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

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.

Short story poetics and theoretical and methodological bases of research into Kipling’s short story cycle

According to the recent hypothesis, Kipling’s short stories are considered to be the products of the transformation of journalistic discourse into a literary one. Kipling’s short stories deal with the topic of “clashes” of Western and Eastern cultures. Linking these two cultural phenomena is an essential factor in his biography as well as poetics of his short stories and their internal connection needs to be considered in the analysis of the stories. This analysis should not only identify the traces of a report as a journalistic genre (even if at the level of subtext), but also confirm that Kipling’s work as a reporter implies his role as a representative of the Western culture. The given topic can be perceived as a problem due to the paradigmatic factor represented by its multidimensional nature i.e. the fact that it belongs to three dimensions of reality – linguistic, fictional and cultural.

La claridad (2020), de Marcelo Luján: una lectura como ciclo de cuentos

Partiendo de un somero recorrido por las distintas aportaciones teórico-críticas del siglo XX en torno al denominado ciclo de cuentos, se defiende tal estatuto genérico para La claridad, libro de cuentos de Marcelo Luján publicado en 2020. Dado que esta obra reúne seis cuentos que son autónomos y a la vez están interrelacionados gracias a una serie de elementos narrativos, cumple los requisitos para ser considerada un ciclo. Se realizó una entrevista con Luján, reproducida en este trabajo, con el propósito de entender el proceso creativo detrás de esta obra y conocer qué concepción tiene este autor de su propia obra narrativa. Departing from a brief review of the different theoretical and critical contributions from the 20th century around the so called short story cycle, we could define La claridad, a book of stories by Marcelo Luján published in 2020, as such. This classification is justified by the fact that this work brings together six stories that are both autonomous and interrelated thanks to a series of narrative elements. An interview, reproduced in this work, was conducted with Luján in order to understand the creative process behind his work and to know what his own conception of it is.

Персонажная система и мотивная структура повести Г. Башкуева «Убить время»

Introduction. Gennady Bashkuev’s works attempt to comprehend the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and To Kill Time proves a most significant prose work of the writer. Goals. The article seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between the system of characters in the novel and its motif structure, which helps clarify the underlying idea of the work, eclectic in structure and close in form to a short story cycle. Methods. The study rests on the theses about a relationship between semantics of motif and character, predicativity of motif, and on the concept of motif complexes and leitmotif construction of the narrative. Results. The main character of the novel is the narrator, the narrative proper divided into childhood memories and those of recent past. The characters of childhood can be clustered into three groups: family, friends, adults —motifs of happiness, celebration, romantic dreams and that of loss are associated with them. The characters of adulthood are women and childhood friends who are associated with motifs of marginal life, betrayal, guilt, and that of romance. The motifs of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ memories are intertwined, and it is the motif structure that ensures the integrity of the narrative. The key role in the novel is played by the binary image — the saleswoman Inga and the city madwoman — that combines two main themes for the narrator’s self-reflection: childhood and women. The plot structure partly fits into the universal mythological scheme: a series of trials — sketches-events from the life of the autobiographical narrator — is built into somewhat a ‘mythological journey’ to finally end with the acquisition of ‘elixir’ — catharsis and spiritual liberation. Conclusions. The image of the protagonist, the narrator, is explicated in the text and is revealed in the system of motifs associated with characters of his memories. Analysis of the character system proves instrumental in revealing key ideas of the novel and interpreting its title: those are reflections about time that become a focus of the author’s viewpoint uniting the seemingly disparate stories.

THE SHORT STORY CYCLE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATURE (BASED ON THE SHORT STORIES BY J. MCGREGOR)

The article is devoted to the poetics of the short story cycle - a genre of short narrative fiction, where classical traditions and experimental narrative techniques are used to explicate topical issues of contemporary British literature. Beside the fact that the stories are relatively short, they are characterized by semantic compression, gaps in meaning, “internal” psychological plot, intensity, expressive imagery, lyricism, implications. The consistency of the short story cycle is created by thematic complementarity, coherence of style and composition. The short story cycle by J. McGregor ‘That Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You’ is devoted to everyday life of English Fenland inhabitants and can be attributed to the ‘narrative of community’ genre, traditional for British literature. McGregor’s short story cycle embodies almost all modern tendencies of the genre: a wide palette of themes within the framework of topical issues; vivid psychological portraits and images; variety of narrative types and forms; suggestiveness, implications, specific usage of pronouns, stylistic devices of contrast and repetition.

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

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.

Frontier Imagery in Gentrification Narratives: Andrew Wingfield’s Short Story Cycle Right of Way (2010)

Metaforyka pogranicza w cyklu opowiadań Andrew Wingfielda pt. Right of Way (2010) poświęconych procesom gentryfikacji Niniejszy artykuł stanowi analizę cyklu opowiadań pt. Right of Way (2010) amerykańskiego pisarza Andrew Wingfielda przez pryzmat mitu pogranicza. Odwołując się do pojęcia pogranicza, sformułowanego przez historyka Fredericka Jacksona Turnera pod koniec XIX w. oraz do teorii miejskiej ekologii wypracowanej przez socjologów tzw. szkoły chicagowskiej, pokazuję w jaki sposób Wingfield wykorzystuje metaforę pogranicza i proces inwazji-sukcesji w celu krytycznego ujęcia gentryfikacji w podmiejskiej Ameryce. Wingfield sięga po rozpoznawalny dla Amerykanów mit założycielski, ale zabieg ten służy mu jako punkt wyjścia do wielowymiarowego ujęcia zmian zachodzących w przestrzeni miejskiej. Interesują go przede wszystkim interakcje międzyludzkie w obrębie lokalnej wspólnoty oraz tworzenie się więzi emocjonalnej z miejscem.

Stylization of Ornamental Narrative in the Prose of Denis Osokin. The Cycle of Stories “Angels and Revolution. Vyatka 1923”

The article analyzes the poetics of the short story cycle “Angels and Revolution. Viatka 1923” by modern Russian writer Denis Osokin. The author, developing the tradition of Russian ornamental prose of the 20 th century, creates a modern interpretation of revolutionary events. The fictional locus of Viatka 1923 becomes a space of the artistic experiment for language renewal. Using the technique of stylization of the ornamental narrative, Denis Osokin forms the image of an impersonal narrator consisting of many narrative-rhetorical figures that weaken the fabulality of the narrative. The artistic integrity of the cycle is preserved by a system of style, intertextual, and motivational equivalences that create a special form of lyrical plot characteristic for ornamental prose.

Book Reviews

The American Short Story Cycle, Jennifer J. Smith (2018)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 194 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47442-393-9, h/bk, £75.00ISBN 978-1-47445-269-4, p/bk, £19.99Dead Voices, F. G. Paci (2019)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 285 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-319-6 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-318-9, p/bk, $25Eye, Marianne Micros (2018)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 142 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-258-8 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-257-1, p/bk, $20Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, Chris Mourant (2019)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 301 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47443-945-9, h/bk, £80

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

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).