Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2014

‘Solomon’ is a new work of short fiction, set in the United Kingdom and northern Uganda. It explores themes of memory, violence and recovery through the consciousness of a young Ugandan man. The accompanying essay ‘“Solomon”: Terror and Terroir’ reflects upon the genesis and writing of the story in the context of Terroir, a new book-length collection of fiction, with emphasis on depictions of violence and the relationship between the notion of terroir and human psychology.

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.

Criticism on Alice Munro has neglected many adaptations of her writing. This article offers a corrective by examining Don McBrearty’s 25-minute short film ‘Boys and Girls’ (1983), based on the story of the same title. In this article, I explore how Munro’s treatment of metanarration and her preoccupation with issues of perspective – as revealed, for instance, by the story’s gestures towards its being focalized from the perspective of an unnamed, first-person narrator and that it is relayed to us in retrospect – are imbricated in the narrative structure of McBrearty’s adaptation. I begin by exploring Munro’s concerns about narration and gender before examining McBrearty’s project and analysing how it not only replicates but also offers a fresh perspective on the short story.

This article examines the manner in which we impose the logic of short fiction on life narratives, and more broadly, the intertwining of the way that we understand fiction and the way that we understand reality. The subject matter ranges through Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestion that the moral acts are like the creation of works of art through Ian Hacking’s notion of criminals ‘acting under description’ and Richard Sennett’s discussion of the narratives that downsized IBM employees place upon their redundancies. Parallel to this runs the examination of fictional life narratives found in Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried. These disparate elements are united through their reliance on plausibility, agency and event, which are not only features of short fiction but also the very limits of the stories we tell about ourselves.

While there are myriad lenses through which we can examine Anton Chekhov’s mastery of the short-story form, one of the clearest is his use of the natural world. The writer often uses descriptions to build story structure and transmogrify the protagonist’s experience, all the while highlighting a theme pervasive throughout his work – that of humankind’s damaging effect on the natural world and the implications of reciprocal damage. A close look at two of Chekhov’s later stories – ‘Peasants’ and ‘In the Ravine’ – reveals his ability to paint, in simple, evocative language, landscapes that do far more than serve as mere backdrops.

The New Puritan Generation, José Francisco Fernández (ed.) (2013) Canterbury: Gylphi, 203 pp., ISBN: 9781780240152, Paperback, £14.99

Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original, Thomas Morr is (ed.) (2014) Dublin: Tramp Press, Dublin, 215 pp., ISBN 978-0-9928170-15, Paperback £12.00