Early Short Stories Research Articles

Mighty Eagles and Mercenaries: Existentialism and War in Ghāda al-Sammān’s Early Short Stories

Abstract This article looks at the existentialist nature of Ghāda al-Sammān’s early short stories, with a particular focus on her very first collection, Aynāka qadarī (Your eyes are my destiny), published in 1962. Ghāda al-Sammān was born in Syria and widely celebrated for her novelistic career: this article gives centrality to two of her early short stories as they present narratives that intricately weave individual and collective struggles within the context of the Algerian war of independence. Analysing the interplay between overarching Arab causes, feminism and existential themes, this study explores the nuanced portrayal of characters grappling with the complexities of war, morality and personal redemption. The protagonists, often embodying dichotomous perspectives, symbolize dignity and barbarism, echoing existentialist principles. The article examines how al-Samman’s youthful perspective and Sartrean influences shape the narratives, offering readers a unique lens into the psychological and moral dimensions of conflict. By unravelling layers of existential struggle and political engagement, this analysis sheds light on the richness and relevance of al-Samman’s early works within the broader literary and philosophical landscape.

A New Woman Dialogue with Aestheticism and Decadence: Netta Syrett’s Short Stories for The Yellow Book

ABSTRACT Focusing on critically neglected works by prolific writer Netta Syrett (1865–1943), this article reveals her New Woman dialogue with aestheticism and decadence in her early short stories written for the iconic 1890s periodical The Yellow Book: primarily, ‘A Correspondence’ (1895) and ‘Far Above Rubies’ (1897). Together they trace Syrett’s increasingly assertive voice and navigation of the period’s seemingly competing but intersecting aesthetic, decadent and feminist movements. I argue that Syrett uses aesthetic and decadent discourses as strategic vehicles for the articulation of the evolving feminist ideas more fully expressed in her later pro-suffrage works. Specifically, her stories register her response to the male elitism and misogyny of aestheticism and decadence through a critical engagement with their tropes (exotic setting; aestheticized interior; femme fatale) and discourses (of mythology; statuary; floriography) in order to challenge the objectification and marginalization of women by masculinist culture using its own terms of reference. Syrett’s stories are thus discursive spaces through which she articulates anxieties about women’s place in, or exclusion from, aestheticism and decadence, asserting her role in these movements as both participant and critic. This article thus offers a more comprehensive understanding of the evolving discourses of, as well as the dialogues and debates enacted by, fin-de-siècle women’s writing, shedding new light on the aesthetic and decadent movements.

The Economy of Whiteness: Make-Up and Female Sexuality in Transactional Modern Love in Uno Chiyo’s Early Works

ABSTRACT This article analyzes female make-up and modern consumerism in Uno Chiyo’s early short stories Shifun no kao (‘Painted face’, 1921) and Rōjo Manon (‘The old woman Manon’, 1928). These works were published as the notion of beauty transitioned in Japan’s modern era, shifting from a preference for heavy to light make-up. The obsession with whiteness of the female protagonists, as well as unique motifs in Uno’s short stories, suggests racial and sexual issues in modernity. Despite the common perception of their cosmopolitanism, this article argues that the modern girls described in Uno’s works tend to internalize the ethnic and cultural hierarchy between Caucasian men and Japanese women, denigrating and othering non-Western people, including the Japanese whose bodies do not successfully represent Westernization or modernity. In a similar vein, Uno portrays the failure of female make-up as the attempt to emulate an artificial Western beauty, thereby illustrating the challenges faced by female authors describing Japanese female characters in the modern era.

The Influences of Cultural Context on the Psychological Development of Child in Alice Munro’s Early Short Stories

The Influences of Cultural Context on the Psychological Development of Child in Alice Munro’s Early Short Stories

Становление авангардистки: Г. Стайн в диалоге в У. Джеймсом, Г. Флобером и П. Сезанном

Analyzing Gertrude Stein's early short story “The Good Anna”, included in the trilogy Three Lives (1909), the article examines the dialogical process of the formation of the author's poetics at the intersection of various discourses dealing with the concept of habituality. Written under the influence of the ideas of W. James and the aesthetic principles of G. Flaubert and P. Cézanne, the story can be read as a “space” within which scientific and aesthetic representation of ordinary interact. I argue that we can treat this juxtapositions of names (Stein, James, Flaubert and Cézanne), not as a result of individual circumstances and personal preferences, but as a manилиifestation of certain zeitgeist. Particular attention is paid to the comparative reading of “The Good Anna” as created under the powerful influence of Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” On the one hand, the recognition of Flaubert's influence on the writer is commonplace in Stein scholarship. On the other hand, it has not attracted close attention, paradoxically remaining a frequently mentioned but underexplored issue. The article proves that through her dialogue with Flaubert, Stein develops a special mode of defamiliarization, revealing the complex relationship between the extraliterary automatically emerging speech of everydayness and the literary experimental discourse. The discussion of Flaubert's influence on Stein's development as a modernist author implies, in principle, the need to look at this dialogue from a broader perspective, without reducing it to a special case of apprenticeship with the greats and without forgetting the two-way direction of this contact of texts.

The Gendered Strategy of Tsutsui Yasutaka’s Early Works

This paper examines the relationship between SF author Tsutsui Yasutaka’s early short stories and the author’s gendered persona. The first section outlines the magazines in which Tsutsui’s early works were published, arguing that these magazines and their imagined readership influenced the content of each work. The second section analyses the representation of female political activity in several of Tsutsui’s early works, arguing that this representation contributed to Tsutsui’s “masculine” image. The third section focuses on how Tsutsui’s short stories depict the difficulties of being a man in Japan at the time of publication, illustrating how this foreshadowed the development of Men’s Studies and the Men’s Liberation Movement in Japan. The final section examines the relationship between Tsutsui’s image and his fan base by analyzing publications by Tsutsui’s fan club, “Tsutsui Club.” The analyses in each section lead to the conclusion that Tsutsui consciously used the political discourse of the time to set himself up as a champion of men, and to secure himself a place in the Japanese entertainment cannon.

Entre materialismo y espiritismo: la representación artística en El ruiseñor y el artista de Eduardo L. Holmberg

This article studies Eduardo L. Holmberg’s early short story, entitled “El ruiseñor y el artista” (1976) from the points of view of the problem of representation, of the conception of art embodied on various discourse levels, and of the ambivalence of meanings. The constant oscillation of border elements, such as life and death, wakefulness and sleep, visuality and verbality, materiality and transcendence finally reveals that the ultimate responsible for semantic inversions is writing itself, in correspondance with Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the fantastic.

"El oficio de mirar": Regarding the Human-Animal Gaze in Three Texts by Julio Cortázar

Several of Cortázar's stories feature animals represented in a range from the fully realistic, to the fantastic, to the symbolic or purely imaginary. One of his most widely read stories, "Axolotl," turns on the transmigration of a human consciousness into that of a salamander. This limit situation is predicated on the act of looking, a mutual gaze that ultimately leads to the inexplicable absorption of the human subject into the animal object. Two other lesser-known texts by Cortázar—the early short story "Bestiario" and a later sui generis text called "Paseo entre las jaulas"—likewise develop the trope of the human-animal gaze as a mode of knowledge or understanding, but they do so using a variety of techniques that obviate the kind of fantastical twist we see at the end of "Axolotl." These two texts, whose animal logic is developed discursively and associatively, offer the reader a more psychologically plausible and even intimate glimpse into the potential of the interspecies gaze. Taken together, these three very different works serve to further elucidate Cortázar's insistent grappling with the problematic of self and (animal) other.

An individual’s detachment as a precursor to existentialism in Andreev’s The Grand Slam [Bolshoy shlem

The article examines L. Andreev’s early short story The Grand Slam [Bolshoy shlem] (1899) which features a number of themes explored in his later oeuvre. The article offers characteristics of the four protagonists. None of them finds the outside world to be of particular importance: they are fully engaged in their game of vint (Russian whist). Their interactions are markedly pragmatic and confined to necessary remarks around the card table; therefore, their psyches never cross. However, upon the sudden death of one of the players, their familiar game world is shattered. Ironically, the player dies on the verge of achieving his long-term goal — to win a grand slam. This is Andreev’s way of showing the irrationality of human existence and raising the subject of death, absurdity, and people’s detachment, all three conceptually related to existentialism, a philosophy that would be defined in the 20th c.

“Love and Self-Love”: The Balance between Sympathy and Self-Respect in Louisa May Alcott’s Early Fiction

This paper explores one of the early short stories by Louisa May Alcott in order to offer an example of a problem that plagued women in 19th century America, wanting to thrive both in the domestic and in the public spheres. By focusing on “Love and Self-Love,” an early short story, the paper highlights one of the major concerns at the time of the emergence of the first proto-feminist movements: the balance between women’s inclination to sympathy for others and their own self-esteem. The plot revolves around self-respect and stages forms of female empowerment by using fiction as a form of education oriented towards creating awareness in the public sphere.

Isis as Little Red Riding Hood: Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston's "Drenched in Light"

This essay argues that Zora Neale Hurston's early short story "Drenched in Light" (1924) deploys the intertext of "Little Red Riding Hood" to frame the story of Isis. Casting the dilemma of the Black female artist and her desire to cross boundaries in the framework of Little Red, Hurston amalgamates European and African American folklore traditions, shifting the tale of Red Riding Hood to a trickster tale that empowers Isis. The Little Red framework is re-imagined in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, demonstrating the significance and accomplishment of "Drenched in Light" as a reflection of the Black artist courting white and Black patronage. This essay was written for the special collection titled "Children, Too, Sing America."

Inside Fire Season

Inside Fire Season Joy Lanzendorfer (bio) saturday, october 26, 2019 acres on fire: 26,000 buildings destroyed: 77 I'm starting to get used to the idea of evacuating my home. This is the third time. The first was in 2017, when the Tubbs Fire tore through nearby Santa Rosa. The second time was voluntary, when we fled the smoke caused by the deadly Camp Fire. Now I find myself at risk again as the Kincade Fire burns near Geyserville, forty minutes away. Despite this, I'm not sure what to save should my house be engulfed in flames. My possessions become both worthless and precious at the same time and value splinters into different meanings: monetary, practical, historical, sentimental. I can live without all of it, but I have it around for a reason. Finally my husband and I agree on a rule: We won't take anything we can replace. In my office, I flip through a volume of high school poetry, cringing at every melodramatic word. It wouldn't be terrible if this burned, I think. Still, I throw it in the box alongside early short stories and elementary school diaries. The future version of myself, the one who has lost her house in a fire, feels oppressive. I don't want to disappoint her. This box of personal scribblings is small compared to my library, which fills an entire wall of my office. But most of those books can be replaced, so okay. My teenage poetry to be saved, Jane Austen to burn. In the bedroom, my husband has rigged up an air cleaner by taping a filter to a fan. Last year, the entire state was cloaked in smoke as the town of Paradise burned down, killing eighty-five people. I got sick—a sore throat and hacking cough that didn't go away until we drove to Oregon and camped in the woods. This time, we're being more careful, but I can still smell smoke, even inside. I contemplate my clothes. Will I want to save the nicer clothes that I've [End Page 98] collected over time but wear only for fancy occasions, or will I want comfortable clothes to wear in a shelter? I'll definitely want socks and underwear, although, to be fair, those can be replaced. I try Marie Kondo. What brings me joy? Having a bed and a house. Not evacuating. There are clothes I love because of the deals I got on them—the three-dollar leather boots from a thrift store, the three-hundred-dollar Kate Spade jeans I found on sale for fifty. I shove everything in bags. It can all be replaced, but finding clothes I like is hard. I don't even go into the kitchen. At this point, the Kincade Fire is on the other end of Sonoma County, but it's spreading so fast that authorities are evacuating most of the population, around two hundred thousand people. Everyone I know is affected. The closest evacuation is Valley Ford, an isolated hamlet connected to me by a long, dry country road. My home, Petaluma, is the first stop for evacuees. The fairground has been turned into an emergency shelter, but from what I hear, it's already full. Outside, I fill the chicken feeder in case we have to leave them behind. We can't bring chickens to a hotel room, so they'll have to take their chances. As I watch my three hens gobble the food, I suddenly sense someone behind me. When I whirl around, no one is there. A second later, the wind moves the leaves by the garage toward me, which is the wrong way. Usually the wind would move leaves away from me, toward the gate, not in the opposite direction, toward the chickens. I go into the backyard and stare up at the Japanese privet. The wind sloshes the branches in a way that seems backward. It looks strange in the smoky air, like the tree is drunk. For the second time, hurricane-force winds are causing fires in Sonoma County. It's not just that the winds are strong—although they are, ripping the...

A Library of One's Own

A Library of One's Own

EASTER SHORT STORIES BY A. I. KUPRIN

Easter motifs permeate all of Kuprin's work and reflect the trends characteristic of the development of the Easter genre in Russian literature as a whole. Early short stories point to the crisis of the genre: “Bonze” contradicts the Easter canon; irony appears in the short stories “By order”, “My passport”, “Family style”, “Grass.” They contain mandatory elements of the genre: are timed to Easter, possess a special festive mood, tenderness and emotion, and display a spiritual renewal of the characters. In some of the short stories written in 1911–1916 (“Easter Eggs”, “Holy Lies”, “Daddy”) a comic component appears: satire intensifies, and irony turns into sarcasm. Traditional Easter plots seem banal, and therefore fake and feigned, resembling a parody of the genre. In exile, the writer again turns to the Easter genre: he writes “Moscow Easter” and “Easter Bells.” The author himself craves the enlightenment and transformation that Easter brings, creativity becomes salvation, bringing light and joy to the writer who is longing far from his homeland. Memories of childhood or youth become the basis of most Easter story plots. After all, a naive and sincere belief in miracles persists in children for a long time, they very keenly experience the joy that this holiday brings with it, while adults eventually lose this childish faith in miracles, and their life-drained, hardened souls become cold and still. Memories can be different, they are not always joyful or happy, but it is the experience of these memories, the immersion in the past that creates a special festive mood and promotes spiritual purification and transformation.

Fitzgerald’s War: Bryan Dalyrimple, Josephine Perry, Pat Hobby, and the Politics of Disillusionment

Abstract Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction includes a number of combatants in the Great War, the global conflagration does not interest him primarily as a theater of combat. Rather, whenever war is discussion in his work, other social issues are implied—namely, disillusion and indifference. In the early short story “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” the veteran’s real shell shock occurs when he discovers that military service does not open the doors to upward mobility, and he finds opportunity only in a life of crime (that ironically eventuates a political career). In Josephine Perry stories such as “First Blood,” “A Snobbish Story,” and “Emotional Bankruptcy,” the war is remote history even as it is ongoing; the obligations of patriotism quickly sink into the great Sahara of American apathy. Finally, even in late Pat Hobby stories like “Two Old-Timers,” war is revealed to be nothing more than a flickering cinematic simulacrum of bravery that shapes both cultural and personal memory, a delusion that only insiders like Fitzgerald’s screenwriting hack know is engineered. Reading these three overlooked texts against the backdrop of commentary by H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and R. H. Tawney, this article argues that the cynicism of the interwar years did not begin in the battlefields but in the parlors, backrooms, and studio back lots of the home front.

The Motif of the Last Term in the Short Story of V. Rasputin A Bear Skin for Sale

The article analyzes the origins of the last term motif in V. Rasputin’s prose. An early short story by V. Rasputin Bearskin for Sale (1967) examines this motif from the standpoint of Christian Orthodox axiology. The analysis uses the first two editions of the short story: 1966 and 1967. The motif of the last term determines the plot of the work and reveals biblical and evangelical reminiscences that connect the story with the traditional image of the world in Russian culture, where the leading ideas are human repentance and salvation of the soul. A. N. Uzhankov’s research, which reveals the patterns of development in ancient Russian literature, explains the presence of the idea of “last times” in the minds of the ancient Russian chroniclers. V. Raspustin’s prose restores the continuity of post-1917 Russian literature with the origins of Russian literature. The story of the hunter Vasily in Bearskin for Sale reveals the psychology of human renewal, the emergence of a new attitude towards time, life, oneself and the animate in nature. Cyclic, repeated and expected time, in which a person was previously included, is replaced for him by that which is discrete, interrupted, expressed in the feeling of every moment of life as the last. A person who is ripped by sin out of harmonious coexistence with the world becomes different through an inner admission of his guilt. The motif of the last term, characteristic of the main works of V. Rasputin, the stories Money for Maria, The Last Term, Live and Remember, Farewell to Matyora is revealed from the very beginning of his literary path.

Некоторые особенности юмористических рассказов Марка Твена

The article deals with the early short stories of Mark Twain. It illustrates the key features of the humor of Mark Twain’s short stories, and the role of American lifestyle, especially in the Western region’s historical culture, folklore and traditions of newspapers humor in the formation of Mark Twain as a writer. There is an analysis about the mutual relations between humor and critique in the article too. To our conclusion humor was not the main goal in the literary activity of Mark Twain, the main principle and goal of the writer’s works were to discover the materials coming from hypocrisy, dissimulation, ugliness and realities of those times, and their comic potential. That is why to use widely the ways and methods of the comic elements helped the writer to show and describe the personages, characters, things and objects in a conflicting manner with their full details and bareness in various colors.

Exorbitant Dust

AbstractThis article traces the figure of polvo (dust) across the writing career of Puerto Rican and New York writer Manuel Ramos Otero. Polvo heralds the macabre sensuality of his early short stories, long before his diagnosis with HIV, and persists and morphs through his later essays and poetry up until his eventual death in 1990 from AIDS complications. Writing defiantly as a queer, a feminist, a Puerto Rican, and a sidoso, he produced work that invites death and desire to commingle through a figuration of dust, as a scattered substance that covers skin, coats translation, and dirties conventional genres. Polvo illuminates the dimensions and risks of relation as a particulate matter that exposes our porosity—clinging and hovering in the space between bodies, between the past and the future, between life and death. As the dust settles in the wake of Hurricane María, so too can polvo be read as prescient for how coloniality lingers as enduring conditions of debility and precarity. Ramos Otero's affinity for finitude, figured through polvo, counterintuitively conjures a relational desire that privileges the porous, the marginal, and the always precarious possibility of survival. Polvo moves across the different genres and phases of Ramos Otero's work as a matter that refuses to disentangle the material realities of queerness and coloniality.

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...

The Banality of Violence in A. L. Kennedy’s Early Short Stories

The present paper adapts Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil to illustrate the banality of a specific manifestation of evil, which is violence, as it is presented in the early short stories of A. L. Kennedy. Selected stories from Kennedy’s first two collections, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) and Now that You’re Back (1994), are analysed to show that, like Arendt, Kennedy does not dismiss the perpetrators of violent acts as sadistic monsters but rather perceives them in their complexity as human beings who may commit inhuman crimes, yet cannot be explained away easily as less than human. Kennedy’s point about the banality of violence – banality in the sense of commonness or ordinariness, not in the sense of triviality – is reinforced by her preoccupation with ordinary characters leading mundane lives, whose humdrum existence is disrupted by unexpected, though typically unexceptional, circumstances. Lacking the capacity or skill to cope by non-violent means, Kennedy’s characters resort to violence in a perverted attempt to come to terms with the uncertainty of life and to express in a physical manner what they cannot express in language.