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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2014
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Online versus Print: The reputation of literary fiction magazines
By Laura DietzAbstractThis article examines the role of literary magazines in the age of digital delivery, specifically the way in which their traditional functions as talent scouts and tastemakers are affected by the perceived second-class status of electronic publishing. What are the implications for a vital publishing outlet for short stories and what might editors and writers do to remain influential and relevant? Our findings suggest that post-print magazines can be taken seriously, and hence that the category will remain relevant, as some (but not all) titles employ use specific strategies to make the leap to online or other digital delivery with their status and influence intact. This article presents original survey data on the reputation and legitimacy of online versus print literary magazines, examines the potential impact of recent business model changes and makes predictions on how the genre will continue to evolve.
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American laconic: Nescience and realism in Richard Ford’s ‘Optimists’
By Joseph FrankAbstractThe short stories of Richard Ford are examples of how the short form and minimalist prose mimic the unhealthy limitedness of human knowledge. Ford himself claims it is fiction’s duty to recreate the condition of not knowing and that people are the mysterious sum of their actions. Using Ford’s story ‘Optimists’, and considering the tension between empirical and Platonic epistemologies, minimalist short fiction is considered for its portrayal of human knowledge as limited and imperfect. As such, the short story form is uncannily apt at achieving narrative realism interested in the human condition of not knowing or nescience.
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The role of the anticanonical text: Jack Conroy and the Anvil, a Case Study
More LessAbstractReaders of American short stories have only a limited number of hours to devote to literature, in which we have infinite options of texts. Unless pursuing a particular project, most readers might look to anthologies for textual guidance, assuming that an anthology offers the easiest access to what is ‘best’ in a literary category. Any collection of texts is, ultimately, the choice of one or of a few publishers and editors. This article focuses on a body of texts that is largely neglected from the canon of American short stories, that of the worker-writer from the 1930s. After a brief summary of current concerns with canon formation, I perform a case study on author Jack Conroy and other contributors to his 1930s magazine, the Anvil, to prove that their work is, for the most part, forgotten by the most popular collections of American short stories. I then suggest that it is not worthwhile to insist that this corpus be represented in the canon, but rather to ask what happens to literature that, for one reason or another, becomes ‘anticanonical’. I suggest that the role of these proletarian texts is not to be largely read by today’s readers, but to have nourished the spreading diversity of American authors and readers.
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‘Sometimes Two People like Each Other Who Shouldn’t’: Díaz, Schickler and Bradbury stories that defamiliarize the teacher–student relationship
More LessAbstractCharles E. May’s assertion that Junot Díaz’s ‘Miss Lora’, 2013 winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, is not outstanding is challenged. The current discourse on teacher–student sex scandals is used to inform a reading of Díaz’s story that reveals its success under critical scrutiny. Sheila L. Cavanagh’s sociological work on the sex scandals surrounding white female teachers is incorporated alongside James Knoll’s work as a psychologist on profiling sexually predatory female teachers. ‘The Smoker’ by David Schickler and ‘These Things Happen’ by Ray Bradbury are also analysed as fitting into the trope of students and teachers developing relationships that fall outside the bounds of the white heteronormative master narrative. May’s claim that short stories succeed in ‘defamiliarizing’ our everyday constructs of reality is shown to occur in each story in relation to our expectations of the sexual boundaries between teachers and students.
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Reading a culturally different text: Meaning signification process in Chinua Achebe’s short stories
Authors: Jaya Shrivastava and Amarjeet NayakAbstractChinua Achebe has written extensively on African culture, its mores and the impact of European imperialism on indigenous African societies. His novels garnered worldwide attention and contributed towards the development of the African literature. But his short stories merit equal attention and interest owing not only to the similarity of themes that they share with his novels but also the skilful use of English, a ‘world language’ or an ‘alien language’ as he himself calls it, to depict the clash between traditional African cultures and colonial encounter. As an African author writing in English, Achebe appropriates this European linguistic means as an ethnographic tool to depict the traditions of Igbo society to which he belongs. Storytelling was a mainstay of the Igbo tradition and an integral part of the community, and it becomes pertinent for his readers outside Africa, who are unfamiliar with the sociocultural nuances of the African language, Igbo, to construct its meaning in the reading process by interpreting the textual cues. This study, taking a few of Chinua Achebe’s short stories as an example, will explore how the meaning of unfamiliar cultural elements is signified in the reading process through the language of the text such that it is comprehended and responded by the reader. The article argues that an understanding of the meaning signification process can make a reader conscious of the cognitive processes taking place in his her mind during the reading event and can introduce his or her to features of a distinct culture.
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‘The world outside seemed mummified into a sheet of dead whiteness’: Epiphanic experience in the short stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
More LessAbstractThis article argues that the female characters in C. N. Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) go through mental developments similar to epiphanic experience as recently defined by Matthew G. McDonald. The characters, who are often living in the diaspora, feel themselves trapped between their African background and influences from the West. While reflecting upon their situation, they gradually acquire a better view of their problems that allows them to distance themselves from their present circumstances and envision a future that would better satisfy their needs. Adichie depicts these mental developments through subtle literary devices that benefit from narrative experiments, words from Igbo vocabulary and devices known from African storytelling traditions.
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‘Practical Kabbala’: A translation into English of Leopoldo Lugones’s ‘Kábala práctica’ (1897)
More LessAbstractThis article presents a translation from the Spanish of ‘Kábala práctica’/‘Practical Kabbala’, a short story in the fantastic mode published in 1897, preceded by an essay that considers the place and function of translation in the British literary system based on a case study of this story and its Argentinian author, Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938). The introductory essay explores the possibility that the limited and only recent reception of Lugones’s work in the United Kingdom is related, albeit not exclusively, to a persistent British intercultural myopia as far as non-anglophone literatures are concerned that may be attributed to the anglophone linguistic exclusivism that is one consequence of the hegemonic status of English. This leads, it is argued, to a consecratory approach, based on iconic ‘snapshots’, to incorporation of translation into the British literary system, rather than an exploratory approach that seeks to uncover the hinterland; in other words, an approach that treats non-anglophone literatures as the cultural equivalents of holiday hotspots rather than fully stipulated cultural-discursive systems in their own right. The case of Lugones serves to demonstrate that an exploratory approach (by translators) to non-anglophone literatures reveals writers and literary traditions whose significance places ‘consecrated’ writers such as fellow Argentinian but now ‘World’ Borges in a context necessary to the elucidation of their own significance.
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‘Green Boots’ Cave’
By Jim HinksAbstractThe short story ‘Green Boots’ Cave’ introduces an inexplicable phenomenon – that one might experience the events of an entire lifetime within a few moments – and plays this idea against recognizable, ‘real’ historical events. It follows Todorov’s notion of the process of reader adaptation to the inexplicable (as opposed to hesitation), described in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
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Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years
By C. D. RoseAbstractThis story-article takes its title from three key elements in Maupassant’s canonical story ‘The Necklace’. A teacher invites a class to put the story together, having given them only these clues, and then eventually tells the story. As this process unfolds, he appropriates the story and its telling in a self-reflexive attempt to investigate narrativity and the mechanics of the short story, reflecting on Maupassant’s life and career and on the reception of the story by its varied listeners.
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Review
By Dean BaldwinAbstractThree short story collections from America
Come by Here: A Novella and Stories, Tom Noyes (2014) Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 159 pp., ISBN: 7981932870930, p/bk, US$17.95
The Man who Noticed Everything, Adrian Van Young (2013) Pittsburgh, PA: Black Lawrence Press, 179 pp., ISBN: 7981937854263, p/bk, US$16.00
Starting Over: Stories, Elizabeth Spencer (2014) New York: Liveright, 202 pp., ISBN: 9780871406811, h/bk, US$24.95
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