Excerpt: The short story cycle, often relegated to the margin of literary studies, offers a pertinent example of a nomadic genre. Because it resists definition, it inhabits a liminal space straddling the short story and the novel. The fixed centrality of the novel, as a recognized and well-established genre, is upset by texts trespassing borders […]
Magic Realism at the Service of Ethnicity: Darrell Kastin’s Azorean Honeymoon in The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales
This essay attempts to contribute to the ongoing critical discussion on theshort story-cycle and its tradition within the framework of emergent contemporary American literatures, more specifically American writings with a Portuguese ethnic resonance. The collection of stories which will be the basis for discussion in the ensuing pages is Darrell Kastin’s The Conjurer & Other […]
Circling the end of the line in Vimala Devi’s Monção: glints of significance across Vimala Devi’s short story cycle
In this article I analyse Vimala Devi’s Monção (1963) as a short-story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure” (Lundén 12). It is this generic quality I argue, […]
Inclusive Memory: The Power of Collective Remembering in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
This essay considers how collective memory works to develop and sustain a group identity in Gloria Naylor’s 1980 novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Using post-structural theorist Bronwyn Davies’s collective biography project as a model through which to understand Naylor’s work, it becomes clear how collective remembering in the novel prompts the women characters to […]
David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide: Dismantling the Trauma Paradigm
This article argues that David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008) offers us a culturally significant exploration of hegemonic theories around how we understand, or are said to understand, the temporality of trauma, its effect upon identity via its effect upon memory, and its representation in narrative. Moreover, the specific structure of Vann’s text as a short […]
Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan
First paragraphs: The use of absence in the short story cycle is an overlooked but vital element of the genre.1 It contributes to the way that cycles can manipulate the focus in their stories, using developed patterns of absence to influence the reader’s response. The technique of the return story is identified by Gerald Lynch […]
Adapting fragmentation: changing borders in Olive Kitteridge (HBO 2014); Case Histories, (BBC 2011-2013); Love and Friendship (2016) and Sanditon (ITV 2019)
First paragraphs: Text and film are typically framed by liminal spaces or borders where the reader or viewer enters and/or leaves the narrative world, i.e. openings and endings. Generally speaking, openings introduce the reader to the narrative world, while endings negotiate the separation with the reader or viewer (Hock 67). Narrative endings are particularly significant […]
“Preposterous Adventures”: Affective Encounters in the Short Story Cycle
In lieu of an (English) abstract here are the first paragraphs: In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed observes that hegemonic notions of happiness are associated both with a sense of belonging to a community and a sense of direction or “telos”: happiness is often figured as the “endpoint” of a unidirectional “path” (199, 32). […]
Centrifugal and Centripetal Narrative Strategies in the Short Story Composite and the Episode Film
The article discusses the unifying and disintegrating narrative strategies of a form of episodic narrative called the short story composite, or short story cycle, and will be compared with the episode film. In the first part of the article the view that the short story composite is a comparatively recent phenomenon is questioned, the argument […]
Expanded Universes in Science Fiction: A Matter of Integration
Still lacking theoretical definitions, expanded universes are an artistic phenomenon often seen in science fiction literature as well as innarratives in other media. This text proposes a mechanism to explain how these universes come into being. For this, we analyze a series of cases such as Robert A. Heinlen’s Future History, Ursula K. Le Guin’s […]