problems of genre definition of the short story and goes back to Poes
seminal paradigm, which remains an inescapable mainstay in
theorizing about the genre, despite the changing fashions and schools
of critical theory. Peter Gibian traces Poes legacy as a foundational
model in the development of European aestheticism and decadence,
showing how the peculiar dynamics of reading and reception that are
played out in the American writers stories shaped the way these later
authors read Poe, influencing their vision of the process of aesthetic
transmission.
The second section, The Linguistic Turn, presents essays that set
short story criticism in relation to cognitive theory, discourse analysis
and linguistics. Pilar Alonso explores the cognitive connections
between the novel and the short story, interpreting the existing
differences and similarities between the two genres in terms of
variations of goals, decisions, focus, scope, and degrees of
elaboration. Per Winther applies notions of discourse analysis to the
processes at work in the writing and reading of short fiction texts and
examines how the concept of framing (circumtextual, intertextual, and
extratextual) can achieve narrative and hermeneutic closure in short
stories. Drawing on considerations of reader-oriented criticism,
Consuelo Montes-Granado analyzes the mixed linguistic identity of
Chicano writing from a literary, sociolinguistic perspective. She
examines Sandra Cisneros symbolically charged use of codeswitching and narrative skill within the confines of the short story as a
literary genre.
The third section of this volume, Borders, Postcolonialism,
Orality, and Gender, addresses issues of gender and genre, orality,
hybridity, brevity and testimony literature. Carolina Nuez-Puente
looks at short stories from a feminist and Bakhtinian perspective and
hails Charlotte Perkins Gilman as the creator of a new genre, the
dialogical feminist short story. Rebeca Hernndez argues that in
postcolonial literature, the letter, irrespective of the form it adopts,
whether that of an autonomous narrative unit or poem, takes on the
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Just as he has thrown light into the origins and evolution of the
genre which he has helped conceptualize, Charles May, in his essay
here, surveys the present state of the art and adumbrates the contours
of the future. He sketches the map of the contemporary horizon of
American short fiction and considers the works of recent short story
writers such as T.C. Boyle, George Saunders, Rick Bass, Eric
Puchner, Ryan Harty, Julie Orringer, ZZ Packer, Joan Silber, David
Means, Joy Williams, Charles DAmbrosio, Andrea Barrett, and
Deborah Eisenberg.
The various authors of this volume, scholars from several different
continents, have reflected on wide-ranging aspects of the short story
from multiple perspectives that relate to varying traditions: European,
American, Native American, Canadian, South American, and African.
Looking back to the origins of the short story, the articles in this
volume also throw new light on the future in an attempt to sketch the
emerging panorama of the most recent short story writers and short
story theories.
Although the first theories about the short story originate with Poes
The Philosophy of Composition (1846), historically the first forms
of the genre go back to the emergence of the medieval tale. Some
scholars acknowledge in passing that the medieval tale lies at the
origins of the short story, yet very few critics have explored these
connections further. As W.S. Penn aptly remarks:
Historically, the earliest genre of the story is the tale . The
description of the tale as a genre of the story is only a beginning; yet,
as long as we are able to describe the genre, structure, enunciative and
narrative postures, mode and tropical convention, the beginning is a
valid one.