Short Story Cycle Research Articles

The Image of a Snow in the “Childhood” Cycle of Short Stories by V. A. Nikiforov-Volgin

The article examines the semantics of the image of snow — one of the pervasive images of the “Childhood” short story cycle, which opens the first book by V. A. Nikiforov-Volgin “The Birthday Girl Earth.” Snow for the author, as well as for the emigrant poets who left Russia after the 1917 revolution, is a symbol of the lost homeland. At the same time, the analyzed texts of the writer comprise both a mythopoetic tradition of the image of snow, associated with the natural cycle of changing seasons, and a biblical tradition that implies the connotation of sacredness. In the “Childhood” cycle, snow is subject to metamorphoses: it turns into ice, icicles, and water, indicating the coming spring and Easter. The appearance of snow in the cycle of stories is associated with the onset of spiritual spring — Lent. The image of snow is multi-meaningful: if the melting of snow in “Communion” is likened to death, then in the last story “Silver Blizzard” it is used to introduce a revival motif associated with Easter semantics. Easter is the central event of the cycle. Thanks to the image of snow, the last Christmas story is also correlated with the dominant theme of the Resurrection of the Lord. The image of a snowstorm, integrated with the image of snow, appears in the last story of the “Childhood” cycle. The blizzard for V. A. Nikiforov-Volgin is one of the symbols of the Nativity of Christ, endowed with the semantics of joy and festivity. The dynamism of the image of snow in the “Silver Blizzard,” which completes the cycle, emphasizes the meaning of renewal that is embedded in it: Christmas for the writer is the starting point of God’s path in the world to a Bright Resurrection.

Prasanthi Ganapathy Ram. Nine Yard Sarees: A Short Story Cycle. Singapore: Ethos

Prasanthi Ganapathy Ram. Nine Yard Sarees: A Short Story Cycle. Singapore: Ethos

Same Author, Same Stories, Different Unity: A Close Comparative Reading of a Selection of Stories from Raymond Carver's <i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love </i>and <i>Beginners</i>

This essay provides a close comparative reading of three stories from Raymond Carver’s short story cycles Beginners and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A working definition of short story cycles is developed and referenced in the evaluations of these stories—this definition utilizes literary scholar Gerald Lynch’s work on the sub-genre. The close comparative analyses of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, “One More Thing”, and “Gazebo” reveal that both collections meet the criteria of short story cycles, however, Beginners has a stronger unity that achieved through its shared themes. This supports the argument that Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, exchanged Carver’s unity of theme in Beginners for a weaker unity of style in What We Talk About.

‘Sarahland would trick me into thinking it was the entire world’: Sam Cohen’s short story cycle as queer ecology

This article proposes that in Sarahland (2021), Sam Cohen makes of the short story cycle form a productive arena in which to explore queer ecological concerns. Reading with queer ecocritic Nicole Seymour, it argues that the early stories frame heteronormativity as an ecology of harm whilst also exploring the difficulties of using critical theory to create more caring, queerer alternatives. The later stories, in making their environmentalist concerns more explicit, go further in articulating a queer ecological consciousness. The discussion focuses on how Cohen creates a dense ecology of affective, narrative and symbolic connections between the component stories. It suggests that the short story cycle is a form rich with possibility for exploring questions of queer futurity, ecology and belonging.

Translations of portrait characteristics of the heroes of V.G. Korolenko's Siberian short stories into the Yakut language

The object of the study is the Siberian stories of V.G. Korolenko. The subject of the study is the portrait characteristics of the heroes of V.G. Korolenko's Siberian short stories. The material for the study was the portrait characteristics of the heroes of V.G. Korolenko's Siberian short stories translated by N.E. Mordinov-Amma Achchygyya. His stories are rich material for research, since in them the portrait characteristics of the characters are presented very figuratively, using various expressive means (metaphors, comparisons, personifications, metonymies, hyperboles). The short stories "Makar's Dream", "Marusina Zaimka", "At-Davan" from the Yakut cycle of Siberian short stories were chosen for the study. The theoretical basis for the research is the works of G.N. Pospelov, A.B. Esin, L.S. Kulik, O.I. Ivanova, K.I. Platonova, I.S. Yemelyanov and others. The purpose of this work is to identify the features of the translation of portrait characteristics in the translation of Korolenko's literary texts from Russian into Yakut. The purpose of the work identified the following tasks: 1) to analyze the concept of "portrait characteristics"; 2) to make a solid selection of portrait characteristics from Siberian stories; 3) to consider the features of the translation of portrait characteristics when translated into the Yakut language. Descriptive and comparative methods were used to solve the research tasks. The material was collected using a continuous sampling method. The relevance of this study is due to the lack of scientific works in Yakut literary studies on the comprehensive study of portrait characteristics when translated into the Yakut language. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that in modern literary criticism, the transfer of portrait characteristics in the translation of literary texts remains still unexplored. The theoretical significance of the study lies in the fact that it reveals for the first time the features of portrait characteristics when translated into the Yakut language. The practical significance of the research lies in the possibility of using its results in the analysis of other similar works and their translations. Also, the research materials can be used in universities of the humanities in the creation of textbooks, textbooks on translation practice for students of the philological department.

Minority, collectivity, and the short story cycle. Identity and difference in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late

This essay expands the politics of minor literature that, in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rests on the identification between the individual and the collective, by drawing on the affordances of the genre of the short story cycle. While highlighting the relational dynamics between the minor and the major that underlies Deleuze and Guattari's account, I show how a focus on genre offers the critical tools to articulate the enclosure of community with the pluralities of subjective belonging. The short story (cycle) has often been considered to have close affinities with minor literature due to its fairly low reputation, its interest in marginal characters, and its typical narratives of community. The essay complicates this equation through a discussion of Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late (2019), a series of interconnected stories illuminating the shared struggles of a group of Nigerian migrants in Belgium. While the cycle as a whole conveys a sense of belonging in which linguistic difference provides the very ground of group formation, the individual stories reveal the gaps within the collective and illustrate the ways in which identity and migration are affected by divergent intersectional subject positions marked by class and gender. By examining how political and aesthetic concerns go hand in hand in Unigwe’s short story cycle, the essay argues that minorities’ political struggles for emancipation do not necessarily require internal cohesion, but can also be enhanced through social diversification and multiple literary practices that shift with new contexts of linguistic production and global circulation.

Introduction: the aesthetic agency of minor literature

This introductory essay traces a genealogy of the notion of the minor in critical theories of the past four decades to then articulate the notion’s aesthetic dimension. Foregrounding that dimension, we argue, offers a powerful analytical tool for fostering a dialogue between world literature and postcolonial studies. Through a critical survey of the important work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, Pascale Casanova, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, as well as David Damrosch and Bergur Rønne Moberg, we contend that these theoretical formulations of the minor have rarely lived up to their methodological promise to articulate creativity, change, and solidarity in ways that are in the final instance not determined by vertical opposition to the major or by an overly restrictive account of aesthetic agency. Going back to the work of Kafka that is so central to Casanova’s and to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the minor, we retrieve the figure of Odradek and propose to read it as instantiating a self-reflexive aesthetic intervention that configures its own relation to political constraints. This insistence on aesthetic agency, we submit, challenges and complements both Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking philosophical and political account of the minor and world literature’s focus on circulation and postcolonial studies’ emphasis on sociohistorical contexts. The introductory essay concludes by presenting the six essays that make up the special issue, and emphasizes the ways in which these essays’ attention to the formal and imaginative devices of the minor pluralize the notion by articulating not only minor literatures and languages, but also literary figures (children, women, sisters, queer men), genres (short story cycles, flash fiction, buried laments), and literary practices (indirect translation, diasporic publication, rewriting, adaptation) in ways that capitalize on the aesthetic agency of the minor.

Фольклорная символика рассказа И. Бунина «Ворон»

The article is devoted to a poetical analysis of Ivan Bunin’s short story “The Raven” (1944), which is a part of the cycle of short stories about love “Dark Alleys”. The research is undertaken in order to comprehend the role of folklore in the formation of the poetic world of Bunin’s love story, to identify the emotional and aesthetic perspectives of the images, motifs, and the central conflict of the short story, which is contextually conditioned and mediated by folklore symbols. The research is novel in that it is the first to analyze in detail the short story “The Raven”, its character system (images of the father, the son, the daughter, Elena Nikolaevna) and to identify the most important folklore components of the central conflict of the story (a love conflict). As a result, it is shown that the active involvement of folklore symbols (the folklorized concept “The Raven”, a color palette of folklore), which were close and understandable to the Parisian community of Russian emigrants, allowed Bunin (who adhered to national traditions, including folklore ones) to bring additional poetic intentions into the text of the shott story, imbued with imagery familiar from childhood and bright fairy-tale emotionality, to bring the perception of the text created in exile closer to the nostalgic memory of the abandoned homeland of Russia.

Национальный мир глазами ребёнка в прозе И.Э. Бабеля

Attempts to reproduce the lost world of national tradition arose in the works of many authors of the first third of the 20 century as a consequence of the collapse of traditional culture, a process typologically similar for both Russian and Jewish civilizations. The desire to recreate the world of the past is also one of the characteristic features of I.E. Babel's prose. Having described the collapse of the national world in “Red Cavalry”, I.E. Babel reconstructs it not only in “Odessa Stories”, but also in an unfinished cycle of short stories about childhood. The main character and, concurrently, “the narrator” of this book is a child. However, the connection between him and the adult narrator is not as strong as in the autobiographical prose of most I.E. Babel’s contemporaries (representatives of both Russian and Jewish literature). The adult narrator doesn’t dream of escaping the reality, he has no desire to return to prerevolutionary Odessa; on the contrary, he dreams of growing up as soon as possible and gaining strength sufficient to prevent the collapse of the national world, to repel the rioters, even at the cost of his own life. The ideal in the prose of I.E. Babel is not the past, but the future, in which his hero will get stronger and be able to create a “brave new world”, “The International of good people”.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Influence on Adrian Tomine’s Short-Story Cycle Killing and Dying

ABSTRACT Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying (2015) is one of the most celebrated graphic novels of the twenty-first century—although that genre designation is misleading inasmuch as the book is actually a short-story cycle composed of six seemingly autonomous short stories linked together by shared topics and motifs. This essay examines how Tomine achieves overall narrative unity despite the individual stories’ heterogeneous settings, plots, and characters. In particular, this analysis examines how Tomine employs the theme of “striving and failing” to link the texts: each entry is united by a character’s need to connect, to be seen, to be understood. Protagonists suffer from worries and fears they are unable to articulate, their anxieties rarely fully framed on the page. Additionally, this reading of Killing and Dying explores how Tomine sublimates the influence of 1960s manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi (1935–2015), whose work Tomine helped bring to English-speaking audiences after decades of neglect, in organizing the cycle.

Hawthorne and the Problem of Immigrant Fiction in Jhumpa Lahiri's Hema and Kaushik

ABSTRACT: This article considers Jhumpa Lahiri's exploration of the tensions that manifest within the category of immigrant fiction through a reading of Hema and Kaushik , a short story cycle that functions as a hybrid parody of the form and content of two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works: The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun . It argues that Lahiri challenges reductive conceptualizations of immigrant identity while spotlighting key differences between Hawthorne's fictionalized Anglo-Saxon immigrants and her fictionalized South Asian ones. She tacitly comments on Hawthorne's politics and on the politics of art and literature as lenses into the South Asian immigrant experience in what Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù characterize as Anglo-nostalgic times. Ultimately, Lahiri mourns her fictionalized immigrants' disempowerment while inviting her readers to persevere where her protagonists fail: through furthering conversations about the politics of immigrant identity, hybridity in its different forms, and Anglo-nostalgic impulses that threaten to subvert the agency of hybrid and marginalized individuals in and beyond the United States.

Conflicts and Crises, Dialogues and (Dis-)Connections: Renegotiations of Identities through Irish Narratives of Community

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the condition of glocality was rendered highly visible by the 2008 world financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic in Ireland, as elsewhere. Moreover, glocality can impact on such forms of identity as that of nationality, either with an exclusionary impetus or effecting the recognition of shared experiences. This article examines how the community, as a spatiotemporal concept, serves as a means of exploring renegotiations of identity and modes of interdependence in a glocal world. Discussing short fiction by Roddy Doyle and Emma Donoghue, published against the background of changing cultural narratives of Irishness during the Celtic Tiger period, I argue that short story cycles function as multi-layered reflections and interventions that place Irish identities in dialogue with other affiliations, but also with Irish history. Such a critical discussion renders visible the potential in literary fiction for coming to terms with conflicts that are rooted in essentialist understandings of identity and for opening up possibilities for renegotiations in light of local and global interrelations. When Doyle’s and Donoghue’s stories reflect upon and criticise exclusionary tendencies, they further the recognition of shared experiences despite cultural difference within a glocal world. Thereby, they interrupt the perpetuation of simplifying identity discourses based on notions of alterity and exceptionalism, contribute to identity renegotiation, and invite the possibility for building communities during times of continuous crisis.

Specificity of Comedy in Contemporary Kazakh Prose (E. Tursunov’s Short Story Cycle)

The relevance of this article lies in the need to construct a comprehensive history of the development of comedy in contemporary Kazakhstani literature, of which the works of Ermek Tursunov are an integral part. The author explores various approaches to the study of irony, satire, and humor, including philosophical (G. Hegel, F. Schlegel), cultural (A. Bergson, B. Dzemidok, M. M. Bakhtin, D. S. Likhachev, Y. Borev, A. M. Panchenko, N. V. Ponyrko, V. Ya. Karasev), and philological (V. Tyupa, V. Propp, M. Yu. Asanina, I. A. Obukhova, S. A. Dubrovskaya). The scientific novelty lies in the fact that Tursunov’s stories are analyzed for the first time in the declared aspect. The research has established that, firstly, irony becomes an important means of comedy in Tursunov’s collection of stories “Karashanyrak”. Secondly, non-direct speech ironically exposes the hero’s surrounding world (“How Kazakhs believed in omens”). Thirdly, there is an orientation towards Chekhov’s humorous tradition (“How Kazakhs received guests”, “How brides became wives”). Fourthly, the writer’s humor relies on national Kazakhstani traditions of comedy embodied in folklore (“How Kazakhs organized noisy performances”). Finally, one of the ways of constructing a comedic plot in Tursunov’s stories is through the synthesis of an anecdote with elements of satire. This study offers new insights into the role of comedy in contemporary Kazakhstani literature and contributes to the broader understanding of humor as a literary device.

Сreative potential of metaphor in the cycle of stories by Hryhor Tiutiunnyk «Steppe Tale»

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of metaphors in Hryhor Tiutiunnyk’s short story cycle «Steppe Tale». The classification of metaphors is considered according to the partial language affiliation, the way of formation and existence and the structure.
 It was established that from the point of view of partial linguistic affiliation, verbal and adverbial metaphors are most often used. Adjective metaphors are used less often, noun metaphors are also not marked by frequency of use. Adverbial metaphors mostly complement verbal metaphors. Such an interaction between two types of metaphors is evidence that metaphor should be considered as a phenomenon of syntactic semantics, which makes it possible to trace the formation of metaphorical meaning within the context due to the successful combination of words.
 According to the method of formation and existence, fixed, individually authored and conceptual metaphors function. Metaphors form a content integrity, and the combination of their meanings actualizes the figurative and associative plan.
 From the point of view of structure, simple metaphors prevail, but complex ones are not inferior to them quantitatively. A simple metaphor is based on a simple comparison, i.e., the convergence of images is based on one feature. A complex metaphor describes a concept using a combination of images or primary metaphors.
 A detailed metaphor deserves special attention, in which the carrier of the metaphorical image is a whole complex of associatively connected words. The text-creative role of the developed metaphor is most noticeable primarily in the linguistic design of the text, in its semantic expansion and in the realization of the pragmatic task of the text.
 Peculiarities of the use of metaphors and their pictorial and expressive possibilities were also studied.
 To achieve the goal and solve the tasks, the following methods were used: the method of analyzing scientific and theoretical sources, the method of contextual analysis, and the method of continuous sampling.

Lutheranism in the Contemporary American Short Story

ABSTRACT In Bobcat and Other Stories (2013) and Dog Run Moon (2016), Rebecca Lee and Callan Wink each offer their interpretation of the short-story cycle. The two collections exhibit obvious differences in setting and style of narration but reveal a striking parallel: both collections are inspired by Christian, specifically Lutheran, motifs and allusions. In a discussion of regionalism, the Scandinavian Midwest, and themes such as coming of age, historical political events, and the psychology of relationships are all important, but the deeper structure is best perceived in light of biblical precept. The key to understanding this dimension in these stories are references to Lutheran core passages in the New Testament (printed in bold in the Lutheran Bible) and ideas of Lutheran education.

The Upended Pastoral in Welty's The Golden Apples

Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples exemplifies the upended pastoral through subversive symbolism of natural elements and uses dynamic natural settings to reveal individual characters' resistance to oppressive community ideologies and awareness of the often-inescapable nature of those ideologies. Two natural elements that figure strongly in The Golden Apples are bodies of water and trees. Through the short story cycle, Welty manipulates the traditional trope of water as purifying and epiphanic. Instead, bodies of water frequently highlight class divisions and represent the impossibility of being part of the community once ejected from it. Often sites of death, near death, and faked death, Welty's bodies of water are deceptively placid but are portals to dissolved relationships. Additionally, The Golden Apples' woods and trees are settings for Morgana's boys and men to behave in aggressively masculine ways. These locations portray masculine performance as comical and expose male characters' insecurities about their reputations. For Morgana's women, trees are associated with sorrow, anger, resignation, unachieved dreams, and barriers that exist between the individual and the community.

Rubik, the Short Story Cycle, and the Digital Age

In the 21st century, the demands of digital presence and the distractions of the internet simultaneously challenge writers wishing to represent contemporary life and threaten the attention readers are willing to give to literature. In this paper I argue that the short story cycle is a literary form that is capable of representing digital life and does so in a way that extends and expands the way that we read. I take Elizabeth Tan’s 2017 book Rubik as my case study and my analysis focuses on the way Tan uses two key features of the short story cycle form to represent and simulate life in the digital age. I begin with a discussion of how Tan uses the multiplicity of the cycle form to demonstrate the polymediation of life in the developed world and that the use of discrete, separate stories in the cycle allows for switches in voice and style which not only simulates the polyphony of digital life but also encourages us to contrast the different ways individuals use mobile technology to manage their lives. Following this, I demonstrate how Tan uses the connectedness of the cycle form to create hyperreal nested narratives in Rubik, highlighting the blurring of the boundaries between online and offline, between reality and simulation, and in doing so encourages active participation from the reader.

Русалочий мир «Руси» (сказочно-мифологические мотивы и образы рассказа И. Бунина)

The paper is devoted to analysing the figurative and motivic series of Ivan Bunin’s short story “Rusya” (1940), which was included in the cycle of short stories about love “Dark Alleys”. The research aims to comprehend the role of Russian folklore in the formation of the poetic world of Bunin’s text. The authors of the paper identify the main dominants of the literary world of Bunin’s short story, differentiate the existential spaces of the acting characters, trace the trends in the embodiment of the poetic space of a female character based on Russian folklore and ancient Slavic mythology. In particular, the authors consider the character system of the short story and evaluate the axiological coordinates of the main characters through it. The research is novel in that it is the first to focus on two endings of Bunin’s short story, which have not previously attracted the attention of critics, to represent in detail the folkloristic components of the image of the main female character. It is the first time that the researchers do not associate Rusya’s image with Russia, but correlate her “swamp” world with the mentifact of a mermaid. As a result, it has been proved that the nature of the unusual female character and the poetic world of Bunin’s short story as a whole is largely connected not with the Russian origin of the female character, but with her “mermaid” (and partly Eastern) origin.

Nazwy osobowe w opowiadaniach Agnieszki Zimnowodzkiej jako tekstowy komponent dziecięcej konceptualizacji świata

The subject of the article is a selection of personal names excerpted from „Humorki” ( Little Humours ) – a cycle of short stories by Agnieszka Zimnowodzka, which constitute, in the author’s opinion, an important component of a literary communication that reproduces children’s conceptualization of the world. Their specificity, mechanisms of creation and motives for selection were determined by: the addressee’s age, the author’s creative intention, the applied genre and stylistic convention, the functions attributed to namesand subordinated to text pragmatics. The collected set of names was interpreted in the motivational-communicative platform as text and as semiotic and semantic structures. An analysis of the collected anthroponyms revealed a few creative tendencies typical of the writer’s creative workshop. By creating proper names with appellative bases pointing to the characters’ qualities, she follows children’s conceptualization of the world based on trying to experiment with the language. Therefore, the names have a form of naming neologisms derived by means of word building. In the acts of creating proper names, the author applies some particular naming models, within which the names created in series can be indicated. The writer brings together personal names and other onymic categories which complete their meanings and maximise the power of the message, making use of both verbal and situational humour.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide: Dismantling the Trauma Paradigm

ABSTRACT This article argues that David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008) offers us a culturally significant exploration of hegemonic theories around how we understand, or are said to understand, the temporality of trauma, its effect upon identity via its effect upon memory, and its representation in narrative. Moreover, the specific structure of Vann’s text as a short story cycle enables it to present, query and disrupt ways of thinking about chronology, narrative, and identity, such that it offers a productive modeling of the complications inherent in adhering to exclusionary and prescriptive ideas about how trauma might be narrated.