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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2016
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2016
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‘What we see with’: Redefining plot
By David JaussAbstractThe conventional definition of a plot, which focuses on causality and character change, is inadequate and misleading, especially in short fiction that focuses more on character revelation than character evolution. This essay defines and illustrates with examples from a wide range of short fiction seven alternative kinds of plot or organizing principles, most of which have been in existence for centuries but nonetheless remain unrecognized by most writers, scholars and teachers of creative writing – plots we can call episodic, juxtapositional, argumentative, expository, associative, lyrical or hybrid.
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‘Something I’ve been meaning to tell you’: Epistolary ‘writing back’ in Alice Munro’s stories
More LessAbstractEven though the narrative art of Alice Munro’s short stories has been widely studied, the use of letters as a recurring narrative element has so far been neglected. Letters are, however, central in Munro’s work as more than twenty of epistolary short stories in her oeuvre show. The letters in these stories fulfil a variety of functions. They become ‘third space[s]’ for the realization of romantic games or a means of therapy enabling the immediate reliving of an experience. This article focuses on the function of ‘writing back to the centre’ as it is displayed in two of Munro’s short stories: ‘Material’, collected in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), and ‘A Wilderness Station’, collected in Open Secrets (1994). An analysis of the letters in these stories from the ‘writing back’ lens shows that Munro’s understanding of ‘writing back’ differs significantly from the postcolonialist origin of the concept and is predominantly linked to a feminist dimension.
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Class wars between women in Maeve Brennan’s ‘The Anachronism’
More LessAbstractMaeve Brennan’s mid-twentieth century stories set in a wealthy village in New York are often read as critiques of prejudice against Irish-American maids. However, in ‘The Anachronism’ (1954), Maeve Brennan suggests that class, even more than nationality, is central to women’s identity in the United States during the 1950s. In this story, Brennan revises stereotypes of class and nationality regarding Irish and English immigrants. Betty, a maid from England, and Mrs. Conroy, an Irish-American widow, forge bonds based on class despite their expected enmity based on nationality.
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‘A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)’: Authorship as imposture
More LessAbstractAngela Carter’s ‘A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)’ can be read as an allegory of the production/reception processes as well as the author/reader relationship. Through the study of its language, structure and enunciative economy, important premises concerning authorship are undermined. First, the myth of the author as a prophet gave way to the image of the author as a craftsman; second, the illusion of the author’s will-to-say gave way to the reader’s role in meaning ascription and the revelation of the Reader-as-author imposture. As a reader of Carter’s short story, I will in my turn find myself in the position of an impostor, calling upon the real author and quoting her declarations, trying to build conformity between the real author and the authorial figure interpellated in the text.
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The good waiter’s guide in search of morsels of magic: Turning ethnography into fiction
More LessAbstractThis article is a version of the theoretical part of my Ph.D. thesis in creative writing, which accompanied a text entitled The Musty Currant-Breads: A Novel in Stories. The stories take place in Greece, in an all-night café by the harbour, where Egyptian immigrants who work as fishermen spend their spare time. Pavlo, waiter in the café, has an uneasy relationship with other locals, and he enters the marginalized world of these fishermen. I employed ethnographic techniques to gather material that I later used for the stories while working as a waiter, and I researched the lives of Egyptian fishermen by undertaking participant observation and autoethnography. In this article I show how a creative writer could use anthropological techniques and how ethnography could be turned into fiction.
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Rebooting the lyrical short story: Experimenting with viewpoint
More LessAbstractThis article examines the writings of short story theorists, Michael O’Toole, Monika Fludernik, Uri Margolin, Bruce Morrissette and John Gerlach, and analyses their findings through comparison with a number of experiments with viewpoint in my recently published short fiction collection Mr Jolly (2016). These experiments include utilizing second-person in order to understand its ability to exploit narrative indeterminacy, as well as other experiments with point of view in order to explore how various narrative modes can enhance dramatic engagement. Finally, the link between viewpoint and other narrative effects is demonstrated through the inclusion of a short story example from the collection.
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Reviews
Authors: Tom Ue, Carol Fenlon and Carol FenlonAbstractThe Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change, Maria Löschnigg (2014)
Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 381pp.,
ISBN: 9783868215267, p/bk, €42,50
Jellyfish, Janice Galloway (2015)
Glasgow: Freight Books, 169 pp.
ISBN: 9781908754950, Hardback, £12.99
I Am Because You Are, Pippa Goldschmidt and Tania Hershman (eds) (2015)
Glasgow: Freight Books, 209 pp.,
ISBN: 9781910449264, Paperback, £8.99
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Report on the 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 13–16 July 2016
By Moy McCroryAbstractAn attendee’s summing up of an international conference on the short story: ‘Influence and Confluence in the short story: East and West’ which raises questions of identity, ownership, ‘othering’ and reveals the differences aired, notably those of writer versus scholar, and writer versus critic, roles which, while not always seen as convergent in the academy, are in practice fulfilled by authors equally.
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