Segmentivity, narrativity and the short form: The Twitter stories of Moody, Egan and Mitchell

This article seeks to complement existing media-based approaches to Twitter fiction with a genre-based approach that considers it in the context of the genre and the tradition of the short story. After a brief introductory overview of Twitter fiction, I discuss three Twitter stories, written by established authors: Rick Moody’s ‘Some Contemporary Characters’ (2009), Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ (2012) and David Mitchell’s ‘The Right Sort’ (2014a). In a close textual analysis of these stories, I trace the impact of the Twitter format on the style, plot, themes and narrative techniques of these short stories. More particularly, I show how each of these works combines poetic and narrative techniques, or what DuPlessis has called ‘segmentivity’ and ‘narrativity’, in a different way. Finally, the conclusion considers the characteristics of these Twitter stories in the light of the tradition and the genre of the modern short story more in general.