American Short Story Research Articles

Poetics of spontaneousness in postmodern narrative

The article focuses on specific features of textual space of postmodern narrative and on definitions of basic notionsт of postmodern poetics. It is proved that the key poetic means and devices of postmodern narrative are narrative rhizome, transformed narrative technics, hypertext, digitised textuality, which in the process of spontaneous writing lead to narrative chaos, quazireality and language improvisation. The research also traces stylistic means and compositional devices typical for American short story as a literary genre, viewed from their evolutionary perspective within three consecutive periods in its development − prepostmodern, postmodern, and postpostmodern.

A Brief Study on the Symbolic Meaning of the Main Characters’ Name in The Scarlet Letter

As a great romantic novelist in American literature in the 19 th century and a central figure in the American Renaissance, Nathaniel Hawthorne is outstanding for his skillful employment of symbolism and powerful psychological insight. The Scarlet Letter , which is considered to be the greatest accomplishment of American short story and is often viewed as the first American symbolic and psychological novel, makes Nathaniel Hawthorne win incomparable position in American literature. With a brief introduction into The Scarlet Letter and a brief study on the two literary terms, i.e. symbol and symbolism, the paper attempts to expound Hawthorne’s skillful employment of symbolism in his masterpiece through the analysis of the symbolic meaning of the main characters’ name in this great novel.

Transnational perspectives in Simon J. Ortiz’s short fiction

Abstract Contemporary American short stories from Simon J. Ortiz’s Men of the Moon (1999) can be considered a testing ground for conceptualizations of (trans)-national identities from Randolph Bourne’s ‘Transnational America’ (1916) to David Hollinger’s Postethnic America (1995). In these stories the aesthetic concretization of contingent experiences by Native Americans both confirms and critiques the theoretical concepts of postcolonial studies and transnational American Studies. Both Ortiz’s ‘The Way You See Horses’ and ‘Crossing’ unfold the relativity and observer-dependence of individual perception as well as the epistemological awareness and cultural dialectics of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Themselves (1991). Actual intercultural and transnational encounters in Ortiz’s stories often spell disaster much more radically than promise. Only three of the stories in Ortiz’s collection, ‘Pennstuwehniyaahtse: Quuti’s Story’, ‘Hiding West of Here’ and ‘To Change Life in a Good Way’, suggest interethnic solidarity. These stories help develop a humanism which expresses itself in the dissociation of foreignness and familiarity in postcolonial and transnational contexts. Ortiz’s short fiction thus functions as a liminal third space which exposes both the fragmentation and potential of time-honoured Native American spiritual convictions. That such spiritualism has partially sunk into oblivion does not spell irrelevance and obsolescence. Paradoxically it turns into the precondition of mutual rapprochements of cultural difference and both intercultural and transnational acceptance. What renders Ortiz’s reassertion of Native American spiritualism humanist is the caution and tolerant awareness of the other that accompanies it.

Underdogs

Underdogs Daniel M. Mendoza (bio) Stray Dogs: Writing from the Other America William Hastings, ed. Down and Out Books www.downandoutbooks.com 224 Pages; Print, $12.12 The stories in Stray Dogs: Writing from the Other America cover the small farm towns, ghettoes, and other places that literary anthologies—like the Best American Short Stories—don’t. This collection’s narratives are full of poverty, violence, and rage. But that shouldn’t be upsetting to readers, rather, the collection should be applauded for how realistic its writers can be. Readers may think that these working-class writers—as they are often called—are following in the tradition of older writers like Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, and John Fante. But where those writers sentimentalized a class and life style that was anything but romantic, the writers in this current collection offer worlds that are startling because they are so close to the realities in which many Americans live. The anthology is a collection of mostly prose fiction, but there are a few lyrics and poems included in the work as well. Familiar names like Daniel Woodrell, Dickey Betts, Chris Offutt, and Sherman Alexie are in the collection alongside works by less familiar writers like Patrick Michael Finn, Joseph D. Haske, Vicki Hendricks, Ron Cooper, Michael Gills, Larry Fondation, and Eric Miles Williamson. In the introduction to the collection, Lou Boxer writes: “This book is not for the weak at heart or easily offended. Stray Dogs is a head-on collision with life,” and later, “for indeed the other America [End Page 21] is our America. It is the home of fractured dreams and failed ambitions. It is war out there. Like it or not.” Boxer writes with a desire to make Stray Dogs the most significant record of contemporary working-class fiction. His warning should be taken seriously by readers as well as critics of working-class fiction who believe that aesthetics often take a back seat to didactics in this literary genre. It can be easy for a writer who chooses the working-class as his or her subject matter to be over-didactic or to even fall into sentimentality. We have seen this happen with even the best writers—DH Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck come to mind. It is a common occurrence for newer writers as well. Perhaps the most significant assertion in the anthology’s introduction is that all the works included are told with a “necessary honesty and objectivity to deconstruct life to its stark, basic landscape and you are left with a brutal truth.” This kind of truth which realism is best suited to elaborate on is seen in all the works in Stray Dogs. What you get best from many of the writers in this collection is their ability to create a world that is both stark and brilliant with life. Patrick Michael Finn’s story “Where Cat Scratch and Happy Valley Meet” is one example of the quality of writing in Stray Dogs. In this story, Wayne, a man flipping burgers as part of the San Bernardino County Welfare to Work plan, convinces his “half-retarded” friend Filthy Phil Rick to help him rob Happy Valley Liquor. What ensues is a narrative equal to the work of Chekov’s short stories. Despite the tragedy that looms over “Where Cat Scratch and Happy Valley Meet,” Finn’s talent for constructing aesthetically appealing sentences keeps the reader close. Near the end of Finn’s story, the reader comes across one sentence in particular that elaborates on the situation all the people within his fiction find themselves in: The future is only the sunset, and all the twisted fuckheads from around Cat Scratch stumble around toward the sunset until their skin looks like it’s been burned by acid. What is noticeable at first read is the language of the narrator. This is not the language of one who pulls the color from the story’s world to replace it with some kind of moral judgment. Finn’s ability to create a world that is vivid and alive is one hallmark of literary realism, as Nabokov had observed in...

A Young Girl's Recollections of Edgar Allan Poe

AbstractIn a previously unpublished essay, Elma Mary Gove Letchworth (1832–1921) details her visits to the Fordham, New York, cottage of American poet, critic, and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). Her account provides a young girl's impressions of the famous author and insights into Poe's domestic life, humor, and fondness for children. The present paper examines Letchworth's essay and compares it with the reminiscences of other acquaintances of Poe, including a similar article written by her mother, Mary Gove Nichols (1810–84), in order to evaluate the accuracy of Letchworth's account.

<i>I Awate Your Answer</i>: George Saunders, Narrative Ethics, and Dialogue as Fiction’s Semantic Seat

Few academics have written about the American short story writer George Saunders, despite his recent prominence in the national imagination – he’s published several best-sellers (most recently Tenth of December), writes for both New Yorker and GQ-reading audiences, delivered a now-viral commencement address at Syracuse University in 2013, and was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of the same year – and his longstanding regard among literary circles, a “writer’s writer.” Those critics who have written about him usually perpetuate a misconception – so Saunders holds – that he is a satirist, and begin their inquiries assuming in Saunders the sort of monovocal or political qualities associated with the genre. Without dismissing their readings I suggest reconsidering Saunders’ fiction (and nonfiction) in relation to movements charted in Mary Holland’s Beyond Poststructuralism and Judith Ryan’s The Novel After Theory, as well as Adam Kelly’s “New Sincerity,” all of which identify a strain in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction moving past poststructuralist and postmodern impasses and assumptions about communicability and art’s ethical valence – movements David Foster Wallace predicted in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” railing against the “junta” of postmodern irony. Reading Saunders and Wallace together, I argue that their fiction is what M.M. Bakhtin called “heteroglossia,” and more specifically that Saunders writes highly ambiguous ethical, rather than moral narratives, predicated on a belief that literature is a dialogue requiring empathy – meaning “meaning” lies not with the author or the reader, but is shared – and (noting neurological studies that confirm this) the effect of this effort at communication is often to make reader and writer both more empathic, slower to judge and divide, quicker to embrace and identify.

Okinawan Peruvian Poet’s Gender Performativity: On “Diario de la mujer es ponja” by Doris Moromisato

Okinawan Peruvian Poet’s Gender Performativity: On “Diario de la mujer es ponja” by Doris Moromisato Shigeko Mato (bio) Shigeko Mato Waseda University, Tokyo Shigeko Mato Shigeko Mato received her Ph.D in Spanish American literature from the University of New Mexico. She is Associate Porfessor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Spanish Language at School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo. Her articles on contemporary Japanese Peruvian literature and Mexican literature have appeared in Hispanófila, Confluencia, and other journals. She is also the author of Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation: Desire and Limits for Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Mexican Fiction (2010). Endnotes 1. The painting on which Juan Kanashiro Iparraguirre bases his could be one of Utamaro’s many that depict a woman sitting in front of a mirror, either putting white powder to her neck or fixing her hair or makeup (Asano). As in Utamaro’s paintings, in Moromisato’s Diario’s covers, the viewer also sees the woman’s face reflected in the mirror and her long neck from the back. 2. “Esponja” in Spanish (sponge in English) has the connotation of a person who has a great faculty for absorbing information, according to Real Academia Española. Debbie Lee-DiStefano also interprets the meaning of sponge as a woman “capable of soaking up her surroundings, of absorbing any information” (48) 3. Derrida, elaborating on J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances,” delineates that it is the citationality and iterability of every sign (spoken or written) that first “do things” or make it possible for a sign to produce certain effects and actions (by repeating), yet it is also the citationality and iterability that make the effects and actions of a sign unidentifiable, incomprehensible, and invalid within any given context (by altering), “engendering] infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). Butler, also adapting Austin’s concept of “performative utterances,” applies this notion of citationality and iterability of performativity to her study of the construction of gender and sex. For her more detailed analysis of Austin’s performativity of speech acts, see the introduction of Bulter’s Excitable Speech, in which she examines how “injurious speech” (“hate speech”) functions both as “the deed that [utterance] effects” and “certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself” (3). 4. Butler states “the question is no longer, How is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the “matter” of sex untheorized), but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? And how is it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and consolidates that normative conditions of its own emergence?” (xviii–xix). 5. Paracelsus (1493–1541 b. in Einsiedeln, Switzerland) was a 16th century physician, alchemist, and botanist who invented new chemical treatments for illnesses and wounds (such as use of laudanum and mercury for syphilis) (Norden). 6. See p. 1–2 of this study. 7. I first found this quote in Carmen Tisnado’s study on four South American short stories with lesbian themes (278) and then examined Butler’s original study. Works Cited Asano, Shugo. Kitagawa Utamaro. Tokyo: Shincho Nippon Bijutsu Bunko, 1997. Google Scholar Balderston, Daniel and José Maristany. “The Lesbian and Gay Novel in Latin America.” The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel. ed. Efraín Kristal. Cambrdige, England: Cambridge UP, 2005. 200–16. Google Scholar Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge Classics, 2006. Google Scholar Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Anina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993.307–20. Google Scholar Butler, Judith. “Introduction.” Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge Classics, 2011. xi–xxx. Google Scholar Butler, Judith. “Introduction: On Linguistic Vulnerability.” Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.1–41. Google Scholar Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.307–30. Google Scholar “Esponja.” Diccionario de la lengua española. 22 ed. 2001. Real Academia Española. Web. 1 Feb. 2012. Google...

The role of the anticanonical text: Jack Conroy and the Anvil, a Case Study

Abstract Readers of American short stories have only a limited number of hours to devote to literature, in which we have infinite options of texts. Unless pursuing a particular project, most readers might look to anthologies for textual guidance, assuming that an anthology offers the easiest access to what is ‘best’ in a literary category. Any collection of texts is, ultimately, the choice of one or of a few publishers and editors. This article focuses on a body of texts that is largely neglected from the canon of American short stories, that of the worker-writer from the 1930s. After a brief summary of current concerns with canon formation, I perform a case study on author Jack Conroy and other contributors to his 1930s magazine, the Anvil, to prove that their work is, for the most part, forgotten by the most popular collections of American short stories. I then suggest that it is not worthwhile to insist that this corpus be represented in the canon, but rather to ask what happens to literature that, for one reason or another, becomes ‘anticanonical’. I suggest that the role of these proletarian texts is not to be largely read by today’s readers, but to have nourished the spreading diversity of American authors and readers.

Fat Feminism: Reading Shelley Jackson's ‘Fat’ through Elizabeth Wilson's Gut Feminism

In this article, I treat a literary text as a form of somatechnics making an intervention in fat embodiment. I read contemporary American author Shelley Jackson's short story ‘Fat’ from The Melancholy of Anatomy through what Elizabeth Wilson terms ‘gut feminism’, a feminism accounting for the dynamism of the biological body and acknowledging ‘organic thought’ as an alternative to the mind/body split. Wilson's ‘gut feminism’ is related to theories drawing on Deleuze's concept the ‘Body without Organs’ such as hypertheorist N. Katherine Hayles’ argument for the ‘Text as Assemblage’. I show how the seemingly surreal narrative of ‘Fat’ provides crucial insights about fat, understood as an assemblage of images, affects and matter and as a liminal substance questioning the integrity of the subject. Fat is associated with the feminine in a reclamation of the early modern rhetorical term ‘dilation’, which figures the swelling text as a fat, fertile woman with voracious orifices. I describe how Jackson's ‘aesthetics of fat’ works through dilation, disgust and ‘bad taste’ to draw the reader into an experience of fat embodiment. I characterise fat as a ‘sticky sign’ in Sara Ahmed's sense, one that will not stay confined to the page but sticks to the reader and elicit gut reactions. In conclusion, I argue for a non-derogatory model of reading as incorporation

Something Rich and Strange

REVIEW-ESSAY THOMAS ÆRVOLD BJERRE University of Southern Denmark Something Rich and Strange RON RASH SURELY NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION TO READERS OF THIS JOURNAL. The prize-winning poet, short story writer, and novelist has gained a wider readership for each new book he has published. It has been a pleasure to observe the growing readership as well as the increase in scholarly articles on Rash. This past year alone has seen a heightened focus: in November, Ecco, Rash’s long-time publisher, put out a career-spanning collection of thirty-four selected stories meant to establish his place in the canon of great American short story writers. It is titled Something Rich and Strange, a title that would also be fitting for the two books released by The University of South Carolina Press a few months earlier, books that also serve to reaffirm Rash’s status: The Ron Rash Reader (2014), edited by Randall Wilhelm, and John Lang’s Understanding Ron Rash (2014). The latter has the honor of being the first scholarly monograph on Rash’s work. Several more are on their way—at least one anthology is in press at present. And Rash just keeps on writing. His sixth novel, Above the Waterfall, will be published in September 2015. The Ron Rash Reader is a 400-page collection spanning all the genres Rash has worked in. Editor Randall Wilhelm has taken on the daunting task of extracting from the author’s fourteen books (published in only twenty years) what the publisher calls a “best of” collection that represents the “full range” of Rash’s career. And since Rash has published poetry, short stories, and novels, often alternately, readers can now see the variety of his work in one book, genre by genre. The arrangement sets off what Wilhelm calls “Rash’s recycling methods” (15), a “nuanced and subtle weaving” of thematic material (5). In his excellent introduction “Blood Memory,” Wilhelm states that the “carefully chosen selections exhibit some of the best of Rash’s work” (5). Although the exact basis of Wilhelm’s selections is never explained, the novel samples make sense. We are introduced to the first chapter of each novel. I would have liked to see more poems included, and while 152 Thomas Ærvold Bjerre the selection of short stories can be debated, what is here is certainly excellent and representative of Rash’s full body of work. In just under thirty pages, Wilhelm’s introduction lays out an impressively detailed overview of Rash’s books. Wilhelm shows deft insight into the finest details of Rash’s poetry, suggesting his progress as a writer and summing up the general themes of his body of work: the focus on the natural world (specifically Appalachia) and its people, the recovering of the region’s lost voices, an examination of “the lonely spaces of the human heart” (4), despair met with courage, hope, and love, a fight against the tired stereotypes of his region, an increasing concern for drug abuse, and, as Wilhelm is keen to point out, an often overlooked humor that draws on the best of the tradition of Southern humorists. While the introduction admirably covers important matters of style, genre, poetics, inspiration, and themes, I disagreed with his reading of The Cove as “a thriller” and was surprised that war was hardly mentioned in the discussion of the novel. On a more general note, the issue of gender remains largely untouched in Wilhelm’s exploration of Rash’s oeuvre. Apart from already published work, the collection also features four previously uncollected pieces of nonfiction (dated broadly as 2006-2013) as well as five previously uncollected short stories (also dated broadly, as 1998-2013). Despite the lack of specific dates for the texts as well as the curious absence of Rash’s essay “The Importance of Place,” the addition of these unpublished works is cause for joy for anyone who appreciatesRash’swork.Thetwolongeststories,“Outlaws”and“TheFar and the Near,” are riveting explorations of youth, war, family, and art, while the three-page long “The Harvest” is quintessential Rash in its quiet way of packing a big punch. Despite my minor reservations, The Ron Rash Reader is a...

Discovering Fiction: A Reader of American Short Stories, Book 2 - Judith Kay and Rosemary Gelshenen

Discovering Fiction: A Reader of American Short Stories, Book 2 - Judith Kay and Rosemary Gelshenen

The English Language and Global Literary Influences on the Work of Shahnon Ahmad

Postcolonial literary theory asserts that the colonial literature provides the models and sets the standards which writers and readers in the colonies may either imitate or resist. The major Malay author Shahnon Ahmad received his secondary and tertiary education in English and taught English at the beginning of his career. Drawing on his collection of essays Weltanschauung: Suatu Perjalanan Kreatif (2008), the paper argues that Shahnon was influenced at significant points in his literary development by his reading of literature in English and English translation–nineteenth century European and American short stories, the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner – but not by English (British) literature itself. Through his creation of original new works, focused on Malay society and directed towards Malay audiences, Shahnon was not a postcolonial subject but a participant in, and contributor to, the wider flow of world literature. Keywords: postcolonial, Shanon Ahmad, English literature, literature in English, world literature.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (review)

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (review)

Review: Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary American Short Stories from the New Gilded Age. Wendy Martin and Cecilia Tichi, eds.

Review: Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary American Short Stories from the New Gilded Age. Wendy Martin and Cecilia Tichi, eds.

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi Ryan Bradley (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 154] STEVE ALMOND is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America, which features a Best American Short Stories 2010 selection, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” and which won the 2012 Paterson Fiction Prize. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the Rumpus and the Boston Globe, Almond is among the nation’s most arresting essayists on culture and politics. WILLIAM GIRALDI is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. In addition to being a novelist and memoirist, Giraldi is also a literary critic whose essays and reviews appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Daily Beast. His next two books, a novel and a memoir, are forthcoming from Norton. Both authors use humor to excavate the messy truths of human emotions. Fellow Bostonians and close friends for a decade, Almond and Giraldi allowed me to interview them outside their reading at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 18, 2011. [End Page 155] RYAN BRADLEY: How would you define voice in writing, particularly voice in short fiction? STEVE ALMOND: You’ve been writing more short fiction. Do you have a rap on voice? WILLIAM GIRALDI: I believe I’ve got a rap on voice. And by voice, you mean style, I take it. When you’re talking about voice, are you talking about the voice of the writer or the voice of the character himself? For example: Barry Hannah. He has a voice, a language, that’s pretty uniform throughout all his books, no matter which character’s perspective he’s writing from. But if you look at Steve’s short stories, the voice varies a little bit— ALMOND: A lot. GIRALDI: Depending on who the character is. So voice, or style, has to fit that character, his or her vision. Steve’s collection My Life in Heavy Metal—those stories all have the same theme of longing and of shame. ALMOND: No. That’s not true. GIRALDI: Of young people struggling to make it through their tumultuous lives. ALMOND: Wrong. Wrong. That’s a lie. Don’t listen to that. GIRALDI: But whether the story is in first person or third person, that voice shifts a little bit. It shifts because it has to match the vision of the character. So whenever you say “voice,” I think you’ve got to connect it to vision. Go ahead, Steve. It’s your turn. ALMOND: Well, let me give you an example of Billy’s early work because I know Billy’s early work pretty well. Like he knows mine not very well, actually. Totally mischaracterized my work! This is typical of young writers. Young writers want to be taken seriously. They want the world to take them seriously, and they think it’s important not to joke around, to not make light of anything, be like [End Page 156] Hemingway and Faulkner, all the badasses that get the big awards. So Billy’s early work, although it’s interesting, was pretty self-serious and curtailed. This was true of his fiction and nonfiction. It wasn’t bad. It was competent and occasionally had pathos, but it was very obedient. And then he showed me the book you’ll hear him read from tonight, Busy Monsters. The voice wasn’t just like the full range of Billy’s personality had gotten onto the page. It was as if he had found a voice that was an exaggerated version of who he is. His kind of machismo and his erudition and all the stuff that is in his personality that as a friend of his, I knew had been turned up to eleven. Which is, I think, my conception of voice. Voice is an effort to get onto the page a version of your natural speaking voice, edited into eloquence, amped up by the writerly attention you have while you’re at the keyboard. You’re saying about first...

På Vej Mod Short Storyen

ABSTRACT The article derives from the intertextual approach to the notion of literary identity, introduced to the modern literary theory in the 1960’s by Julia Kristeva (born 1941). The main idea behind this approach is that no literary text should be perceived as an isolated unity, but always in relation to other texts, which it refers to. The author applies the intertextual perspective to examine the signs of external literary influences in Lise Andersens minimalist prose collection ”En særlig sommer og andre billeder”, published in 2008. The analysis aims to highlight influences from the American short story genre, which appears as an important source of inspiration not only for Andersen herself, but in fact for most of the Danish writers of minimalist fiction. The analysis provides examples of, how inspiration from the American short story manifests itself in form, narration and structure of the selected stories in the collection. Last but not least, the author draws attention to the general importance of American influences in Danish contemporary short fiction and their role for the critical perception of this literary genre both in Denmark and abroad.

Travel and “Homing In” in Contemporary Ethnic American Short Stories

In American ethnic literature of the last three decades of the 20th century, recurrent themes of mobility, travel, and “homing in” are emblematic of the search for identity. In this essay, which discusses three short stories, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Louise Erdrich’s “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” and Daniel Chacon’s “The Biggest City in the World,” I attempt to demonstrate that as a consequence of technological development, with travel becoming increasingly accessible to ethnic Americans, their search for identity assumes wider range, transcending national and cultural boundaries.

Developing Critical Thinking: A Case Study of Teaching a Hemingway Story

English Literature is generally taught at tertiary level in Bangladesh to develop the critical and analytical ability of students, so as to enable them to develop their own evaluation and assessment of texts studied in classrooms. Such assumption often proves in vain, because even tertiary level students depend more on their cognitive capacity rather than their creative ability. Thus the ability of a student to think critically seldom grows because critical thinking (ct) is a faculty which only increases with practice and concentration. This paper endeavors to explore critical thinking ability as an important aspect of pedagogy which further enables a learner to be self-confident and inspirational in using his/her acquired knowledge both in the academy as well as in real life situations. The main focus of the paper is the traditional or classical process of literature study in classroom situations we usually practice in this part of the world to develop the psychology, thought process, and maturity of a learner. Literature is thought to have the power to develop or to create curiosity in learners in finding out the critical situation of real world. Again literature is believed to be a collection of characters, reflection of real life, absurdity, and the hundreds and thousands of problems and solutions to be encountered by a learner everyday which develops the faculty in learners to adjust or overcome hurdles in real life. Thus the paper through the analysis of a popular American short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway tries to address the problems and solutions related to the teaching/development of critical thinking ability. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v7i0.12255 IIUC Studies Vol.7 2011: 9-24

Orbiting by Bharati Mukherjee: A Contemporary American Short Story in the English Classroom

The article puts forward arguments why American short stories should be used to teach English as a foreign language. It also describes the method which might help to teach literature in secondary schools. Additionally, it presents the results of the research conducted among students in Lomza, Poland, which aimed at examining the pedagogical potential of applying ethnic American short stories in teaching English as a foreign language. This was done by comparing the literary critical analysis of Orbiting – a short story written by Bharati Mukherjee with its intuitive interpretations by young Polish adults. Finally, the article is supplemented with the passage from the said text as well as lexical and reading comprehension exercises based on its contents, which can be used in the English classroom.

Fin de Baudelaire: autopsie d'une uvre sans nom

Jean-Louis Cornille's study is that rare exception: a critical work in French on Baudelaire's prose poems that does not regard them as the poor cousin of Les Fleurs du mal. He counters this generally dismissive francophone attitude towards Le Spleen de Paris, as well as the opposite prejudice held by many anglophone Baudelaireans who lavish praise on its quintessentially modern ‘poétique de la fragmentation’, by demonstrating, through meticulous close readings, that it possesses an internal logic and structural unity all of its own that rivals the much-vaunted ‘architecture secrète’ of the verse poems. Two main structuring principles are invoked that bear testimony to Baudelaire's practice of reworking his earlier material, both from within the collection itself and outside it. The first, ‘concatenation’ (a term Cornille borrows from fellow Baudelaire scholar Alain Vaillant), refers to those prose poems that provide ironic commentaries on their immediate predecessors; the second, ‘circularity’, refers to the ‘recyclage’ of larger, discrete clusters of poems: the first twenty-six prose poems not only revisit themes from Les Fleurs du mal, but they are themselves reworked by the final twenty-four. This approach could be considered too methodical were it not for the fact that Cornille pertinently relates Le Spleen de Paris to key episodes in Baudelaire's personal life. Many poems give vent to his frustrations, insecurities, and unresolved conflicts: his allusion to eight authors in ‘Les Bons Chiens’ recalls those eight members of the Académie française he courted in a failed bid to join its illustrious ranks; his subversion of negative gender and racial stereotypes in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ signals his closer bond to his lover Jeanne Duval's black mother than to his own; the fragility of political and artistic power relations in ‘Une mort héroïque’ and of friendship in ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ are vengeful allegories of his sense of profound betrayal at the hands of his publisher Arsène Houssaye. This intimate link between the biographical and the textual is further reinforced by Baudelaire's proto-Mallarmean predilection for anagrams and wordplay: to take just one memorable example, ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ rhymes with Arsène Houssaye. Subtle and provocative too is Cornille's contention that the boundaries between the ‘autotextuel’ and ‘intertextuel’ are sometimes blurred: ‘Laquelle est la vraie’ is thus arguably less inspired by Poe's ‘Berenice’ than it is by Baudelaire's own translation of the American's short story. Occasionally, Cornille succumbs to the danger of overinterpretation: is the ‘liasse de papiers’ in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ really to be understood as an allusion to Baudelaire's earlier poems? He also slightly overstates, despite a trenchant comparison of cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Philippe Muray, Baudelaire's anti-Hugolien rejection of the occult (his debt to Swedenborg barely gets a mention). Overall, however, this perceptive study, despite the absence of an index and though primarily of interest to the specialist, intelligently repositions Le Spleen de Paris within the broader context of Baudelaire's opus and intellectual influences, including his translations and correspondence, as well as offering a timely reminder that biographical readings of great literary figures need not be anachronistic or reductive.