Short Story Cycle Research Articles

Tourism and Identitary Conflicts in Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue

This paper explores the problematic cross-cultural encounters in Monica Ali’s work Alentejo Blue (2006) set in Mamarrosa, a fictional place in the Portuguese region of the Alentejo. This collection is a composite of nine stories alternately focalised by different characters, posed in an interstitial position between the polyphonic novel and short story cycle. The narrative’s reluctance to fit in genre taxonomies mirrors the heterogeneous nature of the characters’ perspectives, ranging from British expatriates and tourists in Portugal to the locals’ views of these visitors. Such a conflation at a complex cultural crossroads favours no inspiring encounters, but rather fuels feelings of frustration, a profound sense of displacement and a tantalising incapability of solving conflicts. The paper also examines the second story in the collection, which entails the experience of British writer Harry Stanton in the Alentejo as paradigmatic of a subjective projection of the preconceptions and prejudices which most often intervene in a tourist’s construction of place, and which eventually pertain to culturally erected barriers between the self and the Other.

A Patchwork Quilt: Short Story Cycle in Gloria Naylor's the Women of Brewster Place

Gloria Naylor, a celebrated African American novelist, presents in The Women of Brewster Place the struggles and hopes of seven women who choose to live in Brewster Place for some reason or the other. Though of different age and from different background, the women reach out to each other and together find the strength to resist oppression. Through short story cycle, Naylor establishes that however ordinary her life might be, in each woman there is something to admire and something to honour or remember. Its structure is an advantage to the writer to give voice to as many women as she desires. Moving away from the traditional form and linear narrative, Naylor has made use of short story cycle which suits her attempt to retrieve the lost ‘her’ stories and bring to light the experiences unexplored and excluded even by the male black writers.

El orden y el desvío: hibridación genérica en Un día cualquiera de Hebe Uhart

El artículo estudia Un día cualquiera (2015), último libro de cuentos de la escritora argentina Hebe Uhart. Se muestra el carácter híbrido del volumen respecto a su clasificación genérica. Los cuentos de Un día cualquiera mantienen relaciones heterogéneas entre sí. Así, el libro tiene semejanzas con una autobiografía de infancia o con el ciclo de cuentos, pero no equivale exactamente a ninguna de las dos categorías.

Crouching spectres and hidden masters in ‘Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat’ by Russell Banks

Abstract Elaborating on Hemingway’s iceberg metaphor, which encapsulates the implicit dimension of the short story, this article looks at a minimalist story by Russell Banks, which is haunted by the many subtexts floating under the surface of the text. In this article, I show that both the writing and the reading of this elliptic short story are intrinsically haunted by submerged ghost writings, histories, sister stories and discourses, the tips of which briefly surface here and there in Banks’ multi-layered story. A palimpsest haunted by Hemingway’s overbearing influence over the modern short story, Russell Banks’ ‘Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Row Boat’ first limns the shadowy presence of ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ within its narrative strategy, characterization process, dramatic tension and suggestive descriptive technique. Second, Banks’ artful text betrays lingering traces of the history of the United States, perceptible in background Native American vestiges signalling a ghostly presence that has survived dislocation, as well as in the dialogues, gesturing towards the spectral legacy of slavery and Orientalist discourse haunting social relations. Finally, I tackle the embeddedness of the short story into the sequence, exposing how, because of the allographic echoes tying one story to another, the anonymous characters are haunted by their fuller descriptions, names and roles from other stories, whispering their ways into this highly stylized, understated short story, and fleshing out the characters that roam its landscape as mere spectres. I moreover argue that the failure of the American Dream – encapsulated in a metaphor giving the collection its title, Trailerpark – metonymically haunts this narrative and the whole short story cycle. Last but not least, the collection and each story within are furthermore structurally haunted by the ghostly presence of unidentified characters living in one of the trailers, whose blatant obliteration from the diegesis and missing story pose a number of reading problems.

Towards Mosaic Wholeness: Jenifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as a Composite Novel

Jenifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) has raised much debate about its genre. Some critics see the book as a traditional novel, while others see it as a short story collection. Guided by Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris's The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (1995), the aim of the study is to prove that Egan's book belongs to the genre of the 'composite novel'. The composite novel is made up of fragmented individual stories, but they have unifying ties that eventually lead to their narrative wholeness. A close examination of Egan's book reveals how the genre of the book is closely connected to its main thematic concern: achieving narrative wholeness out of fragmented stories through the characters' nostalgia

Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Reviewed by: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Caroline A. Streeter WORDS OF WITNESS: BLACK WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE POST-BROWN ERA, by Angela A. Ards. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 230 pp. $26.95 paper; $26.95 ebook. BRIDGES TO MEMORY: POSTMEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHNIC AMERICAN WOMEN’S FICTION, by Maria Rice Bellamy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 190 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook. At first glance, a study of autobiographical works and an examination of literary fiction might appear to have little in common. However, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era and Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction resist polarizing classifications. Both Angela A. Ards and Maria Rice Bellamy deploy feminist theory and an intersectional methodology. Intersectionality, first articulated by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the template for comprehending subjectivity on the part of women of color, for whom identity is constituted through multiple registers of experience. In Words of Witness, Ards considers a selection of black women’s life stories to construct a chronological counternarrative to the modern civil rights movement. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy theorizes the way inflections of race and gender reconfigure the literature of postmemory. Bellamy’s reading of comparative ethnic literature captures how legacies of racism and imperialism engender repetitive cycles of traumatic memory among women of color. Ards and Bellamy incorporate textual indeterminacy in their analyses. Words of Witness addresses the increasingly ambiguous distinction between autobiography—fact-based documentation by historical actors—and the subjective recollection of memoir. Ards identifies the contested status of some works in her study. She also acknowledges potential influence on the part of publishers seeking to exploit the popularity of confessional writing. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy makes a risky move by historicizing postmemory literature in social movements: “the critical historical moments of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 147). The hazard here entails reifying ethnic fiction as a kind of sociology or exercise in identity politics. The manifestation of political tensions internal to the studies are signposts of intersectional methodology. Ultimately, Words of Witness and Bridges to Memory emphasize multivocal testimony and collective memory as critical agents of transformation. The power of the collective voice is embodied in the structural similarities that link these works, each of which consists of five chapters. Each chapter in Ards features one author and one text. In Bellamy, one among five chapters focuses on two authors [End Page 236] and texts. (Bridges to Memory also ends with a conclusion incorporating a brief discussion of a film.) The phenomenon of overlapping methodologies and concerns is accentuated by the presence of Edwidge Danticat in both books—her memoir in Ards and a short story cycle in Bellamy. Ards calls the production of countercultural memory in black women’s autobiographies “the ethics of self-fashioning” (p. 4). Countercultural memory is powered by the holistic articulation of personal narrative and political discourse. The challenge of balancing the inner life with political activism animates Words of Witness. Ards examines works published between 1994 and 2009—four memoirs and one theatrical production based on an unpublished screenplay. The texts, “in dialogue with particular [political] legacies,” adeptly demonstrate the elisions in the master narrative of the modern civil rights movement (p. 5). Warriors Don’t Cry (1994) is Melba Beals’s harrowing story of her time as one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the group of black teenagers at the center of the 1957 campaign to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock epitomized the intransigence of Jim Crow, demonstrating the unapologetic resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools. Warriors Don’t Cry is the counter history to the continual citation of Brown as the earliest signpost in the triumphant narrative of civil rights. Although Warriors Don’t Cry provides an able template...

„Typy” komiczne szlacheckiej prowincji w cyklu Ostatni z Nieczujów Zygmunta Kaczkowskiego

The paper looks at the comic characters of Polish provincial gentry in Zygmunt Kaczkowski’s six-volume cycle of short stories and novels Ostatni z Nieczuj o w ( The Last of the Nieczujas ), published between 1853 and 1855, but first periodically printed. According to modern researchers and critics of the 19th century Kaczkowski is numbered among the most important 19th-century writers, who included Sarmatic issues in their prose. Attention is paid to the following characters: noblemen who become frenchified and abandoned old Polish tradition, versus conservatists and traditionalists; eccentrics lords and infamous revellers; brave and reckless fellows, who fight duels or live a life of soldiering, poverty-stricken noblemen and cosmopolitan free-thinkers.

From Guest Worker to Cultural Cosmopolitan: Evolving Identities in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Short Story Cycle Der Hof im Spiegel

The title story of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's ‘Der Hof im Spiegel’ has received the most critical attention of any piece from the collection, leading to the neglect of the composition of the collection as a whole. Reading it as a short story cycle and examining the connections between the texts reveals that they track developments in migration and integration from before German unification into the 1990s. Through her narrator Özdamar comments on developments in social initiatives to promote integration and mutual understanding, as well as advocating direct individual contact as the basis for intercultural understanding. She also explores possibilities of identification for those with a diasporic background which look beyond social models such as multiculturalism and transcend national borders and citizenship. In particular, Özdamar explores the potential of an adaptive cultural cosmopolitanism for establishing new lattices of identification as the basis for a re-orientated subjectivity in migration.

Teaching the Short-Story Cycle, Teaching American Literature

This article argues that the short-story cycle should be central to teaching American literature, because the genre crystallizes major tensions of American literary history: marginality and inclusion, the individual and the community, and the formation of a national literature from transnational and local materials.

Eudora Welty and the Short-Story Cycle: A Report on My Research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Eudora Welty and the Short-Story Cycle:A Report on My Research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History Ikuko Takeda As the recipient of the 2015 Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, I stayed in Jackson and researched at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from May 18 to 30, 2015. In this report, I would like to demonstrate how the primary resources at MDAH helped me to elaborate my plans for my project. My dissertation focuses on the short-story cycle as a genre in terms of the historical and cultural context of the American South. A short-story cycle, sometimes referred to as a story sequence or a composite novel, is a collection of short stories in which each story is independent, but simultaneously interrelated to one another. Southern writers have produced many masterpieces of the short-story cycle, including Cane by Jean Toomer, Georgia Boy by Erskine Caldwell, Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, and, of course, The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty, and—if we find the book not merely a collection of stories but a work that should be read as a whole—Welty’s The Wide Net and Other Stories. The reasons each writer has used the form differ, yet we might say the form has been an apt medium with which to represent a complicated, hybrid, southern society. In my dissertation, I will examine the ways in which the short-story cycle has provided a unique generic framework for representing and investigating the complex interplay of contending forces that constitute what we think of as “the South.” The MDAH holdings that helped me to get a fuller sense of Welty’s notion of connected short stories include: Series 1: Uncollected Stories; Series 5: The Golden Apples and Related Works; and Series 29: Correspondence. Series 1: Uncollected Stories includes “The Children” and “Beautiful Ohio,” which become respectively “At The Landing” and “The Winds” in The Wide Net. Studying the ways in which Welty changed the subjects and techniques through these works allowed me to understand how she made the stories in the volume connect to one another. “The Flower and the Rock,” which is included in Series 5: The Golden Apples and Related Works and later published as “Music from Spain,” is very important for my project. Welty wrote “The Flower and the Rock” before she realized its [End Page 159] connection with the other stories that would become The Golden Apples. Comparing these two stories, I tried to articulate what Welty accomplished by adopting the form. Finally, Welty’s letters to her editors and friends collected in Series 29: Correspondence gave me an insight into Welty’s interpretation of the short story, novel, and short-story cycle. Series 1: Uncollected Stories—“The Children” and “Beautiful Ohio” Although The Wide Net and Other Stories is, as its title shows, a collection of short stories, a few scholars have considered the book to be a short-story cycle. Susan V. Donaldson notes, for instance, Welty “suggests in The Wide Net’s sequence of stories the possibility of a new aesthetic of short fiction, one for which questioning, openness, and transformation constitute both subject and technique” (99). As Welty and Russell discussed a “Natchez Trace collection,” they questioned where and how to collect or publish The Robber Bridegroom (Kreyling 62). Since there are many differences between the settings, plots, and characters in “The Children,” an unpublished typescript held by MDAH, and “At The Landing,” it is difficult to tell how Welty changed the former into the latter in order to collect the story in The Wide Net. As Mary Hughes Brookhart and Suzanne Marrs note, however, one of the biggest differences between the two stories is that in “‘At The Landing’ Welty’s use of setting provides an infinitely more complex vision” (89). In “The Children,” the garden, the setting for the story, seems to have no relation to the heroine Nora’s love for Thomas and his disinterest in her. On the other hand, in “At The Landing,” Welty chooses the setting of the story as The Landing, a landing in name only, now that the water...

Postcolonial Trauma Theory in the Contact Zone: The Strategic Representation of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light

This article starts by engaging in a dialogue with the most relevant postcolonial emendations to trauma theory, addressed to both its aporetic and its therapeutic trends, and it goes on to reflect on the state of the decolonizing trauma theory project, critically examining the motivations behind it as well as some of the problems it still encounters, like the risk of objectification and revictimization of postcolonial peoples, the blurring of their trauma particularities, and the appropriation of their experience. Then, it proposes an alternative understanding of postcolonial trauma theory as a contact zone where trauma criticism and the postcolony are interrelated and mutually transformed, and where unequal power relations are also attended to. Acknowledging the postcolony as a site of theory production rather than the object of external definition, it proceeds to analyze Edwidge Danticat’s short story cycle Claire of the Sea Light: its strategic representation of grief—which she achieves through the short story cycle structure and overall in-betweenness and ambivalence in symbols and characterization—puts Haitians on the critical map of trauma, fighting invisibility and oblivion, but it simultaneously resists an appropriation of Haitian experience by rejecting any monolithic view on Haiti and refusing to fit into a predetermined template.

The Making of an Asian American Short-Story Cycle: Don Lee'sYellow: Stories

Don Lee reworked his eight magazine stories to varying degrees, arranged the sequence of the stories in a specific order, and published a short-story cycle in 2001. Significantly, the writer changed the ethnic identity of some characters from white American to Asian American. He also added and highlighted Asian American themes and issues. In short, Lee made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence by coloring his stories yellow. This essay examines Lee's rewriting and arrangement of his magazine stories for an Asian American short-story cycle. It first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.

Man against the elements of nature: from the pages of Aleksandr Kuprin’s works

The topic of this paper is discussed on the basis of two stories, ‘The Bog’ (‘Boloto,’ 1903) and ‘The Black Lightning’ (‘Chernaya molnia,’ 1913), and the short story cycle ‘The Laestrygonians’ (‘Listrigony’, 1911) by an eminent Russian writer of the turn of the 20th century, Aleksandr Kuprin. The stories bring images of the four basic natural elements – earth, fire, water and air. In particular, in ‘The Laestrygonians’ Kuprin shows the power of the sea, combined with the unimaginable force of the wind. The author presents man fighting a one-sided battle with the forces of nature. There are, as well, obvious analogies between the four elements and the elemental aspect of human nature. The stories under analysis not only depict the most important elements of the natural world, but also have particular social overtones.

Staging the Reception of American Ethnic Authors in Women's Popular Magazines:

ABSTRACT: This article investigates how Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club penetrated the mainstream with the help of magazines read by millions of women and teenage girls. Seventeen and Ladies' Home Journal first published two stories from the book that were edited to isolate the relationships between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. This emphasis in turn simplified the stories' representation of Chinese-American families and peer groups, offering a way for the magazines to appeal to their audiences' existing cultural assumptions. The book's title story as edited for Ladies' Home Journal celebrates an adult daughter's renewed interest in her mother's traditions, and the version of “The Rules of the Game” that appeared in Seventeen champions a talented young daughter asserting her independence from her mother. In addition to the reception of these stories in the context of women's magazines, the article considers readers' responses to The Joy Luck Club book—an example of a short story cycle by an ethnic American author. Audiences outside the academy have found it difficult to read across interlinking stories, which limits their level of engagement with the text. The demanding fictional form of Tan's book, much like the truncated magazine versions of the stories, may actually encourage shallow interpretations of the struggles of its ethnic American characters.

Jaume Cabré's Viatge d’hivern and the Short Story Cycle

Critics have been uncertain as to the genre of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré's 2000 book, Viatge d’hivern. The confusion, I argue, is due to the fact that the volume is a short story cycle, a literary form situated midway between the novel and the short story collection. Forrest Ingram differentiates among composed, arranged, and completed cycles, and Cabré's comments in his Epilogue to Viatge d’hivern indicate that the book is an example of the third category. While he composed its fourteen narratives over a period of years, when he revised them for inclusion in a single volume he discovered that various threads, some secret and others more obvious, connected the stories. In this essay I examine ways in which theme, structure, and motifs, as well as recurrent imagery and wording, form a web of associations among the individual units of Viatge d’hivern.

Problems of Steinbeck's Poetics:

Abstract This article highlights Steinbeck's early experiments with form, style, and characterization and explores possible interpretations of his work as modernist. By using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony to determine structural and thematic dimensions in The Pastures of Heaven, this study analyzes the ways in which Steinbeck developed the genre of short-story novel or cycle, expanded the range of depiction of personality types, advocated contemporary changes in moral norms, and brought to light historical conflicts.

Subjective Time and the Challenge of Social Synchronization: Gabrielle Roy’s The Road Past Altamont and Catherine Bush’s Minus Time

This article examines the tensions between subjective time and sociality in Gabrielle Roy’s short story cycle The Road Past Altamont ( La Route D’Altamont , 1966), and Catherine Bush’s novel Minus Time (1993). While the two books examine strikingly different temporal circumstances – francophone settler culture in early twentieth-century Manitoba, and the implications of orbital space travel for a Torontonian family near the end of the twentieth century – both works clarify the relationship between social and subjective time. Through these readings I argue that the desire for various levels of social synchronization is a key factor in reading subjective experiences of time, that certain forms of social tension on the level of the family, the society, and even the ecosphere, can best be understood as forms of desynchronization, and that fleeting moments of partial synchronization are deeply necessary for fostering intimacy and connection between individuals, even while total synchronization remains not only elusive, but in fact impossible by definition.

The logic of life narratives in short fiction

Abstract This article examines the manner in which we impose the logic of short fiction on life narratives, and more broadly, the intertwining of the way that we understand fiction and the way that we understand reality. The subject matter ranges through Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestion that the moral acts are like the creation of works of art through Ian Hacking’s notion of criminals ‘acting under description’ and Richard Sennett’s discussion of the narratives that downsized IBM employees place upon their redundancies. Parallel to this runs the examination of fictional life narratives found in Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried. These disparate elements are united through their reliance on plausibility, agency and event, which are not only features of short fiction but also the very limits of the stories we tell about ourselves.

Rhys matters: new critical perspectives

Foreword Mary Lou Emery Introduction Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson PART I: ALTERNATIVES AND ALTERITIES: MARKET, TIME, LANGUAGE 1. Menu, Memento, Souvenir: Suffering and Social Imagination in Good Morning, Midnight Andrea Zemgulys 2. Clockwork Women: Temporality and Form in Jean Rhys's Interwar Novels Nicole Flynn 3. Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark Ania Spyra PART II: BEING AND BELIEVING: JUDEO-CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES AND IDENTITIES 4. Religion and Rhys Steve Pinkerton 5. Pride, No Name, No Face, No Country: Jewishness and National Identity in Good Morning, Midnight Jess Issacharoff PART III: THE LOCATION OF IDENTITY: WRITING SPACE AND PLACE 6. The Country and the City in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark Regina Martin 7. '...that misty zone which divides life from death': The Concept of the Zombi in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction Melanie Otto 8. Reclaiming the Left Bank: Jean Rhys's 'Topography' in Left Bank and Quartet David Armstrong PART IV: PLEASURE, POWER, HAPPINESS 9.The Trouble with 'Victim': Triangulated Masochism in Jean Rhys's Quartet Jennifer Mitchell 10. The Good Life Will Start Again: Rest, Return, and Remainder in Good Morning, Midnigh t Andrew Kalaidjian 11. The Un-happy Short Story Cycle: Jean Rhys's Sleep it off, Lady Paul Ardoin

Narrating Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat's Short-Story Cycle The Dew Breaker

A short-story cycle consisting of nine interconnected stories, Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004) uncovers and creatively maps a Haitian American world whose traumatic experiences remain lar...