Novellas-in-Flash and Flash Cycles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social And Ethical Issues ◽  
Story Cycle

The coda places the book in a larger discourse about new formalisms, which see form as a way to understand political, social, and ethical issues as intrinsic to aesthetic practice. The coda offers a theory of how the short story cycle inverts, displaces, and combines elements of the short story, the short story collection, the novel, and ancient story cycles. The long history of the cycle suggests a unique generic compulsion—which unsettles expectations of closure, development, revelation, and explanation—that revolutionized modern and contemporary fiction.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

scholarly journals Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Evolving Networks ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

scholarly journals Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Story Collection

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

scholarly journals Negotiating Identity and Belonging in the Western Indian Ocean: Fluid Enabling Spaces in M.G. Vassanji’s Uhuru Street

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Dolors Ortega ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Indian Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Cycle

This article analyses the short story cycle Uhuru Street, which describes the life of the members of the minority Ismaili community, whom Vassanji fictionalises as Shamsis, in the context of crucial changes in the history of Tanzania. Diaspora, fragmentation and ethnic multiplicity in a really hierarchical tripartite society will be studied within the framework of cross-cultural networking in the Western Indian Ocean, where complex identity relations are established. Our discussion stems from a brief historical genealogy of the Indian community in Tanzania, it analyses the complex identity relations and affiliations among Tanzanian citizens of Indian descent, and moves on to the analysis of Vassanji’s short stories in order to explore those fluid and enabling spaces where identity and belonging are to be negotiated.

scholarly journals The American Short Story Cycle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
History Of ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Story Cycle

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short story cycle rose and proliferated because its form compellingly renders the uncertainties that emerge from the twin pillars of modern America culture: individualism and pluralism. Short story cycles reflect how individuals adapt to change, whether it is the railroad coming to the small town in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or social media revolutionizing language in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Each chapter examines how cycles use temporal and spatial settings and characterization to link the stories within. Doing so reveals that authors turn to the cycle when exploring identities—be they gendered or ethnic—in flux and when experimenting with the conventions of narrative unity, from regionalist through modernist to contemporary writers. This book constructs a history of community, family, and time in American culture through one of the nation’s most popular, yet unrecognized genres. Combining new formalism in literary criticism with scholarship in American Studies, this book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation, as well as recurrence, that characterize fiction today.

Resisting Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Story Cycle

Chapter five argues that the best way to grasp William Faulkner’s oeuvre is through the paradigm of the short story cycle because of his use of limited localities, interstitial temporalities, and formative kinships; this approach pushes against a mountain of criticism that expects and measures the unity of his work. The form, with its privileging of multiple, competing narratives, is ideally suited to articulating the crises of history and subjectivity that Faulkner dramatizes. Faulkner’s achievements in the cycle reach an apex in Go Down, Moses (1942), which is his most sustained treatment of black-white relations. Go Down, Moses explores both continual and heightened moments of interracial intimacies. The stories most sharply narrate the crises that the white McCaslin line faces when grappling with their unacknowledged kinship with the black Beauchamp line. This chapter demonstrate that the cycle dramatizes the production of provisional racial identities, because they do not depend upon rigid distinctions, essential characteristics, or defined origins.

KONFLIK SOSIAL DAN POLITIK DALAM KUMPULAN CERPEN DRAMA ITU BERKISAH TERLALU JAUH KARYA PUTHUT EA: KAJIAN SOSIOLOGI SASTRA

Buana Bastra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Fithroh Wahidah
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection

This study aimed to describe the social and political conflicts contained in the collection of short stories Drama Tells Too far work of Puthut EA and to describe thecorrelation between the short story collection The play was a story Too far work of PuthutEA with reality night history of Indonesian society. Sources of data in this study is the textcontained in the collection of short stories Drama Tells Too far work of Puthut EA. Whilethe research data is an excerpt sentence, description, dialogue, and other important mattersin the collection of short stories Drama Tells Too far work of Puthut EA. Data obtained byreading and writing techniques. Data were analyzed with the approach of sociology ofliterature and descriptive analysis techniques. The validity of the data obtained byconducting triangulation is triangualasi methods, sources of data and theory. These resultsindicate the existence of social and political conflict are contained in the collection of shortstories Drama Tells Too Far work of Puthut EA, containing social conflicts, among others:(1) gender conflict, namely: the oppression of women, (2) racial conflict, namely:discrimination of race Chinese, (3) inter-religious conflicts, namely: distrust ofcommunism, (4) conflict of interest, namely: the imposition of a leader, (5) interpersonal conflicts, namely: distrust of others, (6) the conflict between social classes, namely: socialinequality. Containing the political conflict, among others: (1) the weapons of battle and (2)the strategy politik. Correlation between the short story collection That play was a storyToo Far of Puthut EA works with historical reality of Indonesian society, among others: (1)The 1998 riots (2) The increase in fuel (3) Ethnic Discrimination (4) Dispute people of thesame religion (5) arrest Without Accompanied Official Letter (6) Violations of humanrights and (7) Poverty.  

The concept of baxt in the bilingual short-story collection glücksmacher - e baxt romani by Samuel Mago and Károly Mágó

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-241
Author(s):  
LORELY FRENCH
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection

This article presents a close reading of the Romani characters and their actions in five stories by Viennese Romani writer and activist Samuel Mago and in two stories by his brother, Hungarian award-winning journalist Károly Mágó, in their bilingual Romani and German collection glücksmacher - e baxt romani. Brief biographies and an outline of the history of Roma and antiziganism in Austria provide background to textual analysis that focuses on how characters in the stories engender baxt/“Glück,” which means both happiness and luck. This dual meaning has inspired philosophical, psychological, economic, and anthropological studies, but literary scholars have rarely examined the concept in texts by Roma. For the protagonists in the brothers’ stories, happiness and luck become based less on monetary fortunes than on other means to live and survive in dark times of persecution and discrimination. The characters’ decisions unveil perceptions of baxt that rely largely on acquiring food, preserving and passing down family heirlooms, receiving an education, and freeing oneself and one’s family from persecution.

The Gender of Public Opinion

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-173
Author(s):  
Megan Faragher
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Electoral Defeat ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Egalitarian Value ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Value

As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.

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