Short Stories Research Articles

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Word ‘Ghost’ in the Collection of Kenyah Stories

To illustrate the concept of ghosts, this research aimed to explain how they were described in Òma Lóngh and Lebu’ Kulit language, the collection of Dayak Kenyah short stories. This research employed a descriptive qualitative method based on figurative language personification theory. Data analysis is conducted using corpus analysis with the  AntConc application. This research concluded that there are four categories that employ personification in relation to the term 'ghost' namely the ghosts act like human, the ghosts being described as dying like humans, ghosts can transform into other forms and ghosts being described as animals. The use of personification in these stories allows readers to relate to and believe in the ghost, enhancing the drama and suspense of the story. The ghosts in this research were only described using personification. Further research might investigate ghosts through different theories to see how their appearance can contribute to certain meanings in the stories.

Companion Plant Reading

Combining Donna Haraway’s call to acknowledge non-human significant others in her Companion Species Manifesto with the ‘biocentric form of literary criticism’11 Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. advocated by critical plant studies, this essay uses the agricultural practice of companion planting as a Framework for reading beyond the canon of anglicised world literature. I analyse three short stories – Sofie Isager Ahl’s ‘Naboplanter’ (‘Companion Plants’, 2018), Can Xue’s ‘鸡仔的心愿’ (‘Chick’s Heart’s Desire’, 2020) and Audrey R. Hollis’ ‘Seedlings’ (2018) – that translate between the botanical and the human realms and use vegetal voices to challenge gendered social conventions, linguistic preconceptions and lingering anthropocentrism. By planting together texts in Chinese, Danish and English intermingled with the idiom of plants, I propose messy, multimodal and multilingual translation as a fundamental figuration in our pursuit of a planetary approach to comparative literature.

Kipling's Manboys and Boymen: Masculinity as Child's Play

This thesis delves into the representation of boys and masculinity in Rudyard Kipling’s fiction through the lens of creative criticism. Using the methodology of a thought experiment,  the study meditates on whether male characters in Kipling’s nineteenth-century short stories are able to render a mature masculine identity, or whether they exist in a state of half-becoming, as ‘manboys’. The central contention posits that Kipling’s works are devoid of a definitive ‘man’ archetype; instead, they portray characters at varying stages of boyhood, shaping masculinity through skilful engagement in childlike play.
 The analysis revolves around select short stories including “The Last of the Stories”, “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”, “The Cry of Blood”, “The Mark of the Beast”, “The Man Who Would be King”, “The Story of Muhammed Din”, “Without Benefit of the Clergy”, “Beyond the Pale" and “All the Mowgli Stories”.
 Central interpretations in the iconic Raj narratives includes an exposure of the fragility and domestic instability of expatriate culture’s dynamics, behaviours, and institutions. “The Man Who Would Be King” is read as an adventure undertaken by schoolboys. In “Without Benefit of the Clergy” and “Beyond the Pale", this playful masculine existence is intertwined with the awkward problem of first love. Moving between short stories, the study keeps a steady eye on the character of Mowgli from “The Jungle Books”, drawing comparing his development to that of other characters.
 Navigating Kipling’s literary terrain has traditionally been a challenging endeavour within academia. However, this piece attends to the complexities of Kipling’s expansive imaginative realm. By redefining masculinity through the lens of playful mastery, this study intends a nuanced interpretation of several of his male characters, contributing to broader critical conversations surrounding gender, coloniality, childhood and psychoanalytic approaches to Literature.

Power and love versus death: “Death Constant Beyond Love” by Gabriel García Márquez

This article analyses the philosophy and literary aesthetics of Gabriel García Márquez’s political satire with reference to his short story, “Death Constant beyond Love.” The analysis is based on the author’s views concerning the common personality traits, actions and ends of tyrannical rulers made manifest in the main character of the story – Senator Onesimo Sanchez. It is observed that the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius’ meditations on the transience of existence, and the mortality of man serve as the backdrop to the power-drunk Senator’s vain attempts to keep exercising his tyranny despite his awareness of his looming death. The story’s central theme is that misused political power – no matter how wide its scope – is limited by man’s transient corporeal existence, or by death, to put it more simply. The author’s reflections upon dishonest politicians as fictionalized in the Senator display how corruption defiles each individual in society. The discussion on the nature and ramifications of man’s boundless ambition for power also draws on Nietzsche’s will to power/will to life equation, and Foucault’s views on resistance-freedom/power proposition.

Unearthing the Diasporic bhadramahila in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

This study aims to examine the influence of the bhadramahila construct both in the Bengal colonial context and its reproduction in the imaginary of the Indian American family dynamics. The works under discussion are:  Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story anthology Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Desirable Daughters (2002). Both  give evidence to the academic discussions on the position of the bhadralok and bhadramahila in Bengal (India) during colonial times, a rare topic in both Lahiri’s and Mukherjee’s stories. The article puts into perspective the making of the “New Woman” in Bengal in the nineteenth century, then moves to the literary section where it analyses how female characters reproduce their cultural baggage in a hybrid setting and deal with inner conflicts, hence inaugurating the figure of the diasporic bhadramahila in the context of the United States.

Beyond the Myth of Chinese Ideograms

Published in The New Yorker in May 2016, Ted Chiang’s short piece “Bad Character” has raised fervent debates on the linguistic properties of the Chinese writing system, as well as on the peculiar, if not perplexing, nature of the language itself. The mixed responses among scholars, from both the East and the West, towards Ted Chiang’s position against Chinese characters reflect the underlying entanglement of disparate discourses, including the universal language, orientalization/self-orientalization, language reform, Asian-American struggles, Chinese exceptionalism, and most importantly, the entrenched myth of Chinese ideograms. By situating Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” (1998) in the midst of the debate, this paper explores not only how Chiang broaches Chinese’s linguistic otherness through the science-fictional trope of alien communication, but also how the author dismantles the discursive baggage of Chinese ideograms by shifting toward technical description of linguistic details. Reading “Story” in joint with Liu Cixin’s seminal Three Body trilogy (2008–10) and a more recent work “Curse” (2015) by Chen Zijun, this paper further contends that a new trend can be discerned that seeks to depart from previous exploitations of Chinese’s otherness through orientalizing gestures and essentialist representations. Unlike their predecessors who either valorize or degrade the non-phonetic alien language allusive to allegedly ideographic Chinese, these authors refrain from setting up a hierarchy between human languages and their alien counterparts, channeling the utopian impulse of sf into treating language as a technical object that is perfectible through constant refinement of its linguistic configurations. The end product of these discursive efforts is a notion of linguistic utopianism, which not only harkens back to the generic affinity of sf to utopia as well as to the long-lived, ubiquitous quest for a perfect language, but also envisions a new ethics of alien communication through explicating the distinct technicality of each language for a non-hierarchical paradigm.

Landscapes, Women, and Art in A. S. Byatt’s “Crocodile Tears” and “A Stone Woman”

ABSTRACT This article examines the fascinating yet intricate relationships between women, art, and landscapes in A. S. Byatt’s two short stories, “Crocodile Tears” and “A Stone Woman”. By engaging in intertextual studies of two Renaissance texts and Byatt’s two short stories, this article aims to re-interpret the ambiguities at the core of these short stories and highlight authorial tones which are otherwise misread. In “Crocodile Tears”, Patricia reconsiders her relationship with her husband within the framework of Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. Her failure to imitate Cleopatra signifies her moral ineptitude and emotional apathy. Ines in “A Stone Woman” becomes a cogent symbol of the Icelandic landscape, whose prototype is Spenser’s Dame Nature, personified nature, goddess of fertility, a monster, a beauty, and a union of opposites. Her precarious conditions at the end of this story suggest a recurrent motif that runs through Byatt’s entire oeuvre: Ars longa, vita brevis.

Egzistencializmas literatūriniuose vaizdiniuose V. Pidmohylny’o ir M. Yatskivo novelėse

This article analyses little-known short stories of modern Ukrainian writers Valerian Pidmohylny and Mykhailo Yatskiv in the context of the 20th century existentialism. It can be considered as a cultural phenomenon which combines philosophy with literature. Pidmohylny’s short stories were significantly influenced primarily by the ideas of the European philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, we can search for similar motives in the works of Pidmohylny and the existentialists, which developed under the influence of the ideas of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Also, the authors consider Yatskiv’s short stories through the prism of the core concepts of existentialism, namely, fate and death. Pidmohylny and Yatskiv can be assigned to existential writers on the basis of retrospective analysis of the themes of their short stories and the thematic areas of 20th century existentialism.

‘All Day, All Night the Body Intervenes’: Representation of Friday in Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Foe by J. M. Coetzee and ‘Wyspa’ by Olga Tokarczuk

This article explores representations of Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), J.M Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986) and Olga Tokarczuk’s short story ‘Wyspa’ [‘The Island’] (2001). In all three works, Friday is mediated and filtered by the process of narration. This article demonstrates how the narrator(s)’s understanding of corporeality affects the representation of the companion, from a source of useful manpower to a silent reservoir of stories, to a trigger which necessitates crossing gender boundaries. Friday’s corporeality reflects the contemporary philosophical understanding of the relation between body and mind, debates around the status of the colonial body, and, more recently, human relations to the environment around us, in tune with new materialist sensibilities.

A nostalgic trip? Klaus Rifbjerg’s “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” and the Copenhagen tramway

For much of the twentieth century, the tramway was the most important public transport system in Copenhagen, Denmark. It played a crucial role in the life of the city and features strongly in Danish art and literature produced during the network's lifespan as well as after it was finally closed in 1972. Despite this, the tramway has only received scarce scholarly attention. This article looks to address the situation. It does so by drawing attention to the fact that although the tramway was shut down, it lived on in art and literature. One example of this is “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” (1985) written by Klaus Rifbjerg. This short story has often been described as nostalgic. While this is not a misreading, it is an assessment that requires clarification. A close reading that draws on studies of nostalgia reveals that the short story does not boil down to a sentimental longing for a lost past. Rather, it thematises nostalgia for the Copenhagen tramway, questioning such remembrances’ status and relevance in contemporary society. This means that, ultimately, the short story can be seen as part of a broader tendency in writing about closures of electric public transport networks in Western Europe and North America: it works as a counternarrative to notions of progress, an antidote to predominant ideas of urban development in the mid-twentieth century.

You as a stylistic vector of otherness: from self-ascription to enactment in Kincaid (1988), Adichie (2009) and Azumah Nelson (2021)

Abstract Based on a theoretical pragmatic model (Sorlin, Sandrine. 2022. The stylistics of ‘you’. Second-person pronoun and its pragmatic effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this article compares the use of the second-person pronoun in three different narratives written by Black writers: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, A Small Place (1988), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel Open Water (2021). It highlights how the racial nature and assumed universality of you is exposed in the texts and argues that the pronoun works as a powerful vector of otherness, bringing the (white Western) reader to experience racism in most intimate terms. The three texts propose varied stylistic constellations that draw on the flexibility of the pronoun in terms of potential reference, entailing different positionings of audiences, going from “self-ascription” (Wechsler, Stephen. 2010. What ‘I’ and ‘you’ mean to each other: Person indexicals, self-ascription, and theory of mind. Language 86(2). 332–365) to “enactment” (Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The experientiality of narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter; Popova, Yanna B. 2015. Stories, meaning and experience: Narrativity and enaction. London & New York: Routledge). The article also evidences how the inter/intra-personal pronoun triggers a blurring of traditional stylistic and narratorial labels and lines. Lastly, from an enactive perspective that sees reading as an intersubjective participatory act where meaning emerges in the very interaction between a teller and a reader, this article sees communicating as an act of coordination based on the metaphor, communicating is dancing, inspired by Azumah Nelson’s rhythmic novel.

Samrat Upadhyay’s “During the Festival”: A Psychoanalytic-Feminist Exploration of Desire

This research delves into Samrat Upadhyay’s short story “During the Festival,” collected in  Arresting God in Kathmandu, examines the innate impulses shared by humans and animals within the modern Nepali society. Through a psychoanalytic-feminist theoretical framework, the study critically uncovers the subconscious projections of characters like Ganesh, revealing the complex dynamics of jealousy, sexuality, and familial relationships. Ganesh’s jealousy towards his wife’s emotional relationship with a young man in the neighbourhood reflects deeper insecurities about sexuality and societal norms and values in Nepal, while the neighbour’s displacement of his wife with his mother exposes the unresolved and conflicting issues stemming from the childhood experiences. Drawing on psychoanalytic principles, the analysis explores the themes of infantile fears and psychical metamorphosis, shedding light on the intricate interplay between individual psyche and societal constructs. By dissecting the text’s intrinsic characters and unconscious desires, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of human nature and societal complexities in Nepali literature.

Архетип гаучо в художественной культуре Латинской Америки

<p>The article examines the role of representatives of a specific ethnic group of inhabitants of the South American steppes-Pampas — pastoralists-Gaucho nomads in the formation, formation and development of national Spanish-American literature based on its genres such as oral folk art, lyrical and epic poetry, drama, realistic and psychological novel. The existence of this ethnic type can be traced back to 1775, but the process of turning a Spanish shepherd into a half-breed Gaucho is still largely unclear. The formation of Gaucho literature can serve as an example of the emergence of folk literature in the countries of Spanish America. Gaucho poetry reached the culmination point of its development with «Martin Fierro» by H. Hernandez, however, it did not take much time for the gaucho theme to turn into prose: drama, short story and novel. The transition from poetry to prose, as well as the transition from oral to written poetry, did not take place immediately. Gaucho poetry continued to develop and gained prominence for the reworking of the legend of Santos Vega, but new forms of Gaucho literature were already supplanting poetry. The novel about the gaucho arose from a primitive popular print, but the popularity gained by the very first attempts to create a novel about the gaucho testified to the prospects of this genre, which soon attracted the attention of truly talented authors. Thus, the Gaucho gave his native land a regional literature, which became a model of cultural and spiritual independence for all countries of Spanish America. Having formed a whole trend in literature, the Gaucho archetype has left a noticeable mark in other forms of art and, perhaps, will serve as an example to national forces called upon to make the transition from imitation of European models to literary Americanism.</p>

Depiction of Caste System and Dalit Consciousness in Ratna BK’s Banda Ākāsh Khulepachhi

The article deals with the caste system and consciousness in relation to class consciousness and Dalit consciousness based on literary text. As Dalit literature portrays the socio-cultural, economic and political issues of Dalits, their inequal relation with the people, caste discrimination, exploitation and suppression and protest and movements; and, it also presents the potential avenues of resolution. The article explores the brutality of caste system and Dalit consciousness for rights, equality, justice, dignity and liberation of Dalits. For this purpose, some short stories from Ratna BK’s Banda Ākāsh Khulepachhi have been chosen for the interpretation. The stories reveal the ground reality of multiple layers discrimination and issues of Dalits, their protest and resolution. Furthermore, the research explores the socio-cultural and political awareness and protests of Dalits, and state’s pragmatic position to address the issues and agenda. The researcher employs the qualitative approach with exploratory and analytical methods. The Marxist concept of class consciousness connecting to Dalit consciousness is parallel applied as theoretical perspectives in this article.

Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s “Echo Tree”

“Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s ‘Echo Tree’” engages Dumas’s experimental short story about two youths discussing how to speak to the dead while on a Southern hillside at dusk. This article studies how this short story meditates on how grief affects our engagement with and reliance upon voiced languages to express a desire for communion that persists beyond death. “Echo Tree”, the article argues, reveals how openness to grief, and the subsequent desire for communication with the dead, improves the imaginative capacity needed for empathetic alignment among the living. In its presentation of the psychological and imaginative difficulties of performing a call-and-response with the dead, “Echo Tree” also analogizes how a reader engages in an act of call-and-response with a muted acousmatic voice from the printed page.

Opening the boundaries of a literary text: Anton Chekhov’s novel “Kashtanka” and its film adaptation in teaching Russian as a foreign language

The article describes the work with a literary text and its adaptation in the classroom of Russian as a foreign language. In particular, we focus on the ways of understanding a literary text by including a film adaptation into classroom activities. Special attention is paid to the characteristics of the intersemiotic translation and its basic concepts: adaptation, film adaptation and interpretation. For the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, this distinction is conditional and is of great interest from the point of view of understanding the idea and content of the literary text and the peculiarities of its interpretation. When working with international students, the use of screen versions of Russian literature texts helps, on the one hand, to simplify the process of understanding their meaning and key points by visualizing verbal and nonverbal components of the text, on the other hand, to complicate this work - to increase the amount of information provided. The present paper presents the algorithm of working on the text of the short story “Kashtanka” by Anton Chekhov and its film adaptations and formulates sample tasks for classroom and independent work.

Sane Salvage: Re-reading the Dissemination of Indian Values in Sudha Murty’s The Magic Drum and Other Favourite Stories

Moral values are sets of socio-culturally wrought guidelines for human behaviour that ensure acceptance of individuals as honest and valued members of a given community. Since literature reflects society and defines morality, it often operates as a medium for disseminating moral values specific to an age and a place. Sudha Murty, the chairperson of Infosys, an Indian multinational information technology company, is also a significant Indian writer in English with more than twenty published books to her credit. Though one of life’s achievers, Murty has remained grounded in her roots of Indian tradition and Indian values. In the intended study, I want to analyse selected short stories from Murty's story collection, The MAGIC DRUM and other favourite Stories (2006), to underscore how Murty tries to salvage Indian values for her target readership of children and young adults. As will be shown, her purpose is to regain and retain moral sanity in the face of severe value erosion. I shall briefly discuss stories like The Seed of Truth; A Bottle of Dew and The Lucky Purse on the one hand and The Last Laddoo; The White Crow and Haripant the Wise on the other to foreground her praise of the positive values of truthfulness, diligence, and kindness in the first set of stories and her opposition to the negative traits like niggardliness, exaggeration, and avarice in the second set. I will try to show how Murty highlights values promoted and vices decried. Attempts will also be made to indicate the significance of the author’s invocation of a rural past and invectives against a consumerist culture in the selected short stories.

‘I Don’t Want to Be Other. I Want to Be Normal’: Mental Boundaries and the Polish Experience in the UK in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories

Borders and frontiers are often problematized in Agnieszka Dale’s Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), where mental borders seem to be more divisive than spatial boundaries. Many of these narratives feature Polish immigrants in Britain who struggle with their displaced condition in various ways. As some of the stories in the collection reveal, the scenario of post-Brexit Britain compromises conviviality amongst different groups, including the Polish community. Special attention is placed upon how several narratives in the volume underscore the prevalence in British society of Polish stereotypes as the crystallisation of the still widespread animosity against non-Europeans. Homi Bhabha’s notions regarding the formation and dynamics of stereotypes will be helpful in understanding the mechanisms beneath such constructions. Likewise, some of the major tenets of social theory, as well as Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’, will contribute to shedding light upon this resentment towards the Polish minority, occasionally adopted too by already established immigrants against their former compatriots. This article will ultimately intend to draw attention to the cautionary nature of Dale’s collection as a call for harmony and the appreciation of difference among nations, thus preventing the gloomy perspectives the dystopian futures of some of these stories forecast upon Europe.

Features of subtext in E. Hemingway and R. Carver’s dialogues (based on the analysis of their short stories)

The article provides a comparative analysis of the implication features used in the dialogues of the stories by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, his follower of the second half of the 20th century. Our analysis is based on their texts written in different years. Employing specific examples, we analyzed the authors’ work on the use of the main subtext elements: A pause or silence, incompleteness and repetitions. The highlighted elements of the implication allow us to make conclusions about the direct influence of Hemingway on the poetics of Raymond Carver’s stories. The comparison of the presented techniques illustrates the authors’ strategies used for the emotional involvement of the reader in the process of deciphering the text, as well as the desire to compress the text without losing its semantic depth.The relevance of the article is determined by the growing interest in the realistic short story, in particular, in the creative legacy of Raymond Carver. The articles and works, devoted to his prose and poetic works, continue to appear in foreign and Russian literary criticism. The analysis of the subtext peculiarities in dialogues allows us to contribute to the study of dialogue strategies, which in the 20th-century literature perform the plot-moving function and disclose psychological characteristics of the character. In addition, the comparative analysis of the writers’ stories helps understand the features of Raymond Carver’s creative method.The methodological basis of the article is the cultural-historical and comparative methods.

Ermakov Equations can be Derived from Zel’dovich Pancake, and they are Cold and Nonlocal through using Neutrosophic Venn Diagram

As we argue in the previous article [3], the labyrinthine worlds of Jorge Luis Borges are more than captivating narratives; they are portals to a deeper understanding of existence. By weaving elements of science-fiction fantasy with philosophical and ethical inquiries, Borges's short stories bridge the seemingly disparate realms of physics and the humanities, offering fertile ground for contemporary physics research. The present-day universe consists of galaxies, galaxy clusters, one-dimensional filaments and two-dimensional sheets or pancakes, all of which combine to form the cosmic web. The so called ”Zeldovich pancakes”, are very difficult to observe, because their overdensity is only slightly greater than the average density of the universe. Falco et al. presented a method to identify Zeldovich pancakes in observational data, and the method were used as a tool for estimating the mass of galaxy clusters [2]. Here we provide an outline from Zel’dovich pancake to Burgers equations to represent cosmic turbulence, and then from Burgers equations to Ermakov dynamics systems, which in turn they plausibly lead to nonlocal current.