scholarly journals The American Short Story Cycle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
History Of ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Story Cycle

The American Short Story Cycle spans two centuries to tell the history of a genre that includes major and marginal authors, from Washington Irving through William Faulkner to Jhumpa Lahiri. The short story cycle rose and proliferated because its form compellingly renders the uncertainties that emerge from the twin pillars of modern America culture: individualism and pluralism. Short story cycles reflect how individuals adapt to change, whether it is the railroad coming to the small town in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or social media revolutionizing language in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). Each chapter examines how cycles use temporal and spatial settings and characterization to link the stories within. Doing so reveals that authors turn to the cycle when exploring identities—be they gendered or ethnic—in flux and when experimenting with the conventions of narrative unity, from regionalist through modernist to contemporary writers. This book constructs a history of community, family, and time in American culture through one of the nation’s most popular, yet unrecognized genres. Combining new formalism in literary criticism with scholarship in American Studies, this book gives a name and theory to the genre that has fostered the aesthetics of fragmentation, as well as recurrence, that characterize fiction today.

scholarly journals Negotiating Identity and Belonging in the Western Indian Ocean: Fluid Enabling Spaces in M.G. Vassanji’s Uhuru Street

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Dolors Ortega ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Indian Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Cycle

This article analyses the short story cycle Uhuru Street, which describes the life of the members of the minority Ismaili community, whom Vassanji fictionalises as Shamsis, in the context of crucial changes in the history of Tanzania. Diaspora, fragmentation and ethnic multiplicity in a really hierarchical tripartite society will be studied within the framework of cross-cultural networking in the Western Indian Ocean, where complex identity relations are established. Our discussion stems from a brief historical genealogy of the Indian community in Tanzania, it analyses the complex identity relations and affiliations among Tanzanian citizens of Indian descent, and moves on to the analysis of Vassanji’s short stories in order to explore those fluid and enabling spaces where identity and belonging are to be negotiated.

Novellas-in-Flash and Flash Cycles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social And Ethical Issues ◽  
Story Cycle

The coda places the book in a larger discourse about new formalisms, which see form as a way to understand political, social, and ethical issues as intrinsic to aesthetic practice. The coda offers a theory of how the short story cycle inverts, displaces, and combines elements of the short story, the short story collection, the novel, and ancient story cycles. The long history of the cycle suggests a unique generic compulsion—which unsettles expectations of closure, development, revelation, and explanation—that revolutionized modern and contemporary fiction.

Resisting Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Story Cycle

Chapter five argues that the best way to grasp William Faulkner’s oeuvre is through the paradigm of the short story cycle because of his use of limited localities, interstitial temporalities, and formative kinships; this approach pushes against a mountain of criticism that expects and measures the unity of his work. The form, with its privileging of multiple, competing narratives, is ideally suited to articulating the crises of history and subjectivity that Faulkner dramatizes. Faulkner’s achievements in the cycle reach an apex in Go Down, Moses (1942), which is his most sustained treatment of black-white relations. Go Down, Moses explores both continual and heightened moments of interracial intimacies. The stories most sharply narrate the crises that the white McCaslin line faces when grappling with their unacknowledged kinship with the black Beauchamp line. This chapter demonstrate that the cycle dramatizes the production of provisional racial identities, because they do not depend upon rigid distinctions, essential characteristics, or defined origins.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

scholarly journals Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Evolving Networks ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

scholarly journals Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Story Collection

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

Book Reviews

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169
Author(s):  
Robert M. Luscher ◽  
Felicity Skelton ◽  
Sarah Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Story Cycle

The American Short Story Cycle, Jennifer J. Smith (2018)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 194 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47442-393-9, h/bk, £75.00ISBN 978-1-47445-269-4, p/bk, £19.99Dead Voices, F. G. Paci (2019)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 285 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-319-6 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-318-9, p/bk, $25Eye, Marianne Micros (2018)Toronto: Guernica Editions, 142 pp.,ISBN 978-1-77183-258-8 (EPUB), ISBN 978-1-77183-257-1, p/bk, $20Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, Chris Mourant (2019)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 301 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47443-945-9, h/bk, £80

Women’s relational autonomy and the short story cycle: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Kadmos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Relational Autonomy ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
The Individual

Focussing on Elizabeth Strout’s short story cycle, Olive Kitteridge (2008), this article proposes that contemporary collections of interconnected stories open new ways of understanding women’s relational autonomy, and the importance of continuing relationships of interdependence and care. Here, relational autonomy is seen as a framework for shared beliefs that subjects’ situated identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex intersection of social determinants, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity. This discussion proposes that the short story cycle is a particularly productive form for writers interested in exploring how women come to a greater sense of who they are through these relationships – some enduring, others not – as they are experienced through apparently mundane moments in women’s lives. This is partly due to less emphasis on the individual trajectory of an autonomous person, and a greater focus on the shared experiences that shape identities and foster personal growth and collective fulfilment. The article seeks to explore this understanding of the cycle by reflecting on distinctive features of the form – modular narrative structure and narrative openness – seen in Olive Kitteridge, to demonstrate how this mode of storytelling helps make salient women’s relational lives.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document