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.

‘The Magazine Short Story and the Real Short Story’: Consuming Fiction in the Feminist Weekly Time and Tide

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Clay
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
The Subject

This chapter examines the short fiction content of the feminist weekly Time and Tide alongside readers’ letters printed in the periodical’s correspondence columns. A basic unit of magazine production the short story is also ‘definitional to modernism’ (Armstrong 2005: 52), and during the interwar period its status as commodity or art became the subject of increasing scrutiny and debate. Drawing on examples from amateur writers and well-known figures such as E. M. Delafield, the chapter explores how Time and Tide negotiated readers’ expectations for short fiction amongst its core target audience of women readers. Building on Fionnuala Dillane’s application of affect theory to periodical studies (2016), the chapter uses her concept of ‘discursive disruption’ to consider moments of conflict between Time and Tide and its readers over the short stories it published as moments of opportunity for the periodical to expand its scope, readership and brow, and renegotiate its position in the literary marketplace.

scholarly journals What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Light In August ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Point Of Reference

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

scholarly journals Gender Role Stereotyping Of Women As Housewives In Conventional Pakistani Society

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amna Saeed ◽  
Noreen Zainab
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Gender Role Stereotyping ◽  
Status Of Women

This study aims to analyze the short story, The Spell and the Ever Changing Moon (2014) by Rukhsana Ahmad, from the feminist perspective. A close reading of the text reveals that facing everyday challenges and juggling between multiple roles is a common practice for middleclass house wives in Pakistani society. The economic instabilities added with emotional, psychological as well as physical abuse plays a vital role in their oppression and humiliation on regular basis. These roles as assigned to them define their social standing and suffering becomes their destiny. Multiple roles of such women and social expectations outside and inside the house define their way of living. Each and every movement and thought becomes codependent on their social familial roles. Being selfless becomes an obligation and ‘sacrifice’ becomes convention for middle class women who spend their whole lives living under the thumb of their men folk. Moreover, the movement and status of women inside and outside the home is also a major concern addressed in this paper including the concept of home, and its significance in lives of Pakistani women.

scholarly journals KAJIAN STILISTIKA CERPEN “JALAN GELAP LANGIT TERANG” KARYA ABDUL WACHID (Stylistics Study of Abdul Wachid’s Short Story “Jalan Gelap Langit Terang")

ALAYASASTRA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Zuyinatul Isro
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This research discusses imagery, diction and figure of speech in a short story entitled “Jalan Gelap Langit Terang” written by Abdul Wachid. This short story is one of the author’s works in a short story anthology, Bacalah Cinta, published by BukuLaela in 2005. This research reveals some figure of speeches such as diction, imagery and elaboration employed by the author of the short story. This research applied both stylistic approach and descriptive qualitative method. Data collection was done by close reading observation and note taking. The result shows that the author takes the advantage of connotative, English and Indonesian diction in some sentences. The imagery employed by the author covers personification, hyperbole, metaphor, repetition, rhetoric, elypsis, and antithesis. Moreover, the author tends to show repetition and symblolism in his style.

The concept of baxt in the bilingual short-story collection glücksmacher - e baxt romani by Samuel Mago and Károly Mágó

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-241
Author(s):  
LORELY FRENCH
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Collection

This article presents a close reading of the Romani characters and their actions in five stories by Viennese Romani writer and activist Samuel Mago and in two stories by his brother, Hungarian award-winning journalist Károly Mágó, in their bilingual Romani and German collection glücksmacher - e baxt romani. Brief biographies and an outline of the history of Roma and antiziganism in Austria provide background to textual analysis that focuses on how characters in the stories engender baxt/“Glück,” which means both happiness and luck. This dual meaning has inspired philosophical, psychological, economic, and anthropological studies, but literary scholars have rarely examined the concept in texts by Roma. For the protagonists in the brothers’ stories, happiness and luck become based less on monetary fortunes than on other means to live and survive in dark times of persecution and discrimination. The characters’ decisions unveil perceptions of baxt that rely largely on acquiring food, preserving and passing down family heirlooms, receiving an education, and freeing oneself and one’s family from persecution.

‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Verbal Abuse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Parental Rejection ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
The One

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

‘Satyre upon a Saxaphone’: Fitzgerald and Music

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-113
Author(s):  
Jade Broughton Adams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Popular Magazine

This chapter demonstrates how Fitzgerald invokes music in his short fiction, which heavily features jazz. Fitzgerald shows how white artists such as the Castles and Irving Berlin often profited from the appropriation of African American musical culture such as jazz and blues. Fitzgerald’s explorations of Tin Pan Alley’s output demonstrate that a more malleable treatment of established formulae can yield valuable results. This book draws parallels between Irving Berlin’s subversion of tired Tin Pan Alley formulae, and Fitzgerald’s own manipulations of the popular magazine short story genre. In his later use of music, Fitzgerald explores the limitations of language, the role of the artist in society, and questions the value of popular culture itself. He satirises the conventions of popular songs, and subtly parodies short story conventions (particularly romantic short story conventions). Fitzgerald identifies with the songwriter, whose role is to provoke emotion and forge an intimacy with the consumer, much like the commercial short storyist. By positioning Fitzgerald’s thematic and character repetitions and concessions to the magazine format as deliberate rather than desperate, this chapter suggests that his self-parody is a conscious aesthetic decision in the process of exploring the identity of the authentic literary craftsman, dancer, or musician.

Horizon Magazine and the Wartime Short Story, 1940–1945

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-249
Author(s):  
Ann-Marie Einhaus
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Editorial Policy ◽  
Filler Material ◽  
Critical Factors ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement

Cyril Connolly’s wartime periodical venture Horizon is commonly regarded as one of the most significant British literary publications in this period alongside John Lehmann’s New Writing series. Connolly’s specialism was literary criticism and cultural commentary, but the magazine also prided itself in offering readers exciting new (and some older) works of poetry and fiction. Given the stature of the magazine, this chapter investigates whether Horizon had a noticeable impact on the wartime short story in Britain, and if so, what this impact might have been. It outlines an editorial policy that, with few exceptions, regarded short fiction as filler material and chose short stories based on a combination of practical and critical factors, determined by availability and convenience as much as by aesthetic judgement.

Frame, Janet (1924–2004)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy Pottroff
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Suicide Attempt ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Lunatic Asylum ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Janet Frame

Janet Frame was a celebrated New Zealand author with a prolific literary career and a dramatic personal history. Mirroring Frame’s own life, her writing frequently addresses poverty, marginalization, and the artist’s struggle in a conformist society. Both her prose and her poetry combine elements of modernism with magical realism. After a suicide attempt at university, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, including the notorious Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, where she received numerous electroshock treatments. In 1952, while Frame was in the asylum, New Zealand’s Caxton Press published her collection of short fiction entitled The Lagoon and Other Stories, which was awarded a prestigious national literary prize, the Hubert Church Prose Award. At the time, Frame was scheduled to have a lobotomy—until hospital officials discovered that she had won the award. In total, Frame was the author of twelve novels, four short story collections, one book of poetry, and three volumes of autobiography. She received many awards and honors, and her writing has garnered numerous literary prizes and much critical attention.

Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-174
Author(s):  
Eric Chalfant
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
White Noise ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spiritual Meaning ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Warren Weaver

This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studies by Mark Taylor. Then, a close reading of Don Delillo’s White Noise draws out the potential of noise to highlight media’s ability to provide spiritual meaning and truth through an affect of divination. Finally, I connect these themes to current conceptions of media’s relationship to truth as well as recent anthropology on religious divination, suggesting the utility of noise to aid in scholarly efforts to materialize both media studies and religious studies as they engage with affect theory.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document