Portability and pedagogy: The bounded short stories in Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

Beginning with a discussion of Ian Reid’s concept of the circumtext, as well as Gerard Genette’s idea of the paratext as ‘threshold,’ this article considers the matter of the short story’s potential for portability via an examination of Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea. Marche’s text highlights the tension between reading fiction ‘as fiction’ versus ‘as anthropological data,’ especially as that tension emerges in Canadian postcolonial literary studies about pedagogy. My aim is to examine Marche’s postmodern parody as a paradoxical challenge to the idea of the short-story collection as an ‘open book,’ a challenge that confronts the notion of history as discourse; as I will argue, the multiple histories emerging as sites of exploration in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea includes histories of political violence and struggle, histories of reading and teaching, and histories of genre.