Engl 206: March 2001, David S. Miall
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Winter2001/short-story.htm
Origin of short story in storytelling; lyric impulse (contrast to the epic); cf. Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" (examples: "The Last of the Flock"; "The Mad Mother"; "We Are Seven")
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (Joyce 188)
If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material facts of the external world, as Ian Watt suggests, the short story attempts to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality. If the novel's quest for extensional reality takes place in the social world and the material of its analyses are manners as the indication of one's soul, as Lionel Trilling says, the field of research for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious, and the material of its analysis are not manners, but dreams. The results of this distinction are that whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual. While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophical framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. The novel exists to reaffirm the world of 'everyday' reality; the short story exists to 'defamiliarize' the everyday. Storytelling does not spring from one's confrontation with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity). (May 328-9)
Frank O'Connor: "the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community -- romantic, individualistic, and intransigent" -- hence its contains "outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society . . . As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel -- an intense awareness of human loneliness." (cited in May 333)
The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fire-flies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of -- the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. (Gordimer 459)
Man has to live how he can: overlooked and dwarfed he makes himself his own theatre. Is the drama inside heroic or pathological? Outward acts have often an inside magnitude. The short story , with its shorter span than the novel's, with its freedom from forced complexity, its possible lucidness, is able, like the poetic drama, to measure man by his aspirations and dreams and place him alone on that stage which, inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone. (Bowen 16)
[On postmodernism) There has been a general movement away from conventional social and behavioural codes, the sense of a common grammar of experience, and a new concern with the individual units of language. Hence the 'difficulty' of much postmodernist writing. The characteristic fragmentation of postmodernist discourse is the direct result of a confrontation with language as itself problematic. The primary question is that of the ability of language to express. In asking -- or expressing -- this question, postmodernist writers have involved themselves in the kind of paradox we night legitimately expect from a 'literature of exhaustion.' (Hanson 141)
In postmodernist fiction there is no obligation for us to believe any story, on any level: we are not necessarily required, even, to construct a sense of metaphysical coherence in a story in which physical coherence is lacking. Postmodernism presents us with a sense of infinite possibility, the other aspect of which is a sense of limitless futility: where we can choose anything, choice and shape may cease to have meaning and value. (Hanson 142)
Sources
Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Stories (1980).
Nadine Gordimer, in "The International Symposium on the Short Story." Kenyon Review 30 (1968).
Clare Hanson, Short Stories & Short Fictions 1880-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985). James Joyce, Stephen Hero (1944).
Charles E. May, "The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction." Studies in Short Fiction, 21:4 (Fall, 1984): 327-338.
Short story components: summarysetting -- time, place, environment
characterization -- change, traits, complexity (round, flat)
structure -- plot: time, episodes, conflict
diction -- discourse (direct, indirect, free indirect), style, figurative, allusive, symbolic
narrator -- tone, point of view, omniscient / limited omniscient / participator
emotions -- in story, in reader, from form
point -- interpretation, theme, moralTheory:
realism, modernism, postmodern (language)
lyrical background
epiphany
inner world of self
present moment, consciousness, unconscious | (vs. plot)
female / male style
stereotypes
author -- style, themes; reviews, literary history, criticism, etc.
Document prepared March 4th 2001