Short Story Form Research Articles

Decolonizing the reading landscape: A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube

Reading and literacy projects in South Africa have a long and fascinating history. In this conversation, Kgauhelo Dube talks about a contemporary Pretoria-based initiative which seeks to promote reading and literacy through the showcasing of African authors and texts. The discussion explores some of the social and material dynamics which inform the post-apartheid reading project, including the lack of reading and library facilities in township settings and the ongoing alienation experienced by black students and scholars in white-dominated institutions. It points to the importance of the contemporary revival of the discourse of decoloniality as a means of framing the project, and as a route to understanding the broader contexts in which African literature is produced and consumed. The discussion also engages with the importance of the short story form for the public reading event and considers some of the ways in which the written text is subsequently reshaped as a dynamic and mobile digital product.

An Analysis of Figurative Language Elements upon an American Short Story Entitled “The Monkey’s Paw

This article describes the study of semantic in a specified domain of figurative language upon a selected work of American English literature, in form of short story written by the renowned writer and author, William Wymark Jacobs, entitled as ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. Several objectives are deduced by the researcher in quest of finding the forms of this figurative language within the passage. Briefly, figurative language itself is a feature of every languages, which emphasized the use of expression to symbolize a different meaning from the usual literal interpretation. In our analysis of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, the varieties of figurative language: Metaphor, Personification, Hyperbole, Symbolism, also another terms used to represent unusual words construction or combination such as Onomatopoeia, Idiom, and even Imagery, are discussed in order in relation with true meaning discovery behind each figurative language properties.

Sonnet story in Shams Tabrizi's Poetic works

Objective: mulana has revealed in various ways his free thought about belief and fundamental issues that is rooted in his worldview. This article is a inquiry about sonnet story in Poetical works of Shams Tabrizi and saying poetry which is all the secrets and while is also considered as long meaning of kind of narrative and story. Methodology: in her sonnets, mulana presents controversial stories to the audience through the flow of mental fluid so that everyone understands his inner message and his inner secrets. The methodology which followed by Rumi is to present a story that a throughout a sonnet which leads to the conclusion of story beyond the colour. Results: He narrate a story in his works and say the myth , but he open a getaway toward meaning imagination world in every story and myth and he uses the method of meaning, allegory , ciphers and symbols in the description his purposes more loudly in form of sonnet and short story. Conclusion: He trgards the liberation of the belongs and terrestrial contaminations along with the decline of obstacles and dignity as a tool for reaching oneself principle.

INTERVIEW WITH PETINA GAPPAH

This interview was conducted on 16 May 2009 at Le Quartier Francais in Franschhoek, Cape Town, South Africa. Petina Gappah is the third generation of Zimbabwean writers writing from the diaspora. She was born in 1971 in Zambia, and grew up in Zimbabwe during the transitional moment from colonial Rhodesia to independence. She has law degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Graz. She writes in English and also draws on Shona, her first language. She has published a short story collection An Elegy for Easterly (2009), first novel The Book of Memory (2015), and another collection of short stories, Rotten Row (2016). Gappah’s collection of short stories An Elegy for Easterly (2009) was awarded The Guardian First Book Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the richest prize for the short story form. Gappah was working on her novel The Book of Memory at the time of this interview.

The Bloomsbury Short Story

This article examines the importance of the short story form for the Bloomsbury writers and how their aesthetic theories influenced its composition, structure and content. Often overlooked in the history of the genre, the Bloomsbury short story has a claim to be an important aspect of the twentieth-century accounts of the short story form. Attention to Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, E.M. Forster and others, such as Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence, indicates their widespread engagement with the genre and the ways in which they treated it from fragmented conversation, as in Woolf’s “The String Quartet,” to Foster’s employment of linear narrative detail in “The Road from Colonus.” Formal experiments with syntax, imagery, and vocabulary and prose rhythm exhibit the seriousness of the short story for Bloomsbury authors. The influence of the Russians is particularly important with Chekov dominating the reading and writing of Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence and others. The very form of publication—mostly journals and magazines—is also crucial in shaping the length and structure of the short story. Attention to experimentation, as well as renewal, of the genre balances the impact of the short story on writers today and the question of a successor to the efforts and achievements of Bloomsbury’s authors. A reading of the short stories of Julian Barnes explores this possibility.

Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison ed. by Mirosława Buchholtz and Eugenia Sojka

Reviewed by: Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison ed. by Mirosława Buchholtz and Eugenia Sojka Grzegorz Koneczniak Buchholtz, Mirosława, and Eugenia Sojka , eds. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. 226. Most book-form criticism on Alice Munro, notwithstanding her ultimate literary success in 2013 with a Nobel Prize in Literature, comes from the period between as early as the 1980s and as recent as 2015. Select publications include, for example, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts (1983) by Louis King MacKendrick, Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel (1987) by Walter Rintoul Martin, Alice Munro (1988) by E.D. Blodgett, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro (1990) by Beverly Jean Rasporich, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (1992) by Magdalene Redekop, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence (1994) by Ajay Heble, Alice Munro: A Double Life (1995) by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Alice Munro (1998) by Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005, 2011) by Robert Thacker, The Fiction of Alice Munro: [End Page 821] An Appreciation (2008) by Brad Hooper, Alice Munro (2009) by Harold Bloom, and Alice Munro's Narrative Art (2011) by Isla Duncan. The list is not exhaustive; yet, it is sufficient to prove long-standing scholarly interest in Munro's life and the issues addressed in her fiction. Of particular interest is the emphasis on the biographical aspect, bearing in mind that she is a secretive, self-effacing author, despite numerous autobiographical allusions in her work. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation and Comparison, a volume edited by Mirosława Buchholtz (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland) and Eugenia Sojka (University of Silesia, Poland) has been an important contribution to book-form criticism of Munro since the writer received the Nobel Prize in 2013. The editors are experts on Canadian literature whose contributions to the development and promotion of Canadian studies reach far beyond the Polish borders and are international in scope. Both also share significant experience in directing Canadian research centres in Poland: Professor Mirosława Buchholtz was the director of the Canadian Resource Centre in Toruń and dr hab. Eugenia Sojka has been a long-time director of the Canadian Studies Centre in Sosnowiec. Their recent co-edited contribution on Munro includes personal recollections shared by those who have met the Canadian writer (the first part, "Reminiscence"), insightful hermeneutical analyses of Munro's short prose (the second part, "Interpretation"), critical and cross-sectional discussion of Munro's work adapted for various media (the third part, "Adaptation"), and thought-provoking juxtapositions of Munro's literary activity with the oeuvre and heritage of other writers and artists (the fourth part, "Comparison"). The opening article, "Intertextual Encounters with Alice Munro: Introduction," by Eugenia Sojka and Mirosława Buchholtz" (7-14), sets the goal of examining "a critical international and intercultural standpoint on Munro's art of short story writing that is not limited to a literary interpretation of the genre, but also gives critical perspectives on film and stage adaptations of her work" (8). The editors certainly deliver on this promise because the scope of the volume indeed extends beyond the limits of literary studies and the examination of the short story form in Parts II and III. The collection also includes "comparative analyses with Mavis Gallant's and Eudora Welty's writing by academics from Poland, Canada and France" with a contribution from George Elliott Clarke, informed by a postcolonial perspective; additionally, the volume features "exclusive reminiscences of encounters with the author by such Canadian writers as Tomson Highway and Daphne Marlatt" (8). These aspects of the collection are covered in Parts IV and I, respectively. The specific goals, as set by the editors, determine the order in which the essays will be reviewed here: starting with Parts II and III, then moving into Part IV, and finally to Part I. The first article in Part II is Lola Lemire Tostevin's "A Touch of Evil in Carstairs" (35-41). Tostevin argues that Munro's stories are about "secrets, fantasies and, ultimately, the confinement of violence found at the heart of the human...

“The Cataclysm We All Remember”: Haunting and Spectral Trauma in the First World War Supernatural Stories of H. D. Everett

ABSTRACTWhile there has been increased interest in women's writing from the First World War, there has been less critical attention devoted to the development of the First World War short story, especially supernatural short fiction from the war. This article combines each of these avenues for studying First World War literature—the female perspective, the short-story form and the supernatural—by examining the First World War supernatural fiction of Henrietta Dorothy Everett. “Over the Wires” (1920), “The Whispering Wall” (1916) and “A Perplexing Case” (1920) each highlight the supernatural as a means of coping with wartime trauma and grief. In stories that center on war crimes, ancestral ghosts and shell shock, Everett gives readers a unique female perspective on the aftermath of war, as these stories concern how those on both the home front and the battlefield experience mysterious supernatural events that reflect the often inexplicable and unpredictable nature of war.

Long Story Short: The Writing Life of Sheila Roberts

In a publishing career within South Africa dating from the 1970s, over the next three decades, Sheila Roberts (1937–2009) consistently evaded oversimplified readings of her work, especially in the short-story form, and in her verse. For most of her later professional career as a teacher of “creative writing” in the United States, she defied literalisms, dispatching back to her country of birth challenging versions of “home truths” and increasingly using devious narratorial techniques, even in her novels, becoming a major innovator in the literature of the English-speaking subcontinent.

Bringing Edward Hopper’s Paintings into the English Language Arts Classroom

This article presents ways to incorporate the works of artist Edward Hopper in the ELA secondary classroom. Students analyze Hopper’s paintings as a text and create their own responses in the form of poetry, short story, photography, and other visual media.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez

Reviewed by: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez Karen Fay Yaworski (bio) Lucy Evans. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014. Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines 16. Pp. x, 230. £75.00. Elena Machado Sáez. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. Pp. 249. US$65.00. Lucy Evans’ Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and Elena Machado Sáez’s Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction both ask how Caribbean fictions, including diasporic ones, articulate community and belonging at local and global levels, how internal tensions animate those communities, and how fictional texts formally manifest the social, political, and aesthetic problematics that concern these writers. Evans’ book offers an insightful analysis of how community is conceptualized in eight contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles. Machado Sáez analyzes contemporary Caribbean diasporic historical fiction as a transnational literary trend and demonstrates how writers negotiate the tension between a postcolonial imperative to ethically depict Caribbean history and subjectivities and market pressures informed by readers’ expectations. In Communities, Evans argues that “the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers’ imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together” (2). The grounds for this unity and the various axes of difference that challenge it are central concerns throughout Evans’ book, which draws on literary, cultural, and anthropological studies as well as on musical traditions. The theoretically dense introduction discusses the demographics and histories of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana; surveys theoretical models of Caribbean community; offers a history of the Caribbean short story; and identifies the limitations of short story genre theory. Evans suggests that Edward Glissant’s, Wilson Harris’, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s models of association across difference are applicable to “the narrative structure of a short story collection or cycle made up of episodes at once discrete and interrelated” (23). She finds division and unity at many layers of Caribbean society, echoing a prevailing trope in Caribbean studies while refusing to privilege unity, as many studies do. She sees division and unity reflected in the short story form and celebrates [End Page 187] Caribbean writers’ “subtle and complex modes of working through differences without erasing them” (20). Evans’ discussion can likewise be commended for how it illustrates the range of dynamic, complex ways Caribbean writers articulate community without collapsing these into a single or simplified conclusion. The book’s four chapters engage with progressively larger communities, moving from rural to urban, then national, and finally global diasporic collectivities. Chapters One and Two explore works by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, and Alecia McKenzie. Evans contends that Senior and Lovelace formally combine modernist conventions with oral storytelling strategies in order to “portray the internal fracture and the heterogeneity characterising Caribbean rural communities more effectively than is possible … [in] traditional ethnography” (46–47). Furthermore, she argues that the short story form “facilitates a [distinct] mode of ethnography” (65) in creating a “multivocal rendering of community” (66). A similar pattern of argumentation emerges in Chapter Two, wherein anthropology loses a competition with literature. Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy, both cited in Market Aesthetics, resist reader assumptions that fiction set in the developing world functions as social scientific research.1 Evans’ argument celebrates fiction’s capacity to offer more nuanced renderings of community than social science but nonetheless assesses fiction as a social scientific intervention, thereby submitting authors to the pressures Danticat and Chariandy object to. This contradiction notwithstanding, Evans illustrates literature’s capacity for imagining community in ways that anthropology cannot. Evans’ treatment of anthropology at times fails to acknowledge the very different objectives, audiences, methods, and conditions of production that the discipline involves. For example, when she highlights “the capacity of … short story collections or cycles … to incorporate a range of sometimes incompatible perspectives and subject positions; a task which is difficult, although not impossible, within the format of an anthropological study” (28), she submits the...

Dead Tilt: Playing for Keeps at “The Blue Hotel,” the Prize and the Price

Stephen Crane had not advanced beyond his teenage years before twelve of the sixteen original members of his immediate family had died, and by his early twenties he was becoming symptomatic with the tuberculosis that would kill him at twenty eight. Death, ever present, overshadowed his life and like a threatening eclipse looms, markedly, in his best work. “The Blue Hotel,” a crowning realization of the short story form, is a site for the expurgation of that relentless spectre, its alienated and adversarial Swede a personification of Crane’s own dissolution, forthwith to be ritualistically purged. Such sacrifice is shown to be psychosocially well founded, historical in long practice and supported by current theory as a means of restoring order to exigent chaos; here Crane in 1898, nearing his unruly end, implemented sacrificial victimization allegorically, with cardplaying rather than the casting of lots his aleatory selector, for the most vital personal reason.

“I Did Not Learn Their Name”: Female Characters in the Short Fiction of Ralph Ellison

Discussion of the status of women in Ralph Ellison's fiction has been limited to the representations in Invisible Man. A number of critics have examined these roles, and a kind of consensus has emerged that such characters are consistently subordinate to the male figures. They serve primarily as maternal images or sexual objects. The commentaries often focus on subtle differences among the stereotypes. Thus, Carolyn Sylvander and Janet Overmyer point to Ellison's tendency to make the white female figures highly sexualized, while Yolanda Pierce and Ann Folwell Stanford note the function of Mary Rambo, who is a desexualized maternal image that must eventually be escaped; Stanford and Claudia Tate examine an excised narrative of Mary that is much more elaborate in showing her as an active figure. Finally, Tate interprets the characters as useful helpers despite their one-dimensionality, and she demonstrates that both white and black women aid the narrator in his search for identity. Mary Rohrberger labels all of the women as automatons, a term that is consistent with the critical agreement that they are invisible in the text.1However, no comparable analysis has been made of the female figures in the short stories; in fact, very little has been published on the stories at all in the last ten years.2 In these fictions, the overall representation of women is more complex than it is in the novel. These characters serve as stern mother figures reminding black boys of the rules of a racialized society, as initiators into the mysteries of sexuality and performance of gender, or as guides encouraging the development of responsible black manhood. In several cases, ambiguity or ambivalence is introduced that suggests the limits of male knowledge about the world, relationships, and identity. This essay focuses on several stories from the posthumously published collection Flying Home and examines the range of representations and their functions within the stories. Some of the works are the Buster and Riley narratives from Ellison's early career, in which two boys interact with adult women. In these stories, father figures are largely absent, so mothers and teachers are essential to shaping racial and gender identity. Other works take up romantic relationships in which the women, while having small roles in the story, are nonetheless key to the narrative. Still others have women provide historical perspectives. The argument I want to make is not that Ellison makes female characters the central figures in any of his stories but rather that these characters are crucial to the storytelling. This difference from the novel may well be the result of the brevity of the short story form and its usual focus on a particular set of circumstances and a limited number of characters. These conditions can intensify the nature of relationships in ways that a novel, especially one of the breadth of Invisible Man, does not need to do. Ellison's stories are about moments in the lives of his protagonists that produce, whether the main characters fully realize it or not, some change in their lives.In two of the Buster and Riley stories, Afternoon (1940) and That I Had the Wings (1943), the mother figures are disciplinarians who allow their concerns with white people to determine their treatment of the boys. In the first of these narratives, Buster's mother (the women are seldom given names) berates him for failing to assist her in her work. He is made to feel ashamed and silently accepts his humiliation:Buster, where you been, you lazy rascal! knowed I wanted you here to help me with them tubs!I was over at Riley's, Ma. I didn't know you wanted me. You didn't know! Lawd, I don't know why I had to have a chile like you. I work my fingers to the bone to keep you looking decent and that's the way you 'preciates it. didn't know!3Buster explicitly relates her verbal attack to her difficulties with whites: She was like this whenever something went wrong with her and the white folks. …

Alice Munro: Nobel Prize-winning Master of the Contemporary Short Story

This article surveys Alice Munro’s achievements and consists of four parts: Alice Munro and the Nobel Prize; From Canadian Small Town Life to Global Literary Renown; Alice Munro’s Art of the Short Story: Oeuvre, Characteristics, Poetics; Exemplary Text Analysis: Alice Munro, “Fiction.” The article focuses on the virtuosity of Munro’s short story poetics and how she breaks with traditional rules of short story writing for her purposes. The poetological analysis is complemented by a detailed analysis of one of her exceptionally well-constructed and moving stories, “Fiction” (2007), which is particularly suitable for teaching and representative of Munro’s mastery of the short story form.

Chekhov’s landscapes: Building story structure with descriptions of the natural world

Abstract While there are myriad lenses through which we can examine Anton Chekhov’s mastery of the short-story form, one of the clearest is his use of the natural world. The writer often uses descriptions to build story structure and transmogrify the protagonist’s experience, all the while highlighting a theme pervasive throughout his work – that of humankind’s damaging effect on the natural world and the implications of reciprocal damage. A close look at two of Chekhov’s later stories – ‘Peasants’ and ‘In the Ravine’ – reveals his ability to paint, in simple, evocative language, landscapes that do far more than serve as mere backdrops.

American laconic: Nescience and realism in Richard Ford’s ‘Optimists’

Abstract The short stories of Richard Ford are examples of how the short form and minimalist prose mimic the unhealthy limitedness of human knowledge. Ford himself claims it is fiction’s duty to recreate the condition of not knowing and that people are the mysterious sum of their actions. Using Ford’s story ‘Optimists’, and considering the tension between empirical and Platonic epistemologies, minimalist short fiction is considered for its portrayal of human knowledge as limited and imperfect. As such, the short story form is uncannily apt at achieving narrative realism interested in the human condition of not knowing or nescience.

‘I Contain Multitudes’: The queer chronotopes of Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’

Abstract This article will explore Annie Proulx’s treatment of the expansive Wyoming setting and the characters’ traumatic lives in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as factors that would seem to militate against the generic limits of the short story form. Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will argue that Proulx represents memory and geography in images in which time and space coalesce or are torn asunder to signify a love that literally dare not speak its name because it would be lethal to do so. The story’s central theme of queer love between two novice shepherds has a concomitant effect on what constitutes the normative in Wyoming’s fiercely patriarchal and machismo world. This results in a range of chronotopes in which heteronormative space and time undergo queer revision. Drawing upon queer theory tropes such as futurity and counterpublics, I suggest that Proulx’s queering of the literary form of the pastoral recalibrates notions of domesticity and the family. Proulx’s imagery thus reveals an alternative ethic secretly at work in the story’s milieu that narrative discourse opens to the reader even if its secret significance is sullied and even silenced by rural myth and history in its represented world.

Voicing the self: Narration, perspective and identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Prince Ramji Rowdedow’ (1874)

Abstract This article considers Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s use of the short story form and authorial, character and narrative voice in her theatrical tale ‘Prince Ramji Rowdedow’ (1874). As context for this article prevailing Victorian approaches to narrative voice will be considered, alongside Braddon’s acting and playwright careers, emphasizing her knowledge of how the voice is utilized on and offstage. The thesis of this article is that although the voice can be fragmented, it is a vital and powerful element of identity construction for both fictional characters and real people. However, Braddon’s deliberate exposé of the highly constructed nature of the theatre demonstrates that a person’s identity is socially rather than individually constructed.

The Vines That Bind

Wine, especially good wine, is something special. It has always been so. But why is good wine so much more than the sum of its parts? Researchers in both the traditional and social sciences have been attempting to answer that question since the first glasses of wine were poured centuries ago. Wine may be history’s most puzzling and most tested beverage. This work employs artistic inquiry in the form of a fictional short story to suggest attempts to define wine are doomed to failure, and that wine’s mystical powers emerge in conversation about it.

Survey of American Literature - The American Short Story

The American short story has been described as a ‘genre’ that thrusts itself into attention. It is regarded as a milestone in the American literary tradition. One cannot study American literature while disregarding its short story. According to Frank O’Connor, who is himself a writer of many collections of short stories, the 'Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form.' Such a quote by such a prominent writer like Frank O’Connor can only stress the peculiarity of the American short story. It is even claimed that the short story, as it is known in the present days, has literally been invented by the Americans. Although the last claim might receive some criticism, it is almost agreed that the American short story has found in Edgar Allan Poe its first major theorist. Being a writer of many famously acclaimed short stories, Poe is considered to be at the top of a list of other American writers who have done some, if not all, their best works in that medium. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, to cite only a few, are believed to have produced their most complete works of literature in the short story form.. The American short story is indeed a very prominent genre that can only be a centre of attention to anyone interested in the American letters. Yet, there are still some hazy aspects to it, in regard to its origins, its theoretical definition, its focus on certain aspects rather than others but also the role of the social and political context of the previous centuries in its rise.

Between the sheets: The short stories of Tennessee Williams

This article explores the creative sensibility that underpins Tennessee Williams’s literary works. It proposes that Williams’s short stories were more than the ‘testing ground for his future works’; they also reveal a great deal about his complex personality, and his troubling negotiation with his desire for men. It draws on his Memoirs (1972), his short fiction and his stage plays to reveal how insistently his homosexuality appears in his work, and is in fact integral to his aesthetic choices. Based on the premise that as a homosexual Williams aligns himself with the outsider and the marginal figure, this article argues that in using the short story form he pushes the boundaries of social acceptability with far more freedom than mainstream Broadway producers would ever allow. The article concludes that, above all, Williams is, in a sense, a character in his stories, the better to express his empathy for those in the margins, and also to disclose his homosexuality ‘between the sheets’ of his stories.