Short Story Genre Research Articles

Broadening and Narrowing Horizons in Zoë Wicomb’s The One That Got Away

In her most recent work of fiction, The One That Got Away (2008), a short story cycle of both place and character, Wicomb continues her exploration of the limits of the short story genre. This article shows how, as characters slip in and out of stories, and as the topographical, cultural and lexical signifiers of one place are blended with or usurp those of the other city, Wicomb gradually interrogates the potentially enriching yet often limited cultural exchanges between Capetonian and Glaswegian characters. A study of her formal reflection of the aborted or confused communication between characters will lead to an analysis of her interrogation of the writing process.

The Russian twentieth-century short story: a critical companion

Lyudmila Parts, ed. Russian Twentieth Century Short Story: A Critical Companion. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2010.359 pp. $49.00, cloth. $24.95, paper.As Lyudmila Parts reminds us in her brief but informative introduction, the Russian short story has always been most prominent in times of transition, acting as harbinger of social and political change and serving as catalyst for literary innovation and evolution. short story, according to Parts, has always been a form that responds with immediacy to the sensibilities of its (p. xvii), whether we are talking about the rise of the genre in the early nineteenth when it marked shift from poetry to prose; Chekhov's stories at the turn of the twentieth which reasserted the importance of the short story at time of political and cultural crisis; or the stories of Vasilii Shukshin in the 1960s and Tatiana Tolstaia and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in the 1980s, which reinvigorated the genre in the post-Thaw period and glasnost'. Parts's collection aims to acquaint the reader with some of the most illuminating critical articles treating the short stories that best represent the genre in twentieth-century Russian literature (p. xiii). As such, it seeks to fill gap in critical attention accorded the modern Russian short story.Of the eighteen chapters, only five appear for the first time in this volume. others are reprints of works that have appeared previously. Taken on an individual basis, all of the contributions offer provocative analyses of individual stories by Chekhov (The Darling), Bunin (Gentle Breath), Babel (Pan Apolek, My First Goose), Zoshchenko (The Electrician), Olesha (Liompa), Nabokov (Spring in Fialta), Pasternak (Childhood of Luvers), Platonov (The River Potudan), Kharms (The Old Woman), Shalamov (Condensed Milk), Tertz (Pkhentz), Shukshin (Cutting Them Down to Size), Tolstaia (The Poet and the Muse), Petrushevskaia (The Lady with the Dogs), Pietsukh (The Central-Ermolaevo War), Erofeev (The Parakeet), Bitov (Pushkin's Photograph), and Pelevin (Nika). Some of these articles are definitive treatments of their topic. Lev Vygotsky's analysis of Bunin's Gentle Breath is classic essay on the short story form and the psychology of the creative process. Aleksander Zholkovsky provides an impressive and exhaustive analysis of the linguistic, cultural, biographical, and intertextual aspects of Zoshchenko's The Electrician. Eric Naiman's reading of sexuality and utopia in Platonov is one of the best concise treatments of the writer I have read. Catharine Nepomnyashchy's treatment of criminality in Tertz's Pkhents is superb example of textual, biographical, and cultural analysis. Diane Nemec Ignashev's reading of Cutting Them Down to Size remains the finest succinct treatment of the salient features of Shukshin's artistic program to date. Equally authoritative and notable is Mark Lipovetsky's analysis of postmodem themes in Pietsukh and Erofeev.There is no denying the quality of these and the other articles of the collection, which, according to Parts, all address the major aesthetic and thematic concerns of the short story genre in the twentieth century, in particular language, childhood, and memory (p. xxiv). Unfortunately, despite these last three common themes, the anthology taken as whole still reads more like collection of individual articles and less like an in-depth look at the Russian short story genre in the twentieth century. …

<em>The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s</em>, by Winnie Chan

Reviewed by: The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s Madeleine A. Vala (bio) The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s, by Winnie Chan; pp. ix + 148. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, £65.00, $95.00. Winnie Chan’s The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s provides a compelling analysis of late-Victorian periodicals and their role in distinguishing the short story as a genre and as a commodity. Chan seeks to “map out how the stakes in the field of the short story’s production were established and contested during this period, as well as how they were defined by burgeoning mass print” (xii). She argues that the explosion of short stories in the late nineteenth century revealed “an oscillation between mass culture and high art [that] . . . was in fact emblematic of early modernism” (xi). This study explores the material history of the short story, a largely overlooked genre, and is a welcome contribution to recent critical discussions on the intersections among literature, audience, print culture, and consumer culture. While Chan’s book delights in its exhaustive information on periodicals—from editorial practices and printing techniques to remuneration of writers and relationships between text and illustration—this attention to detail at times obscures her larger arguments about incipient modernism and British national identity. [End Page 166] Examining the Strand, the Yellow Book, and Black and White in each of her body chapters, Chan recreates the world of each periodical and then focuses on a close reading of one short story in each of these magazines. This methodology allows the selected story to assume new layers of cultural complexity but can also frustrate the reader. Chan’s single extended close reading of a short story is the highlight of each chapter—demonstrating her dexterity at merging print culture with literary analysis—and leaves the reader wishing for more examples of such innovative readings, if even in abridged form. The discussion of the Strand in chapter 1 fruitfully shows how mass culture forges generic elements of the short story. Editor George Newnes eschewed serial publication of fiction in favor of a complete short story within each issue, establishing an average length for the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes as a familiar character across stories with independent plots, a strategy that ensured a loyal readership. Through her close reading of F. Startin Pilleau’s “The Vision of Inverstrathy Castle” (1894), which invited readers to determine its ending, Chan argues that Newnes not only appealed to the tastes of the masses, but also confirmed their education in the short story genre. The Strand privileged the deductive powers associated with detective stories; accordingly, the endings of stories reveal solid truths, and narrators prove reliable, unlike their modernist counterparts. Chapter 2 argues that the Yellow Book, in contrast to the Strand, cultivated an elitist image that “refashioned the short story to construct and underscore the divide between art and commerce” (54). Using Henry James’s unpopularity as a sign of artistic superiority, the periodical published his work and valorized abstruseness and experimentation in the short story. Chan describes the way the physicality of the magazine—including uncut pages, catchwords, a lack of advertising, and no word limits for contributors—emphasized its “artistic aloofness” from commercialism (85), itself a marketing strategy. Her astute reading of editor Henry Harland’s “The Invisible Prince” (1896) argues that the story parodies detective story conventions and “capitalizes on mass culture by critiquing it” (67, emphasis original). Chan also makes a fascinating claim that the Yellow Book in effect democratized exclusivity by suggesting that good taste could be developed in any reader irrespective of social class. However, because Chan offers little evidence of the periodical’s actual readership, this argument seems difficult to assess fully. Chapter 3 focuses on the largely forgotten weekly, Black and White, and argues that its goals ineffectively fused those of the Strand and the Yellow Book. The periodical sought both to solicit mass appeal and to educate its readers in short story aesthetics, resulting in an “anachronistically diverse muddle of appeals” (104). The weekly published relatively little criticism about...

The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives

In this article, I explore the theme of ‘the existential trap’ in relation to Bukowski's short stories. My objective is to illustrate how these traps are inherently spatial. In order to lay the groundwork for my analysis, I begin the paper by considering the specificity of the short story genre as it relates to the representation of place. I then go on to make a geographical reading of three different spatial traps that recur throughout Bukowski's many volumes of short stories.

Crafting Stories, Constructing Selves: Supporting Girls' Development Through Structured Short Story Writing

This study follows 4 eighth grade girls through a 10-week short story unit designed to help develop metacognitive awareness and knowledge about the short story genre. Through interviews, observation, and textual analysis, this article investigates the girls' movement away from a subject orientation (Kegan, 1994), where they had trouble identifying their own goals and beliefs when confronted with multiple competing expectations. Through construction of stories about experiences similar to their own, while simultaneously following their writing and thinking processes, these girls appeared to begin to recognize the need for developing their own beliefs and goals, and figuring out ways to infuse these beliefs and goals into their meaning-making processes when faced with situations where there were multiple competing expectations.

The Theoretical Roots of the Literary avant-garde in 1960s Egypt

This article aims to analyse the 1960s literary avant‐garde in Egypt, drawing various parallels with critical analysis of avant‐garde activity in Europe and the United States. It begins by explaining the use of the term avant‐garde in its generic rather than historically specific sense and its basic social preconditions. It then discusses the role of the journal as an effective medium for avant‐garde experimentation and explores why sixties Egypt saw such a strong avant‐garde assertion, especially in the journal Gallery 68 (Gâlîrî 68). The short story genre—as the hub of sixties experimentation—is the focus of the subsequent analysis in which a selection of broad trends exemplifying the new literary sensibility is sketched out.1 Finally, the article investigates the role of the avant‐garde in relation to the future.

La Nouvelle Héloïse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Pauvre Liza de N. M. Karamzine

Toward the end of the 18th century the Russian writer Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin introduced the artistic movement of sentimentalism and the literary genre of psychological short story. These literary innovations demanded the creation of new artistic formulas capable of expressing the whole complexity of the inner world of a literary hero. Karamzin found these necessary formulas and means in the exalted eloquence and lyricism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s New Heloise. Rousseau’s masterpiece became for Karamzine an important example of the new psychological and sentimental literary aesthetic. However, Karamzine did not remain a simple imitator. In his literary works, he created a real « Russian short story », full of national originality as well as his own innovative methods and artistic individuality. Karamzin’s literary creations profoundly influenced Pushkin and many other great Russian writers of the 19th century.

In the Subjunctive Mood: Carol Shields's 'Dressing up for the Carnival'

Abstract The concept of the carnivalesque is redefined in Carol Shields's recent short story collection, though its traditional promises of celebration, disruption, and excess are nevertheless obliquely fulfilled. Focusing on the title story and 'Dressing Down', this essay argues that Shields's postmodern versions of carnivalesque are written not in the indicative but in the subjunctive mood, signalling openness and unrealized possibilities. Her stories trace subjective patterns of fantasy and desire, and social collectivity is reconstructed through narrative frameworks. Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint, a squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one's self or others, a world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities.[1] Any fiction with 'carnival' in its title promises some kind of challenge to traditional structures of social order and possibly of literary convention, 'dressing up' in anticipation of celebration and festivity, where for a brief space of time dailiness is transcended, split open to allow other more chaotic energies to express themselves. These celebratory gestures may be collective and robustly corporeal as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in his study of Rabelais,[2] or they may be more individualistic and subjective in our own fragmented contemporary world, which Carol Shields calls 'this torn, perplexing century',[3] though in either case resistance to prescribed limits is the promise of the carnivalesque. In her most recent short story collection Shields acknowledges the impulses towards celebration and (modest) abandonment, by writing in what she has described as the 'subjunctive mode', looking at what human beings may do or might have done or would do, which is the territory of 'dreams, possibilities and parallel realities'. In the language of traditional grammar describing the modalities of verbs, 'The indicative presents an event as a fact, whereas the subjunctive expresses it, as for example, a possibility or an aim, or calls it into doubt or denies its reality, or expresses a judgement on it.'[4] By invoking the subjunctive, Shields opens up possibilities for shifts of emphasis, not only cracking open the 'diurnal surfaces' of realism but also writing beyond the 'phantom set of rules about what a story should be and how it must be shaped'.[5] It is the odd association between the carnivalesque and the subjunctive mood that I shall explore in my readings of the two stories framing Shields's most recent collection, 'Dressing Up for the Carnival' (the title story at the beginning) and 'Dressing Down' at the end. Carol Shields is a Canadian writer, an immigrant from the United States, born and brought up in Oak Park Illinois, who met her Canadian husband when on a student exchange to Exeter in the late 1950s and who has lived in Canada ever since (in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg) interspersed with longish visits to Britain and Europe. Since the first British publication in 1990 of her novel Mary Swann,[6] Shields has gained a wide readership this side of the Atlantic. The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, Larry's Party won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1998, and all her fiction (seven novels and three short story collections) are currently available in Britain. Her fictions cross national borders, moving easily between North American and European locations, just as her novels cross generic borders (between fiction, history, biography, and popular romance) and between genders (Happenstance, The Stone Diaries, and Larry's Party). However, it is with her experiments in the short story genre that I am concerned here. Shields has written about how in the early 1980s she broke away from the traditional short story structure, which she describes with a sly hint at its gender affiliations as 'that holy line of rising action that is supposed to lead somewhere important, somewhere inevitable, modelled perhaps on the orgasmic pattern of tumescence followed by detumescence, an endless predictable circle of desire, fulfilment, and quiescence'. …

'Do You See What I'm Saying?': The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver

Abstract Raymond Carver's distrust of explanation and his respect for the mysterious nature of story is firmly grounded in the tradition of short fiction from the cryptic oral folk tale to the perverse formal patterning of Poe and the stylized realism of Chekhov and Hemingway. An understanding of Carver's dependence on pure narrative, from his elliptical early stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? through his more 'generous' stories in Cathedral, provides a context for responding to the common criticism that his characters are inarticulate and insufficiently realized and for mediating the debate about the differences between the stories in his first two collections and those in his last two. The most significant index of Raymond Carver's mastery of the short story genre is his suspicion of exposition and his respect for the mysterious nature of story. Driven by an obsession to tell tales of irrational behaviour populated by characters who reject explanation by insisting, 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please', or by discovering that only story will suffice for 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', Carver situated himself firmly within a tradition of short fiction that originated in the oral tradition and was modernized by Poe's aesthetic patterning in the mid-nineteenth century. His distrust of exposition and veneration of story lies at the heart of the most common criticism of his work -- that his characters are inarticulate and insufficiently realized because they seem unable to explain why they do what they do. It also underlies the frequent critical debate about the difference between the so-called 'minimalist' stories in his first two collections and the 'more generous' stories that began with 'Cathedral'.[1] In what follows, I will try to justify and explain Carver's distrust of explanation, as well as illustrate his uses of story in several of his short fictions, in order to provide some context for the critical reservations about the psychological and linguistic poverty of his first two collections and the supposed superiority of the stories in his last two. Although I run the risk of being labelled a retrograde formalist, I hope to perform this modest critical task by appealing to the formal historical and generic tradition of the short story. In spite of the still current clamour to reduce literature to cultural, social, and political abstractions, I align myself with the 'old-fashioned' view of William H. Gass -- that the writer's fundamental loyalty is to form: 'Every other diddly desire can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day.'[2] The short story is, as Boris Ejxenbaum once reminded us, a 'fundamental, elementary' form that originated in folklore, anecdote, and the oral tale and is thus 'inherently at odds' with the novel.[3] In fact, as Walter Benjamin has noted in his essay on the storyteller, the rise of the novel is one of the primary symptoms of the decline of storytelling, for the novel neither comes from the oral tradition, nor goes into it. Moreover, Benjamin says that another form of communication -- 'information' -- has come to predominate in the modern world that threatens storytelling even more seriously than the novel.[4] Whereas the 'truth' of information derives from an abstracting effort to arrive at a distilled discursive meaning, the truth of story is communicated by a patterned recounting of a concrete experience in such a way that the truth is embodied rather than explained. The story has a compactness that defies psychological analysis, argues Benjamin. In fact, the less psychological shading the story has the more the listener will remember it and tell it to someone else later on. One of the most familiar images of Raymond Carver recalled by his friends and acquaintances is his participation in storytelling exchanges and his wonder at the mystery of story. …

Temporality and Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s attempt to define ‘What’s Canadian about Canadian Literature’ in Survival is a helpful starting point for considering the way the stories in Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), and Wilderness Tips (1992) relate to the short story genre and Canadian literature as broad, limiting categories. Atwood herself recognizes the personal nature of Survival, defining it as ‘a cross between a personal manifesto’ and ‘a political manifesto’ (Survival, 13). She also acknowledges that ‘several though by no means all of the patterns I’ve found myself dealing with here were first brought to my attention by my own work’ (14). As the title suggests, Atwood’s main thesis is that the recurring theme of Canadian literature is survival. Although Atwood identifies different types of survival (such as Canada’s cultural survival despite the influence of the United States), she believes that the most prevalent type of survival in ‘Canlit’ is simply that of ‘hanging on, staying alive’ (33). Survival was a difficult challenge for early settlers, and Atwood certainly seems correct in identifying it as a formative experience for early writers:

'If One Green Bottle...': Audrey Thomas Looks Back on the Cauldron of History

Audrey Thomas's first published short story, 'If One Green Bottle ...' — later to be included in her first book, Ten Green Bottles (1967) — initially appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (June 1965), where it immediately served to announce the arrival of a strikingly original talent. In fact the story, some thirty-five years later, has proven to be seminal to the now considerable body of work by this major Canadian writer. For it is here, in this early work, that one initially glimpses the startling results of her experiments with the short-story genre — experiments that were later to be carried forward into her novels.

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (review)

hUariously on the mark. With her fine sense of humor and insights into human behavior, Prose has created a memorable book. (AKB) Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fictionfrom the African Diaspora Edited by Sheree R. Thomas Warner Books, 2000, 427 pp., $24.95 American sdence fiction (SF) began as a short-story genre. Even now, although it's not uncommon for a new SF writer to debut with a novel, short stories are important, as Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora abundantly Ulustrates. There's much to be celebrated here. A NaIo Hopkinson fan, I immensely enjoyed "Greedy Choke Puppy," a story that shares the Afro-Caribbean reUgious flavor of her novels, and "Ganger (BaU Lightning)," a charged, erotic tale weirdly reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." Derrick BeU's frightening rhetorical masterpiece, "The Space Traders," and Steven Barnes' "The Woman in the WaU," the story of an African American woman and her stepdaughter caught up in "somebody else's war," are equaUy captivating. Though the anthology is mainly composed of contemporary short stories, Tony Medina's "Butta's Backyard Barbecue" and Amiri Baraka's "Rhythm Travel" experiment with forms that are not quite music, not quite poetry. Likewise, the novel excerpts from recent work by Ishmael Reed and AnthonyJoseph and George Shuyler's 1931 satire Black No More give the anthology a breadth and texture it wouldn't have had if only short stories had been included. The Shuyler reprint is one of several early speculative fiction pieces included in the anthology. Charles W. Chesnutt's 1887 tale, "The Goophered Grapevine ," and W. E. B. DuBois' "The Comet" are thrilling precursors to SF as genre. In the most provocative of the five essays included in Dark Matter, Samuel Delaney takes a hard look at "Racism and Science Fiction." His concerns about racial separatism seem to be centered on how that separatism is practiced, consciously and unconsciously, by white writers, yet he seems to be wary as weU of projects such as Dark Matter itseU, that take race as the primary selective mechanism for inclusion. He beUeves that such undertakings are part and parcel of the system of racism. Sheree Thomas states in her introduction to the anthology, "It is my sincere hope that Dark Matter wiU help shed Ught on the SF genre, that it wiU correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field, and that it wiU encourage more talented writers to enter the field." As a white critic and teacher of SF, I think Thomas has admirably "shed Ught on the genre" by making visible an exdting group ofwriters who deserve a much larger readership than many of them have enjoyed so far. (MB)

Power, Otherness, and Gender in the Biblical Short Stories

AbstractThe concern of this article will be with the books of Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Judith, and Tobit. I would argue that we might profitably compare these five books with regard to themes running throughout them. All evidence similarities in how they portray power relationships, alienation and otherness, theology and divine activity, gender categories, and how their protagonists attain ultimate success. Though this set does not represent a collection of works traditionally grouped together in biblical studies,1 find, nonetheless, that these five literary documents evidence ample similarities that we may beneficially consider how they relate to one another. First and most obvious is that each of these books is a free-standing work which is named by a single character, and thus the action is (at least initially) focused around this individual. They are all most likely compositions of the same general time period in Jewish history, during the Second Temple period. All are narrative in structure and brief in length, and might be seen as representatives of a short story genre.2 In all of them we find continuations and reworkings of ideas from the Torah and the Prophets.3 Also, they all function as diaspora narratives; that is, addressing issues that Jews would have been facing in the diaspora. Esther, Daniel, and Tobit are written directly about diaspora situations. Ruth and Judith, though set within in the geographical boundaries of Judah, likewise deal with the question of the relationship between Israelites and other peoples and how to successfully live with other cultures.

Vladimir Nabokov's Short Story "Easter Rain"

Nabokov Studies 4 (1997) SVETLANA POLSKY (Gothenburg) Vladimir Nabokov's Short Story "Easter Rain" Vladimir Nabokov is known mainly as the author of many novels. However, the short story genre occupies an important position in his work. After first appearing in prose as a short story writer during the early twenties, Nabokov continued to write short stories in Russian throughout the thirties. Most of them were first published in emigrant periodicals; die author later included them in three collections: Vozvrashchenie Chorba. Rasskazy i Stikhi ("The Return of Chorb: Short Stories and Poems"), Soglyadataj ("The Eye") and Vesna ν Fial'te ("Spring in Fialta"). All in all, Nabokov wrote about sixty short stories in Russian. The short story "Paskhal'nyy dozhd'" ("Easter Rain") was printed in the Easter edition of the Berlin weekly Russkoe Ekho (The Russian Echo) on April 12, 1925.» This was the first and only time it was published. It was believed that the issue of the weekly with this short story by Nabokov had been lost (Boyd 231). "Easter Rain" also failed to survive in die archives of the author. After a long search, however, I was able to find it in a 1. "Easter Rain" was the last of four short stories published in this now rare weekly. In 1924 Russkoe Ekho published the short stories "Mest'" ["Revenge"], "Kartofel'nyy ElT ["The Potato Elf], and "Udar kryla" ["Wingstroke"]. 152 Nabokov Studies library in the former East Germany, seventy-one years after its publication. The plot of the story concerns an elderly Swiss woman named Josephine, returning to her native Lausanne after 12 years in Russia, where she served as a governess in a Russian family. Although while living in St. Petersburg Josephine had felt alone, out of place, and misunderstood, she now pines for Russia and looks back on her former life with nostalgia. The story begins on the Orthodox Holy Saturday. Josephine, who wants very much to celebrate Orthodox Easter in accordance with Russian tradition, buys a half dozen eggs, ineptly dyes them, and goes to visit a Russian family of her acquaintance with whom she hopes to celebrate the holiday. She believes she is falling ill, however, since she has a strong chül and a cough. The former governess soon realizes that her acquaintances do not want her company and are impatiently waiting for her to leave. She understands that all her efforts have been in vain: the celebrations simply failed to materialize. Back at home her condition worsens. She becomes delirious and the next morning the doctor diagnoses her with pneumonia. For five days she is on the brink of death, but on the sixth day she unexpectedly regains consciousness. Josephine returns from her delirium to this world in a completely new, joyous, and renewed state. The story ends with the laughter of the heroine, who has just regained consciousness. It is immediately apparent that the story "Easter Rain" is built on a contrast, running through the entire text, between two completely dissimilar worlds. One of these is the everyday reality in which the heroine lives. Lausanne, where Josephine is totally alone and unhappy, is presented as a boring little town tiiat is in no way remarkable, with unattractive houses and narrow streets. The description of Lausanne contains numerous nouns with diminutive and pejorative suffixes. Thus, the sun glides along the "roofs of the sloping stone hovels" [domishki] and Josephine now lives in her "native and alien little town Nabokov's Story "Easter Rain" 153 [gorodok], where it is difficult to breathe, where the houses are built haphazardly, side by side, all over the place along the steep, angular little streets [ulochki]."2 Typically, the sun does not linger in this eternally gloomy town. On the day described in tins story, "it was quiet, springlike cloudy, but by evening a heavy icy wind started blowing from the mountains." When Josephine leaves to visit her acquaintances, it is "deserted, damp, and dark" outside. In the evening she walks home "under the noisy, sobbing trees" and sees that the "sky was deep and troubled, the moon was dim and the storm clouds were like a heap of ruins." When our heroine comes around after five...

"We Shall Know Each Other Now": Message and Code in D. H. Lawrences "The Blind Man"

Blind Man has been widely admired as one of D. H. Lawrence's most typical and powerful contributions to the short story genre. If anything, it has been considered too typical, in that its male protagonists represent an excessively stereotyped opposition between Lawrence's famous categories of blood and mental consciousness. Indeed, the main part of the story seems to proclaim the superiority of blood-consciousness, as embodied in its hero, Maurice Pervin. Yet the ending, which Lawrence called queer and ironical,' makes it clear that Maurice has not really prevailed over his equivocal friend and rival Bertie Reid. The story seems first to advance a doctrine, then to give it a practical test, and finally to show it falling victim to its own premises. In this case, at least, Lawrence's philosophy would appear to be a self-consuming one. A major concern of my essay will be to formalize the contradictions of Laurentian dogma in the terms of modern communication theory. This analysis, however, in no way implies that these contradictions are trivial ones, or that there exists any facile solution to them that eluded Lawrence's own powers of intelligence or introspection.

Teaching the Short Story

works from many other genres. The brevity of short stories makes them ideal for class discussion, and readers of all ability levels can finish reading an interesting story within a single class period. Perhaps the most valuable feature of all is simply that the short story allows students to deal, in depth, with a wide range of elements in literature. Yet with all these values, the short story still presents some teaching problems, the most important of which is the difficulty of varying the classroom approach. Too many teachers handle the story as though they were teaching a shortened novel and do little more than engage in formal textual explication. Discussion of the short story text should occur, of course, and students should know something of what the short story genre is. But this does not mean that the activities leading to such understanding need to be routine or repetitive.

Origins of The Companion Library: An Anthology of Medieval Japanese Stories

Around 1700, the Osaka publisher Shibukawa seiemon collected and printed twenty-three medieval short stories and put them on sale labelled Otogi bunko, or The Companion Library. Shibukawa's sales techniques, aimed at selling his anthology to female readers, led later scholars to view these stories anachronistically as women's literature from the Muromachi period. Evidence from medieval diaries, however, makes it clear that these stories were not originally written for women. To date close to five hundred of these largely anonymous stories have emerged to form a substantial medieval genre. Although present scholarship tends to seek authorship of the stories through analysis of social classes depicted in them, it is submitted that the more fruitful approach is rather through analysis of textual origins in pre-Muromachi literary traditions: Heian novel, Kamakura military epic, religious narrative, or oral folktale; and that the most important source proves to be the religious narrative tradition, where textual comparison reveals clearly some Muromachi stories are derivations from such works as Shintō shū. Medieval jongleurs and missionaries such as biwa hōshi, etoki hōshi, and Kumano bikuni played a crucial role in spreading medieval tales, popularizing the picture scroll and book, and contributing to the development of the short story genre.