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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2015
Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2015
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‘The Water, The Onion, The Slow March of the Stars’: Roberto Bolaño and the secret story
By Rodge GlassAbstractTo talk of the transnational is to accept that borders – the skipping over them in life and on the page – is a messy business. It’s understandable that writers such as Roberto Bolaño, usually labelled ‘a Chilean exiled to Mexico’, shouldn’t be included in discussions of contemporary European short fiction. Understandable, but not inevitable. Bolaño left Chile at 15, only returning briefly post-Pinochet before ‘co-founding a Surrealist-influenced, anti-status-quo school’ of writers in Mexico. It wasn’t until Bolaño got clean, got married and settled down in Europe (he moved there in 1977) that he produced the prose which is now his legacy. This article argues that aside from the European novellas (Antwerp, Monsieur Pain), there are five key collections which deserve to be included in European literary discussions, having been composed in Europe and having gone on to make Bolaño’s name. They have also served to move the form forward in the continent he made his home: Bolaño was responding largely to a European tradition. He wouldn’t limit himself to one continent – as Kerr puts it, Bolaño had ‘a deep scepticism about national feeling, and it has been said that his work starts to point the way to a kind of post-national fiction’ – but there’s no doubt that for 25 years, Bolaño was essentially a European with a transnational outlook. For these reasons and others, I argue for Bolaño’s inclusion in European short fiction discourse.
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The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee: When transnational short fiction travels from utopian transcape to dystopian globalscape
More LessAbstractThe Childhood of Jesus is a novella by J. M. Coetzee that poses as an allegory of Jesus’ early life, to better ponder over wider social issues pertaining to the possibility of welcoming and caring for the other. The lens used by Coetzee to apprehend his favourite topic is that of the utopian versus the dystopian nature of a community where differences have seemingly been erased and individual needs have become insignificant. Two contrapuntal discourses are woven in the text: on the one hand, the nameless country where the two main characters take refuge appears as an allegory of a benign communal society where everybody’s basic needs are provided for, and, on the other hand, the systematic smoothing out of every possible desire cannot fail to carry some ominous undertones. What the society that welcomes the main protagonists seeks to expel either pertains to bodily needs or to the exercise of a critical mind. Characteristically enough, Coetzee does not make clear whether the reader should opt for the utopian or the dystopian grid of reading his novel, which may strike us as an allegory of our own condition in an anaesthesized globalized world. The forceful impact of this short text undoubtedly lies with its own paucity of definite answers given to the reader’s interrogations, so that she is made to revisit her own ideological assumptions. This article will attempt to show that this definite lack of allegorical clarity allows for a revisiting of both the fictional and the allegorical modes in Coetzee’s novel, which paves the way for a deeper understanding of the self/other relation in a transnational context.
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‘Golden Deportees’ and ‘Reluctant Pioneers’: The redefinition of home in Mavis Gallant’s ‘Varieties of Exile’
By Kate SmythAbstractThis article argues that Canadian author Mavis Gallant’s short story ‘Varieties of Exile’ highlights the links between identity, perceptions of place and memory, suggesting that the notion of ‘home’ and experiences of displacement and exile for transnational or migratory individuals can be reinterpreted as a positive when placed in opposition to limited and static constructions of national identity. Gallant’s focus on marginal migratory figures allows for an interrogation of what it means to be ‘Canadian’ and ‘at home’, an interrogation that is not limited to Canadian identity and place but that Gallant leaves open for transnational, cross-cultural, global interpretations. Incorporating both modern and postmodern elements, ‘Varieties of Exile’ suggests that there is no ‘true’ self, that identity is mutable. This is linked with migration and with the things individuals choose to remember and forget in order for identities to be continually reconstructed in response to life events.
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Transnational heterotopia and death-driven narcissism in A.L. Kennedy’s ‘Made Over, Made Out’
More LessAbstractA.L. Kennedy’s short story ‘Made Over, Made Out’ (1998) exposes how and why a highly exclusive type of transnational perspective fails to translate into a capacity for dialogue with the (gendered) ‘other’. Structured by ‘homosocial desire’ (Sedgwick), the space shuttle, in which the story is set, functions simultaneously as a ‘heterotopia of crisis’ (Foucault) and as one of those ‘transient non-spaces’ typical of supermodernity (Augé). Although the main characters agree that their astronauts’ point of view fosters an ability to understand the planet as a whole, which undermines NASA’s vested national interests, the protagonist’s inability for dialogue with those who do not and cannot form part of his highly exclusive community is foregrounded. ‘Made Over, Made Out’ allegorizes a transnational utopia’s collapse brought about by individual psychic forces. Instead of gleaning some strategies for communication from his global insights, which might produce agency, the dichotomously minded hero’s death drive propels a psychic regression from narcissism to autoeroticism (Freud), while the eroticized objects (the planet/the wife) are locked into the position of the ‘other’ as spectacle.
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Memory, nation and the crisis of location in Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’
More LessAbstractThis article explores the entanglements of memory and the crisis of location in the context of the India–Pakistan Partition in 1947, as depicted in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction. It will investigate how Manto’s fiction is reflective of the trauma of geographical and existential dislocation with the birth of two nations following a programme of political and epistemic violence and remapping. The study will place special focus on the entanglement of memory and madness alongside the broader issues of nation-formation, alienation and loss. It will examine the trauma of 1947 Partition as a psychological as well as existential crisis that often manifested itself in madness, aphasia and amnesia. With a special attention to the formal qualities of Manto’s short fiction, the article will investigate the human condition of shock and loss by drawing on trauma studies, phenomenology and cognitive psychological studies in episodic memory, unreliable narration and cognition. It will thus examine how the short story is formally and uniquely equipped to reflect the cognitive and phenomenological processes underpinning memory, narrativity and consciousness, especially in their unsettled states of being in a politically violent space. The article specifically focuses on the short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which depicts a diplomatically agreed exchange of madmen across the borders of the two newly formed nations of India and Pakistan and the absurdity in the systematized political processes underpinning citizenship, nationality and identity. It will investigate how madness emerges as an existential as well as an epistemic inwardness that resists political classification with its subversive articulation of agency and emotionality. Manto’s short story and fiction in general may be read as a complex analysis of transnational trauma, memory and crisis of existential identity. This article offers such a study.
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Transnational perspectives in Simon J. Ortiz’s short fiction
More LessAbstractContemporary American short stories from Simon J. Ortiz’s Men of the Moon (1999) can be considered a testing ground for conceptualizations of (trans)-national identities from Randolph Bourne’s ‘Transnational America’ (1916) to David Hollinger’s Postethnic America (1995). In these stories the aesthetic concretization of contingent experiences by Native Americans both confirms and critiques the theoretical concepts of postcolonial studies and transnational American Studies. Both Ortiz’s ‘The Way You See Horses’ and ‘Crossing’ unfold the relativity and observer-dependence of individual perception as well as the epistemological awareness and cultural dialectics of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Themselves (1991). Actual intercultural and transnational encounters in Ortiz’s stories often spell disaster much more radically than promise. Only three of the stories in Ortiz’s collection, ‘Pennstuwehniyaahtse: Quuti’s Story’, ‘Hiding West of Here’ and ‘To Change Life in a Good Way’, suggest interethnic solidarity. These stories help develop a humanism which expresses itself in the dissociation of foreignness and familiarity in postcolonial and transnational contexts. Ortiz’s short fiction thus functions as a liminal third space which exposes both the fragmentation and potential of time-honoured Native American spiritual convictions. That such spiritualism has partially sunk into oblivion does not spell irrelevance and obsolescence. Paradoxically it turns into the precondition of mutual rapprochements of cultural difference and both intercultural and transnational acceptance. What renders Ortiz’s reassertion of Native American spiritualism humanist is the caution and tolerant awareness of the other that accompanies it.
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The transnational anglophone African short story: From resistance literature to prize culture
By James HodappAbstractThe father of African literature, Chinua Achebe, begins his introduction to The Anchor Book of Modern African Short Stories with ‘Literary Historians tell us that the English novel preceded the short story by a hundred years or thereabouts. In modern African literature events happened differently. The short story came first ...’. Despite its central role in the development of African literature as evidenced by early collections by Africa’s most prominent writers, the inclusion of African short fiction in seminal journals such as Black Orpheus and Transition, as well as its continued deployment today by many of Africa’s most prominent writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helon Habila, critical attention in the fields of African literature, postcolonial literature and world literature to the African short story has been minimal. As Ernest Emenyonu points out in a special edition of African Literature Today, ‘National and international conferences and colloquiums continue to be held in Africa and elsewhere to address the issues and challenges associated with the novel, poetry and drama in African literature, with virtually no attention paid to the short story’. This article seeks to address this oversight by briefly examining the history of the African short story as central to the development of African literature and explaining its continued resonance. By tracking the trajectory of the short story in Africa through its multiple phases, this article addresses the oversight pointed out by Emenyonu and articulates a methodology for considering the African short story in a transnational context, particularly in light of the re-emerging field of world literature.
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Translating imaginary territories in fantasy short fiction
More LessAbstractTranslating a text set in an imaginary world poses specific problems to the translator, since the original often indirectly builds on cultural bearings to create a setting both related to reality and endowed with its own peculiarities and exotic features. The translator will need to find the same balance between familiarity and strangeness so as to allow its reader to enter the imaginary world. This article will focus on a precursor of the genre of fantasy, the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. Instead of a tapestry whose threads become invisible, his imaginary world is built like a tessellated literary body. Coherence and identity are not to be found in a wealth of details and lengthy descriptions, but in powerful, striking nodes of meaning. A few examples from the various translations of his early tales into French will help us show the challenge faced by the translator who has to identify these nodes and translate them, finding a new balance in fragmentation which still allows the reader to grasp the ethereal unity of Dunsany’s imaginary territories.
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Short fiction in a transnational digital age
More LessAbstractGiven the state of communication and publication today, it would be impossible to discuss ‘Short fiction in a transnational digital age’ without engaging in some way with digital media. The World Wide Web is an international phenomenon that is exerting influence upon culture and literature in ways we cannot yet fully understand. Short fiction’s involvement with digital media within this network can be linked to changing habits and perceptions on both the individual and societal level. In these evolving spaces, short fiction might still be approached in a traditional manner, as a unique, stable aesthetic unit, but it also requires that we take into consideration its position in a complex network of devices and processes. Certainly, many forms of literature are being significantly affected by the development of digital media. However, given its associations with experimentation and its generic elasticity, short fiction, in its many forms, appears well adapted for negotiating the evolving paradigms of digital reading and writing in their interconnection with literary networks and communities. In this article I will address some of the changes in the reading and writing of short fiction occurring through digital media and will suggest how short fiction might propose a space to explore the impact of these developments on a transnational level.
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Reviews
Authors: Philip Coleman and Paul DelaneyAbstractA Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance, Belinda McKeon (ed.) (2015) Dublin: Tramp Press, 246 pp., €15/£12/$14.95, ISBN-13: 978-0992817053, paperback
The Irish Short Story: Traditions and Trends, Elke D’Hoker and Stephanie Eggermont (eds) (2015) Oxford: Peter Lang, 322 pp., ISBN 978-3-0343-1753-5, paperback
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