Short-short Story Research Articles

DIFFUSIVE AND LABYRINTH NARRATIVE UNCERTAINTY IN ENGLISH POSTMODERN SHORT-SHORT STORIES

In the article there is grounded the notion of diffusive and labyrinth narrative uncertainty in English postmodern short-short stories. In our investigation, there is proved that the emergence of narrative uncertainty is caused by specific narrative techniques such as diffusion and labyrinth which we identify manifestations of the narrative-rhizomatic principle of text form. Thus, the basis of narrative uncertainty creation is the mixture of a narrative technique (diffusion or labyrinth), compositional modifications and linguo-stylistic devices (irony, lexical repetition, personification). Uncertainty as a transversal postmodern idea is traced in experimental texts through unconventional text building, modified text compositional structure. Narrator of a short-short story creates a narrative with the purpose of establishing a permanent hesitation in the interpreting at each level of text compositional structure. Thus, the emergence of compositional modifications can be observed at content level, formal level, and formal-content level which create a specific symbol at figurative-symbolic level. Compositional modifications at one of the abovementioned levels serve as the principal agent of the specific type of narrative uncertainty creation — diffusive or labyrinth narrative uncertainty. A preliminary analysis of English postmodern short-short stories has shown that compositional modifications at the formal and formal-content levels function as a key forming agent for diffusive narrative uncertainty. As to labyrinth narrative uncertainty, compositional modifications at content level, formal level, and formal-content are dominant. The leading role in the uncertainty formation belongs to narrator. Narrator builds a narrative in such a manner that it becomes complicated to interpret. That fact characterize narrator as unreliable storyteller. Diffusive narrative uncertainty is actualized by means of multiple narrator, whereas labyrinth narrative uncertainty through heterodiegetic narrator in extradiegetic situation. Perception of English postmodern short-short stories with the expressions of narrative uncertainty demands from narratator (reader) flexible mindset, openness to different interpretations and readiness for active usage of cognitive skills.

Unusually Combined Lexemes as Means of Creating Uncertainty in English Postmodern Short-Short Stories

The issue of words combinations draws attention of linguists starting from the second half of the XX c. until the present day. This study is focused on the research of semantic mechanisms of unusually combined lexemes and unexpected collocations in English postmodern short-short stories. Reconsideration of the literary past and ironic view on traditional poetic canons are reflected in postmodern literary texts due to the principles of postmodern poetics. Being distinctive feature of postmodern literature in general, uncertainty creates multiplicity of meanings of entire literary text, as well as separate unexpected collocations, by means of unusually combined lexemes. The aim of the study is to elaborate the phenomenon of valence violation, created by unusually combined lexemes and unexpected collocations in English postmodern short-short stories. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to define the notion of valence and lexeme compatibility, to identify types of valence violation in lexemes combinations, and to provide their possible interpretation. Functioning in English postmodern short-short stories such language units widen boundaries of their usage and their combinatorial profile. Unusually combined lexemes focus the reader’s attention and provoke a cognitive mechanism of continuous searching for a hidden meaning of unexpected collocations and the general message of a literary text. In this research unusually combined lexemes are regarded as special markers of postmodern short-short story genre for which violation of text structure, violation of usual relations between lexemes in logic, semantic and syntactic aspects are quite common.

The influence of Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction on Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s short-short stories

The short-short story was first introduced by Japanese writer Tsuzuki Michio, who in the late 1950s – the early 1960s familiarized the Japanese reader with extra-short stories of American author Fredric W. Brown (1906–1972); his traditions were followed by Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), Akagawa Jirō (b. 1948), and other authors experimenting in the new genre of social and psychological science fiction, as well as in the genre of fantasy and detective stories. In American literature, three major specific features of a short-short story were formulated: 1) a fresh idea, 2) an unexpected turn of events, 3) an unpredictable ending. These specific features can be traced in Japanese extra-short stories as well. Since the process of the emergence and development of the extra-short story as a new form of Japanese literature was influenced by American micro fiction, the research examines the elements borrowed from Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s first short-short stories; this includes genres, topics, canons, artistic styles and devices, as well as the treatment of certain social problems. The paper analyzes Hoshi’s and Akagawa’s short-short fiction from a comparative perspective, with an emphasis on intertextuality – shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, in this case, the texts by an American writer. Some literary parallels to Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction can be found in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s first collection of short-short stories «Bokko-chan» (1971), which consists of stories written in 1958–1970, as well as in Akagawa Jirō’s first collection of short-short stories «The Dancing Man» (1986), which consists of stories written in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The succession of plots and philosophical ideas by Brown is examined on the material of seven early short-shorts by Hoshi, where the allusion to the American writer’s micro fiction can be traced; in addition, it is also noted that, in some mystic extra-short stories by Akagawa, it is not the plots which are borrowed, but mostly artistic devices and various techniques, such as psychologism, black humor, wordplay, and metaphorical images. American origins of the Japanese short-short story are investigated for the first time.

Жанр сверхкороткого рассказа-притчи в японской литературе (на примере произведений Синъити Хоси)

The aim of the research is to determine the most significant features of such a genre variety of the Japanese short-short story as a parable story (using the material of Shinichi Hoshi’s prose). Scientific novelty of the paper lies in the fact that it is the first time that a genre model of parable narration has been identified and described in the corpus of short-short story texts. The research findings indicate that the Japanese parable short-short story has common features that are typologically peculiar to the narrative prose of a low word count as a whole, but it also displays properties that do not correspond to the concept of fantasy literature, to which it is often attributed, and, naturally, it is not related to the novella, with which it is mistakenly associated due to its insignificant word count.

“Forever by Your Side,” Cross-Cultural Understanding, and the Aesthetic Dimension of Life

Abstract What appears irrelevant or negligible to readers of one cultural tradition may be seminal and indispensable to those of another. This article studies a prominent Chinese mode of living—the earnest pursuit of the aesthetic qualities of life—to help bridge the “impasses of noncommunication” in cross-cultural understanding. It constructs the working concept of “the aesthetic dimension of life” from Chinese formative thoughts before it applies the concept to the reading of “Forever by Your Side,” a “short-short story” by a contemporary peasant writer in China. The discussion focuses on how the ethical and the aesthetic are mutually entailing and how aspirations for the aesthetic in life affect human actions in general and ordinary people’s everyday choices and behavior in particular. Approaching the story from Chinese cultural tradition and analyzing it with Chinese conceptual paradigms, this article offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary China in its civilizational context and shows a way to overcome obstacles of cross-cultural communication.

José María Merino: teoría y práctica del microrrelato

El microrrelato ha alcanzado un extraordinario auge en las últimas décadas. Se define por su acusada brevedad y su intensa narratividad, su extrema concentración y economía expresiva sustentadas en la elipsis y el arte de sugerir. Aunque ha habido microrrelatos desde las primeras manifestaciones de la literatura, este cuarto género narrativo nace como tal a partir del Romanticismo y, sobre todo, en el modernismo, alcanza su pleno desarrollo a lo largo del siglo XX, a partir de J. R. Jiménez y R. Gómez de la serna, en españa, y, más aún, en Hispanoamérica, con maestros como Borges, A. monterroso y J. Cortázar; y se consolida como el cuarto género narrativo a finales del XX y comienzos del XXI. José Mª merino es uno de los escritores españoles que más y mejor ha contribuido a la construcción de la teoría del microrrelato y está considerado como uno de los maestros indiscutibles en la creación de minificciones representativas de esta modalidad narrativa. Reunió sus microrrelatos por primera vez en La glorieta de los fugitivos. Minificción completa (2007). A ellos hay que añadir los intercalados después entre los cuentos de El libro de las horas contadas (2011) y los agrupados en la tercera parte de La trama oculta (cuentos de los dos lados con una silva mínima) (2014). The short short-story is flourishing in recent decades. It is defined by its acute brevity and its intense narrativity, its concentrated form and expressive economy underpinned by its elliptical and suggestive nature. Although there have been instances of short short-stories since the beginnings of the literary form, this narrative genre begins to take shapre in the Romantic and modernist periods, and develops fully in the twentieth century, in the writings of J. R. Jiménez and R. Gómez de la serna in spain and, in latin America, in those of Borges, A. monterroso y J. Cortázar. It becomes consolidated as the fourth narrative genre at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. José María Merino is one of the spanish writers who has done most to contribute to the development of the theory of the short short-story and is widely considered one of the best creators of the mini-fictions representative of this narrative mode. His first collection of short short-stories is La glorieta de los fugitivos. Minificción completa (2007), to which he has since added others to be found amongst the short stories of El libro de las horas contadas (2011) and those grouped in the third part of La trama oculta (cuentos de los dos lados con una silva mínima) (2014).

Controlling the clock – how showing and telling impact time in short-short fiction

ABSTRACT‘Show, don't tell’ is a common axiom in creative writing classes but the short-short story form complicates this idea. Often, in micro- and flash fiction it is through telling and implication that showing occurs. Taking that into account, I will argue that in the micro- and flash context, where brevity defines the narrative parameters, the relationship between showing and telling is one connected to pacing and the narrative construction of time. That is, what the author chooses to show and tell often impacts on the representation of temporality. This will be explored critically and creatively via case studies ‘Insect Wisdom’ and ‘Note to Self’.

MASALAH-MASALAH SOSIAL DALAM KUMPULAN CERPEN CEMARA KARYA HAMSAD RANGKUTI

This article aims to describe social problems in the collection of short Cemara by Hamsad Rangkuti. The data in this study are words, phrases, clauses, or sentences that contain the discourse of social problems in the collection of short Cemara by Hamsad Rangkuti. The source of the data in this study is the short-short story in a collection of short Cemara by Hamsad Rangkuti. In this short story collection has 15 titles of short stories, but only 12 short story from which the data in this study. Data that has been entered into the tables collected inventory data to obtain summary data. The results showed that in a collection of short Cemara by Hamsad Rangkuti indeed found the existence of problems that are contained on each short story that became a source of research. Aspects of social issues contained in a collection of short stories this is a form, causes, and the impact of social issues. Causes of social problems in the collection of short stories include the economical factors, biological, cultural, and bio-psychology, but not bio-psychology many factors were discovered. In a few short stories that became a source of research, there is a form of deviant behavior and social inequalities that clearly reflected the author's way of building character stories and figures according to the theme that many raised issues of life in the social community.Keywords: social problems, the collection of short Cemara by Hamsad Rangkuti

Postmodern short-short story as a type of postmodern experimental genre

Postmodern short-short story as a type of postmodern experimental genre

MOROCCAN MINI-FICTION MODEL IN AR-RIHANI'S 'HA’AL-HURRIYAH' ANTHOLOGY (MODEL FIKSI MINI MAROKO DALAM ANTOLOGI 'HA’AL-HURRIYAH' KARYA AR-RIHANI)

The aim of this research was to describe the short-short story (al-qisah al-qasirah jidan) of Morocco in Ha’al-Hurriyah anthology by Muhammad Said ar-Rihani by using structural approach. This approach is selected to show the text objectively. This paper analyzed the short short story using the theory of Rimmon-Kenan naratology and Qalyubi stylistics. It tried to find out how the storytelling models in the short-short stories entitled Haitsuma Kana al-Zulmu Fatsamati Watani and Ghidza’ al-A’mal in the anthology are and how language style are used in both short-short stories. The results of this research show that for storytelling, both short-short stories uses narrative and dialogue technique, each of which lead to the centralization and compaction of the theory. Both short-short stories contain structural aspects of metaphorical repetitions whereas in the imaginary realm, there are characteristics of title selection, the use of majaz (metaphor) and itnab (hyperbole).

A pontuação como recurso de estilo no miniconto Fosso do Som de João Gilberto Noll

Este artigo propõe-se a analisar e descrever o modo como a pontuação normativa da Língua Portuguesa desconfigura-se no miniconto “Fosso do som”, de João Gilberto Noll, de sua obra Mínimos, Múltiplos, Comuns e, por isso, funciona como recurso de estilo que contribui para a estruturação da trama poética da narrativa. Além disso, tendo em vista o desvio desta regra gramatical em questão, será observada a estrutura sintática do texto que resulta em elipses frasais e da própria estrutura do gênero prosa conforme os formalistas russos.

Merging of the Short-Story Genres

Story writing craft evolved through the centuries before rising as a separate genre. Unity is an essential element of short story through which it exhibits singularity of effect, unity of impression, and the totality of interest. After the success of the short story, writers further shortened their narratives and eventually short fiction arose as a sub-category of short story. Short fiction further differentiated into a sub-category called the “sudden fiction” that referred to all shortened forms of short fiction. Having mastered artistic brevity, writers began writing even more condensed narratives, and the sudden fiction differentiated into two types: the new sudden fiction and the flash fiction. The new sudden fiction was akin to the traditional story comprising of up to 1500 words; whereas, the flash fiction was similar to the Hemingway’s classic The Very Short Story consisting of up to 750 words. However, the flash fiction later reconfigured to include all short-short stories comprising of 50-1500 words. This paper briefly overviews the evolution of the short story genre and reviews the delicate merger of the short story with the contemporary short-short story.

The Partial Diary of Elizabeth Budding: 1827

The short-short story “The Partial Diary of Elizabeth Budding: 1827” by writer Tara L. Masih.

“I write short-short stories while I am writing a novel” Interview with Nuala NíChonchúir

Nuala, I will start with a question that has been addressed to you in previous interviews. When I first approached your work it struck me that you have such a wide and diverse literary production. You are prolific, multifaceted and multitalented. You have written poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novels, essays, literary criticism and even a short drama play. Is it easy for you to find a voice in all these literary genres? Do you plan ahead the form that best serves your purposes or does it come to you in a more intuitive and natural manner? Also, which genre is the one you feel most comfortable with? Fiction is my thing, really, but I suppose that if I were given a choice and told that I could only write in one genre, then, I would pick the short story. I love short fiction because it offers a real challenge and every time you sit down to write you are starting a new story, which is difficult in one way but exciting in another. So you come to a story, which is completely different to the last one you wrote, maybe in tone or in character. Everything is new. As a reader, I love stylistic writing and, as a writer, I aim for that as well. I like the writing of John Banville, for instance, he is very attentive to language. As I was saying in my lecture about Edna O'Brien, she talks about language being sacred to her. I feel the same way. I was brought up bilingual. My schooling was all through Irish and my home life was all through English. So I was living between two languages all the time, and I have just always loved language. At the moment, I am finishing my third novel. The second one, The Closet of Savage Mementos, is coming out in April 2014. Now that I am writing the third one, I find the length of the novel very comforting because everyday you have somewhere to start again. You come back to your desk and you are moving forward, whereas with the short story, if you write it in a week or two weeks, or a month, you are starting again very quickly. Both things suit me. I find when I am writing a novel that I do not have time for a longer short story. So, I write short-short stories while I am writing a novel. In a way, they present themselves to me but in another way it is a break from the novel. You just divert your attention. The novel I am writing now is historical, set in America in the 19th century, and concerns an Irish person, Emily Dickinson's maid. So it is really fun to write a modern short-short story to get away from that for a while. I have a short attention span and so it suits me, as you were saying, that I am a multi-genre writer. It suits me to write long fiction, short fiction, poetry sometimes not a lot--and then drama. I have written a collaborative play with some other people. That is really my only foray into drama. I suppose historical novels are difficult to write because you need to know a lot about the context and they involve a lot of research. However, it is a genre that is gaining popularity and that it seems to have been revived in the last years. I think it is very appealing. With Hilary Mantel winning the Booker twice it is certainly a genre gaining interest. I like reading historical fiction. I had attempted one previous historical novel. I wrote most of it and then it just didn't work, so I abandoned it. Then I came up with the story for Miss Emily. Could you advance something about your second novel, which will be published in spring 2014? Is it a historical novel as well? No, it is set in 1991 between Dublin and the Highlands of Scotland. When I finished university I went straight to Scotland to work, just as something to do, and the book is set in the place that I went to, a fishing village in the Highlands. It is enjoyable to write about places that you know and you have lived in. When I finished writing the novel I went back to do some last bits of research, which is something I like to do. In October 2013 I was in Massachusetts to complete research on my third novel while I also did some teaching and gave talks at Bay Path College. …

Two Stories

62 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY photo : paul schirnhofer Two Stories Clemens Setz The Two Corpses Aman stood in front of a small salamander. The salamander was lying motionlessly on a boundary stone in the sun. The man knelt down, took off his straw hat, and eyed the dainty creature from all sides. “He’s lying there completely still,” the man thought. “I wonder if he’s dead . . .” He got up, patted the dust of the country road off his knees, and put his hat back on. “He is wandering restlessly through the world, his head immersed in shadows,” the salamander thought. “I wonder if he’s dead.” On the Conductivity of Monks In 1746 Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet had 700 Carthusian monks stand in a circle in a field and wired them together. The wire led to a Leyden jar, a simple capacitor that generated electricity. The experiment was to test whether the monks would all cry out in pain at the same instant. It was a success, as it had already been once before with 180 soldiers of the National Guard. Nollet was subsequently showered with honors by the king and appointed professor of experimental physics in Paris. Translations from the German By Peter Constantine Clemens Setz (b. 1982, Graz) is one of the foremost young writers in the Germanspeaking world. He was a runner-up for the prestigious German Book Award and has received numerous prizes. Peter Constantine translates literature from many languages, including The Essential Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, forthcoming in 2013. He has received numerous prizes and awards. Q&A with Clemens Setz tr. Peter Constantine Q: Is there a quote you like or think is particularly fitting or relevant to very short fiction, whether by a fiction writer or by someone in a field other than literature, be it the arts, sciences, philosophy , religion, or other area? A: “Just speak your self, that’s riddle enough,” the Sphinx says in the second part of Goethe’s Faust. Q: Do you have a favorite flash story or writer, or favorite book of very short fictions? A: Félix Fénéon, a French writer and journalist. He wrote what he called “Stories in three lines” for Figaro—small, dense spotlights on the inexhaustible strangeness of human interactions. One example: “Madame Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was constantly kept from hanging herself from her window latch. At her wit’s end, she fled across the fields.” Q: What are you reading now? A: Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset—quite the opposite of flash fiction. Q: What does flash fiction offer readers that slow fiction doesn’t? A: The delightfully paradoxical feeling of reading that’s reflected in Hamlet’s words: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Q: Did any of your longer work begin as a shortshort story, or vice versa? A: Yes, it happens quite often. A story only gradually divulges the form it needs to lead a life of its own. ...

Two Stories

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 53 photo : thomas langdon Q&A with Alex Epstein Q: Is there a quote you like or think is particularly fitting or relevant to very short fiction, whether by a fiction writer or by someone in a field other than literature, be it the arts, sciences , philosophy, religion, or other area? A: The very short prayer by D. W. Winnicott: “Oh God, may I be alive when I die.” Q: Do you have a favorite flash story or writer, or favorite book of very short fictions? A: Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Q: What are you reading now? A: The Butterfly Crosses the Road, a collection of poems by Eeva Kilpi, a wonderful Finnish poet. Q: What does flash fiction offer readers that slow fiction doesn’t? A: Longing. Q: Did any of your longer work begin as a short-short story, or vice versa? A: When I start to write a very short story, I always imagine it as a novel. In some parallel universe, there must be a crazy writer who is actually writing those novels. Alex Epstein moved from Leningrad to Israel when he was eight years old, almost a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has since published three novels and four collections of short stories. His collections of short-short fiction, Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time, are available in English. He teaches creative writing in Tel Aviv. Becka Mara McKay is Assistant Professor of translation and creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her first book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, was published in 2010. She has published three translations of fiction from the Hebrew, including Epstein's Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two Stories Alex Epstein You Need to Take These Shoes Home “You need to take these shoes home,” said the old woman. “But your home is here,” said the unshaven man quietly. She turned to him in wonder. “Who decided that?” “You and Mother. Don’t you remember?” She hesitated a moment. She pointed toward the window, at a landscape of hills and a plowed field. “I think it’s over there,” she said. “Put the shoes in a bag and take them home.” More True Superheroes T.tried to commit suicide after every disappointing love affair, but once she managed to stop a taxi in the rain using only the power of thought. She never left home without a copy of Anna Karenina. R. was an old sailor who knew how to draw a perfect circle in the sand of the shore of the Black Sea. He said that during his world travels he arrived in Dar-es-Salaam, where he learned to play chess on a board that was half the size of a regular board, with no more than ten pieces on each side. He further claimed that he remembered every word his wife had ever spoken. U. worked as a museum guard for so many years (he never drank on the job) that in the end he had the power to turn every flower in a vase into an artificial flower. He missed the land where he was born. Translations from the Hebrew By Becka Mara McKay ...

Baku

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 57 photo : anton martin A: I just returned to Denmark after a three-month writing exile in New York. Here I bought Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter, a translation of Sappho’s songs. These fragments are a perfect example on what short prose is able to do: to condense. My favorite poem or my favorite fragment is this; it is only one line: “as long as you want.” In this kind of sentence everything is embedded. I cried in the subway, I have read the book four times, and I am still crying when I read it now. It is a radiant sentence, it contains what was and what will come, and everything that never was, and what you thought you had forever. All in these five words. Marvelous. What more do you need? Q: What are you reading now? A: I am reading On Photography, by Susan Sontag. For inexplicable reasons I’ve never read her, but have always known that this was something I had to read at some point. I am breath-taken by her crystal-clear reflections on art and life. It’s inspiring and challenging to read her. In my books I am interested in images in general: the image as photography, the image as a painting, the picture as a reflective system, as perception—I am very interested in how these different incarnations of the image interact. Q: Did any of your longer work begin as a shortshort story, or vice versa? A: I very seldom think in genres or form—actually , all I write is the same, lyrical prose, you can read it as short stories, maybe even poems, or novels. My second novel, Hallerne, is a little different . Its structure is simpler and is more coherent than my other two novels. With Hallerne I had the sense that it could either be a short novel or an encyclopedic novel. But before I came to this realization I had already written the structure of the novel. From within. Then I kept on adding scenes and images. Like bread in the oven, the novel grew from within; like a bundle of short stories you could say. I think of my novels as independently functioning bodies, and as such you can examine every part individually; you could look at a hand, a knee, an upper lip, all independently , but of course mutually dependent on each other and totally interconnected by a circulation of blood. Baku Sylvia Petter I am an old man. I am invisible, almost as invisible as my sister. My sister lives in the house of her husband near the sea, in the house of his father and his fathers before him. My sister is young, younger than I am, but not too young to have forgotten Black January. For the sake of her daughters, she has screened it out. Her daughters, my nieces, they are our Spring. Lights flash in colours of red, white, blue, green, and her daughters sing words unknown to me: oh oh-uh-oh oh, woki po-po. . . . They sing of love and they hum. They were down by the water bathing in light streams when bulldozer men came to the house. Men with mallets did not see their mother, for, as I said, she was invisible . She did not sing. Nor did she hum. When her husband came home her daughters were still bathing in glowlights and singing strange words. In the rubble, he screamed; a young child called out, “Freedom.” The police came, took the young child away. Him, they left crumpled and broken where once stood the house, that of his father and his fathers before him. On the television, babushki, no longer invisible, sing of parties to cheering crowds. Down in the streets young people sing freedom. Policemen come, lights flash their colours; the police leave the young people alone. I think of my sister. Did they not see her because she did not sing? My nieces are beautiful in red, white, blue, green. I think of their father with no house to live in. Will the colours still flash when the singing stops? I put down the telephone, turn...

The frame within a frame: a short-short story sequence theory in a sequence of short-shorts

The short-short has often made the most of its contemporary surroundings. Content on the Internet in the world of self-publishing, it seems to be the embodiment of a twenty-first-century trend for playfulness; that which embraces technology rather than shying away from it. But this has often given the short-short an air of fleetingness, of transience, and therefore something not to be taken seriously. But the short-short demands and deserves scrutiny; it is a complex form which thrives on possibility, which thrives on questioning boundaries. Those that have dismissed the short-short as it sped past them may have failed to recognize its ability to reflect fragmented twenty-first-century identities, and how it is steadily creeping out of the Internet, out of collections and anthologies, into more manifestations, manipulating the novel to its own ends. This article explores the short-short story sequence in a sequence of short-shorts, demonstrating how fragmented, protean short-short writing reflects marginalized experiences, creating performative texts.

The Secret Hero

The Secret Hero Chris Jackson Black and ugly as everhowever … —Notorious B. I. G. I've been Victor LaValle's editor for two books (with a third in progress), but I first encountered him as a reader and, soon after, a fan of his first book, the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, which was published in 1999. That same year, I worked as editor with the writer Kevin Powell on an anthology of what he dubbed "the new black literature" and we both agreed that Victor should be represented. The anthology was anchored by a number of excellent writers who were already making names for themselves, including Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Paul Beatty, along with a slew of relative unknowns. Victor was part of the slew. Each writer in the anthology wrote their own biographical statement, and given the spirit of the time, almost all of them wrote hard-edged, politically ripe assertions of identity (black, bi-racial, Latino, Muslim, Southern, Northern, Midwestern, etc.), five-sentence memoirs steeped in what reads like almost unseemly self-love in retrospect. Victor's biographical statement was very different from the rest: he submitted as his bio a two-paragraph short-short story about a day in his childhood when he tricked a young girl into picking up a lump of dog shit and delivering it to her mother. When the mother saw the girl standing their with the dog shit in her hand, she "yelled baldly like she didn't recognize her daughter. Shut the door from her girl even as Stavres stood quietly, bearing a gift. And this is why I write. Because it's true I'm the boy laughing in the street, but you're the mother who shut the door. And I love ugly, so I love you" (Powell 462). And I loved Victor. At a time when a lot of young black and immigrant writers were telling stories that, even when harrowing or cautionary, were still mostly about discovering and declaring the uncelebrated beauty in their experiences, Victor was on a different mission: to unearth and embrace the ugly. The work we included in the anthology was "Slave" (which features one of Victor's notoriously pungent first sentences: "Rob eats pussy like a champ"), but my personal favorite story from Slapboxing was "Getting Ugly," a slight, funny story whose depths are slowly revealed. "Getting Ugly" is also an ur-text of Victor's eventual body of work, featuring elements that would thread through everything he's written since: the narrator is, by his own account, ugly. The characters are black, but are perhaps even more strongly defined by class: they're working class, at best, but not particularly vexed about pursuing wealth—they're reading Marine recruitment pamphlets, looking for community college credits and the kinds of jobs where you never [End Page 974] get laid off, the outer-borough American Dream. The portrayal of the characters in the story is as tactile as it is verbal and visual—in Victor's books you never lose track of the bodies of his characters, always rubbing, stroking, patting, and holding each other and the objects around them, as if touch were a truer medium through which to apprehend and anchor yourself to the world than language and appearances. And the dialogue is a rich universe of its own. The story is about two young people flirting and maybe falling in love, but their romance isn't the kind you'd find in a Victorian novel; the banter between them seems casual and dirty and comic but is clearly the work of experts: line-for-line their dialogue is as carefully calibrated in word and rhythm as a sonnet—and as powerful in its effect. "Slapboxing" is a great metaphor for what Victor's prose does in this story and every other: it bats readers around in comic combat, keeps them on their toes (is this real or a game?), playfully moves them this way and that, and then, surprise, a sudden sting that stays with you. And what drives "Getting Ugly" forward—the story barely has any plot at all—is Victor's great theme: the tension...

Análisis pragmático integral de un microcuento de Borges

article presents an integrative pragmatic analysis of Jorge Luis Borges's short-short story The Fortune Teller. Firstly, the analysis offers a hierarchy of eight reading levels, ranging from the most literal or naive to the most interpretative. Then, the theoretical principles of the three main pragmatic approaches -pragmatics of communication (also known as interactional approach, or Palo Alto School), pragmatics of language (Austin, Searle, Grice) and transcendental or universal pragmatics, and discourse ethics (Apel and Habermas)-, are applied to a further interpretation. Finally, an examination of several additional readings that propose analogies and extrapolations to theories and concepts from diverse fields, with an emphasis on those stemming from education sciences, is suggested.