Carson McCullers’s ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940)

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Thomas Wolfe ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Petrified Forest

Chapter 11 takes a short essay by Carson McCullers as the basis for a discussion of America’s national trait of being ‘homesick most for the places we have never known’. It considers this phenomenon with reference to the writings of Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who made nostalgic wonder part of the American vernacular. It also draws a comparison between the forward-looking nostalgia McCullers analyses and Robert Sherwood’s 1935 play The Petrified Forest in which the young heroine dreams of returning to a home she has never known. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—‘a veritable Ulysses of the black experience’—and a short story by McCullers called ‘The Aliens’, both of which urge a mature, hopeful, and inward-facing quest for ‘the homeness of home’.

‘What’s Wrong with Carpets?’

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
Jonathan Crane
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Social Content ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
Short Essay

The short story ‘What’s Wrong with Carpets’ continues in the Chekhovian tradition, exploring reality as it is while metonymically signifying the protagonist’s whole life through the glimpse. Moreover, by representing a slice-of-life from modern Britain, with younger generations experiencing job and housing insecurity as a consequence of economic conditions, the story is freighted with subtle sociopolitical implication. The story, therefore, works counter to Charles E. May’s contention that whilst the short story is able to render the mystery and ambiguity of human reality, it has never had a political agenda, and has never succeeded in emphasizing social content. The story is followed by a short essay on its composition.

Happy objects and cruel optimism in Carson McCullers’ story ‘Correspondence’

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
Erin Bell
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Short Text ◽  
American Author

This article discusses American author Carson McCullers’ 1942 short story titled ‘Correspondence’, in order to consider how the unique form of the epistolary short story amplifies themes of alienation and absence. Drawing upon contemporary affect theory as well as a close reading of the story, I consider how the letters in the text can be understood as what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘happy objects’, as well as how the process of letter writing becomes exemplary of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism. Based on her own disappointment with letters and letter writing, McCullers’ short text problematizes the act of writing letters and demonstrates the complexities of epistolary short fiction.

scholarly journals The Use of Meta-discourse An Analysis of Interactive and Interactional Markers in English Short Stories as a Type of Literary Genre

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Dunya A AlJazrawi ◽  
Zeena A. AlJazrawi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Comprehensive Model ◽  
Raymond Carver ◽  
American Authors

The present study investigated the frequency and type of metadiscourse markers in short stories as a kind of literary genre and how these markers are used by short story writers to produce persuasive texts. It is a pioneering study, since very few studies in the literature tackled literary genre and no study involved analyzing short stories. The corpus of 88,940 words consisted of 18 short story texts written by the three famous American authors Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and Raymond Carver. To analyze this corpus, Hyland’s (2005) comprehensive model of metadiscourse was used. Results of the study indicated that metadiscourse markers are employed by short story writers to produce coherent texts and to make their stories persuasive. These results agreed with those of previous studies that involved literary texts indicating that metadiscourse markers are used frequently in such texts. The study findings proved that short stories are considered as persuasive texts not only due to non-linguistic factors, such as transportation, but also due to a linguistic one, namely, the use of metadiscourse markers. This finding is the most significant one, since it refutes the opinion that short stories are persuasive texts solely due to transportation and other similar factors. 

Investor-State Dispute Settlement under NAFTA Chapter 11: The Shape of Things to Come?

1998 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 263-290
Author(s):  
J. Anthony VanDuzer
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade Agreement ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Minimum Standards ◽  
The North ◽  
State Behaviour ◽  
Nafta Chapter 11 ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right

SummaryRecently, there has been a proliferation of international agreements imposing minimum standards on states in respect of their treatment of foreign investors and allowing investors to initiate dispute settlement proceedings where a state violates these standards. Of greatest significance to Canada is Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which provides both standards for state behaviour and the right to initiate binding arbitration. Since 1996, four cases have been brought under Chapter 11. This note describes the Chapter 11 process and suggests some of the issues that may arise as it is increasingly resorted to by investors.

The Relationship of Interrogative Suggestibility to Memory and Attention

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.C. Howard ◽  
A. Chaiwutikornwanich
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Oddball Paradigm ◽  
Memory Processes ◽  
Memory And Attention ◽  
Irrelevant Distractors ◽  
Alternative Hypotheses ◽  
Visual Oddball Paradigm ◽  
Interrogative Suggestibility ◽  
Task Irrelevant

This study combined an individual differences approach to interrogative suggestibility (IS) with ERP recordings to examine two alternative hypotheses regarding the source of individual differences in IS: (1) differences in attention to task-relevant vis-à-vis task-irrelevant stimuli, and (2) differences in one or more memory processes, indexed by ERP old/new effects. Sixty-five female participants underwent an ERP recording during the 50 min interval between immediate and delayed recall of a short story. ERPs elicited by pictures that either related to the story (“old”), or did not relate to the story (“new”), were recorded using a three-stimulus visual oddball paradigm. ERP old/new effects were examined at selected scalp regions of interest at three post-stimulus intervals: early (250-350 ms), middle (350-700 ms), and late (700-1100 ms). In addition, attention-related ERP components (N1, P2, N2, and P3) evoked by story-relevant pictures, story-irrelevant pictures, and irrelevant distractors were measured from midline electrodes. Late (700-1100 ms) frontal ERP old/new differences reflected individual differences in IS, while early (250-350 ms) and middle latency (350-700 ms) ERP old/new differences distinguished good from poor performers in memory and oddball tasks, respectively. Differences in IS were not reflected in ERP indices of attention. Results supported an account of IS as reflecting individual differences in postretrieval memory processes.

A Clinician's Thomas Wolfe

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-162
Author(s):  
ROBERT W. WHITE
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Wolfe
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document