Showing papers in "Style in 1993"

The Narrated and Its Negatives: The Nonnarrated and the Disnarrated in Joyce's Dubliners

Abstract: Joyce's expression, more often than not, is swollen to the limit of the reader's endurance positively by metaphor, puns, portmanteau words, neologisms, and so forth and negatively by cliches, hackneyed language, and repetition. But, as we all know, this swelling in the expression is not necessarily a padding resulting in a lack of significant meaning. Indeed, this apparent empty prolixity is a subtle way of conveying implicit information of plot, character, and theme. However, I wish to deal here with the contrary move in Dubliners: strategies of implication like not naming or delaying the names of characters or objects, eliding words in dialogue, referring to but not reporting words characters must have said, not identifying antecedents for pronouns, leaving referents vague in characters' thoughts and speech, suppressing the thoughts of characters whose thoughts are otherwise revealed (Gerard Genette's "paralipsis" in Figures III 212), and entirely omitting the narration of acts that must have happened (Genette's "ellipsis" in Figures III 128). Most of these techniques would qualify as Gerald Prince's "nonnarrated": "something is not told (at least for a while)" (2). On the other hand, what the characters do not say or do not do would seem to be a variety of Prince's "disnarrated".--"the events that do not happen" (2)--and one may notice in Dubliners many examples of words that are not expressed but could/should have been, acts that could/should have been performed but are not, states that could/should have existed but do not, and objects that could/should have been produced but are not. The nonnarrated and the disnarrated, their varieties and their functions are, then, my subjects as well as, on occasion, the "nonnarratable," that which according to Prince, "cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating" (1). One of the most frequently occurring varieties of the nonnarrated in Dubliners is what Stephanie Bronson calls the "unnamed": characters and qualities that are not given individual names (1). Of these, people in groups or undeveloped individuals filling minor roles like the "whining match-sellers" of "Counterparts" (Bronson 1) and Old Jack's son in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" are obvious candidates for what Seymour Chatman calls "walk-ons" or "extras," rather elements of the setting than characters (Story and Discourse 139). In the classical realistic novel, convention discourages the individual naming of such types: that is, they are nonnarratable. Similarly, sometimes objects are not named as in Old Jack's rather ambiguous reply to a question apparently about Mr. Tierney's payment to the canvassers: "it isn't but he has it, anyway" (121). The first "it" may mean "business," the second "money," but one cannot be sure. Or objects may be referred to by what almost amounts to code language as in Mr. Henchy's allusion to Tierney's secret whiskey cache as his "tricky little black bottle" (123). Even some relatively important characters are not given proper names: Mangan's sister in "Araby," the boys (and later narrators) of the first three stories, and the "queer old josser" of "An Encounter" (Bronson 2, 6, 8). In this latter story, the protagonist even falsifies his name to Smith to avoid the attachment of shame to his name. Still other characters' names are delayed: Parnell in "Ivy Day," Father Flynn, Nannie, and Eliza in "The Sisters" (Bronson 2, 5), Corley and Lenehan in "Two Gallants," and Kernan in "Grace." If we agree with Philippe Hamon that names in many ways have the potential to characterize, individualize a fictional person ("Pour un statut" 147-50), the lack of a name or its delay may well generalize a person as in the cases of the two "gallants." The term is understood ironically, of course, as it becomes evident by the two men's actions, words, and appearances: they represent a bully and a leech, types of the very lack of gallantry. In the case of Kernan in "Grace," the type is even more evidently that of a drunk. …

Reality in the Modern Short Story

Abstract: In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because,--because--I don't know why. (Anton Chekhov) If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. (Ernest Hemingway) It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power. (Raymond Carver) In the history of the development of short fiction, three major stylistic shifts have had far-reaching generic effects: the humanizing of the allegorical romance in the Renaissance, the high point of which are the novellas of Boccaccio; the psychologizing of the supernatural legend by the romantics in the early nineteenth century, best represented by the tales of Poe; and the lyricizing of the slice-of-life story by the realists in the early twentieth century, most clearly exemplified in the stories of Chekhov. I want to explore some generic innovations of the twentieth-century short story instituted by Chekhov, particularly what is meant by "realism" in that form. I focus on Chekhov, Hemingway, and Raymond Carver not only because they provide a convenient continuum from early to mid to late twentieth century, but also because, as the epigraphs above suggest, they are such self-conscious practitioners of the characteristics I wish to consider here: a literary technique that insists on compression, a rhetorical method that reveals meaning by leaving things out, and a language style that creates metaphor by means of metonymy. Moreover, all three authors attempt to express inner reality by describing outer reality and frequently thematize the human dilemma of trying to say the unsayable. Although I cannot in this space provide a complete historical context for my remarks, a few generalizations about previous generic shifts in the short story are necessary. Short fiction originated with the human need to narratize the perception of spiritual eruptions in the midst of the profane everyday world--those objectifications of fear or desire that Mircea Eliade has called the "sacred" or "true reality" for primitive man and woman (10) and that Ernst Cassirer has called moments of "mythic perception" (33). Although such experiences were initially recounted as revelations, the human need to create explanatory models for these experiences forced a shift away from a narrative description of the experience that gave rise to the revelation toward a unified framework of religious conceptual abstractions. By the Middle Ages, the revelatory experience had been so conceptualized that true reality was no longer seen to exist in isolated sacred moments of hierophanic encounter, but rather in a fully organized theological framework that it became the task of art to describe allegorically. This abstract distancing from actual human experience inevitably created a generic counterreaction for a return to "the real," the most famous manifestation of which was the basic shift from the "divine" comedy of Dante to the "human comedy" of Boccaccio. In the Renaissance novella, the breakup of everyday reality was not the result of a perception of a sacred or mythic experience, but rather a concatenation of cosmic accident and human foible. Although this displacement toward everyday life as the subject of narrative fiction was relatively constant up through the development of the eighteenth-century novel, short fiction retained its primary purpose as the allegorical expression of the concept of spiritual reality. The clearest example of this combination of the sacred and the profane is Daniel Defoe's "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs Veal," in which the spiritual, which was previously taken on faith, is replaced by spiritualism, which has to be made plausible by techniques of verisimilitude. …

A Poetics of Immediacy: Oral Narrative and the Short Story (the Short Story: Theory and Practice)

Abstract: The field of orality-literacy studies has helped broaden understanding m many disciplines, but it has not been introduced into discussions of the short story with any rigor, To approach the short story as something other than a kind of truncated novel and thus to consider what it means to read a story, I would like to propose an alternative model for studying the short-story form. That model is the oral epic. The epic is not the oral genre most immediately associated with the short story: Mary Louise Pratt, among other critics, has discussed the proximity of the written story to oral forms of the fairy tale, the exemplum, and the ghost story as it has influenced theoretical discourse surrounding the short story (189-91). The oral epic differs, however, from these shorter forms because of its density and the complex nature of its audience, both of which are relevant to the modern written text. Certainly, this is a genre that dramatically differs from the short story because it is not written down and because, more often than not, it occurs in verse rather than in prose. In his useful book, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong also warns that for anyone in a literate culture, an oral way of thinking is extremely difficult to imagine.(1) With these reservations firmly in mind, however, we should nonetheless be able to learn something useful about storytelling from the oral epic. This pairing may be helpful to theorists and students of the short story precisely because of its unlikeliness. It is not meant as a way to separate clearly the short story from the novel, but as a way to step around the very comparison between those two written forms that has become the conventional method of understanding what a short story may be. That comparison can at times be no more inevitable than a recurring comparison between a sonnet and a long poem would be in a critical discussion of the sonnet. While the short story and the novel may share the very important qualities of being fictional, narrative, and written in prose, therefore, my aim in these pages is to focus on the story as a genre in its own right, bringing in comparisons to the novel only as occasional points of overlap and reference. The oral-epic episode as a model serves to isolate and render more complex a critical understanding of the short story on a number of ways, and all of these contribute to an approach to the genre that I call a "poetics of immediacy." To begin with, the oral epic gives us another way to understand the density of meaning in short stories. It also provides a paradigm of audience that may bring to light certain aspects of reading the short story that are not as prevalent in discussions of the reading of texts in general. This audience, as it is related to the short story, works on the oral dynamic of a participating community, although the need to situate that community in terms of our myths or our politics can be problematic in a modern context. In the meantime, the density and multiple dimensions of the oral episode suggest another approach to ironic and metaphorical structures within the story form, and that new focus may need to rely more heavily on the unique role of the reader of the short story. 1. The study of oral art, as it occurs in primarily oral cultures, is an ongoing effort for which living examples are dwindling as the world becomes more and more literate. Within a diverse corpus of field studies and material, the work of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Adam Parry, although controversial, continues to serve as a cornerstone for the literary focus of much of the work on oral epic.(2) Oral narratives are highly formulaic. This formulaic construction applies not only to the surface language of a poem or story, but operates on a much deeper level, so that the most basic ideas that construct a narrative are themselves common and reusable. One of the most familiar instances of oral epic is The Odyssey although, ironically enough, the text we have put at the center of our canon of Western culture is itself a static version of what was probably a constantly changing oral narrative. …

Beyond What Meets the Eye: The Photographic Analogy in Cortazar's Short Stories

Abstract: Does not the photographer--descendent of augurers and haruspices--uncover guilt in his pictures? (Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography") Photography is a sort of a literature of objects. (Julio Cortazar) In reading Julio Cortazar's two major statements on the short story, "Some Aspects of the Short Story" (1963) and "On the Short Short Story and its Environs" (1969), one cannot but be struck by the multitude of analogies summoned to describe the art of that elusive prose-fiction genre. Unlike the critical essays of other well-known short-story writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Frank O'Connor, Eudora Welty, or Nadine Gordimer (four of those gathered in Charles May's 1976 collection of Short Story Theories, for example), Cortazar's essays seek to define this genre through a proliferation of metaphors drawn from widely disparate fields. Indeed, in addition to the photographic analogy, which I shall shortly be exploring in detail, in the brief space of the 1963 essay Cortazar likens the short story to a boxing match between the text and its reader ("Some Aspects" 28); to a transgression of limits, an "explosion of spiritual energy," a "bursting forth" or a "breakaway from the everyday" (29); to a macrocosmic galactic system ("a good theme is like a good sun, a star with an orbiting planetary system, that, often, goes unnoticed till the writer, an astronomer of words, reveals to us its existence" |30~); to a microcosmic atomic system ("a good theme is somehow atomic, like a nucleus with its orbiting electrons" |30~); and to the proverbial acorn ("every enduring story is like the seed in which the giant tree lies sleeping. That tree will grow in us, will cast its shadow across our memory" |30~). In the 1969 essay Cortazar invokes a new panoply of metaphors. He refers to the necessary "spherity" of the short story's closed form ("Short Short Story" 34); to the advantages of the first-person narrator ("he's inside the bubble and not behind the bubble-blower" |34~); to the writing of the short story as a kind of "exorcism" (35); and to its production as an extraction from a "looming mass," from "the abominable glob you had to tear free of with words" (36). Although Cortazar also would contrast the short story with the novel and compare its genesis to poetry, here and in numerous theoretical statements in other essays, in countless interviews, and in the practice of the short story itself, Cortazar paradoxically attempts to move toward the essentials of the short story by moving away from the field of literature. Although the most cogent of Cortazar's analogies for describing the impact of the short story may have been boxing ("the novel always wins by points, whereas the short story has to win by a knockout" |"Some Aspects" 28; translation modified~), his most extended metaphor for the art of short-story composition is photography. Other writers have employed this same interarts comparison I am thinking of Robbe Grillet's 1962 collection of stories entitled Instantanes (Snapshots), and Ionesco's 1962 La photo du colonel (The Colonel's Photo), but none have so thoroughly elaborated the equation of short-story writing to the practice of photography. In this essay I shall trace Cortazar's use of the photographic analogy from his critical writings through his collage texts to the metatextual aspects of his stories themselves I am interested in exploring the connections he makes between the cultural implications of the practice of photography and of the practice of literature and the way in which two stories in particular, "Blow-up" (Las armas secretas |1958~ translated as Secret Weapons) and "Apocalypse at Solentiname" (Alguien que anda por ahi |1977~ translated as A Change of Light) probe the question of the writer's engagement with society through themes that problematize photographic representation. In "Some Aspects of the Short Story" Cortazar opens his discussion of the "unique character of the short story" with what some theorists of the genre have considered its nemesis, its inevitable but ultimately defrauding comparison to the novel. …

The Mirror and the Labyrinth: The Further Ordeals of Character and Mimesis

Abstract: The current neglect of fictional character as a subject of study probably originates in our having had a surfeit of it in the era of psychological criticism. A more timely explanation is that there is no way to talk about character without treating it as a mimetic representation, and mimesis, if anything, is even more embattled these days than character. Somehow narrative, like Mother Courage, has thrived in these wars though literary events are equally illusory and fraught with the same problems of referentiality. Undoubtedly, narrative has gained the favor it has because it poses none of the "human" pretentions to identity or selfhood aroused by character. Indeed, as Peter Brooks says (a propos of Rousseau), identity "can be thought only in narrative terms, in the effort to tell a whole life, to plot its meaning by going back over it to record its perpetual flight forward, its slippage from the fixity of definition" (33). Character, by contrast, bids to be taken as something that remains steadily itself through the thick and thin of plot, and therefore it constitutes an ideal target for deconstruction: that is, for prying loose from the rock of its self-certainty "by the positive lever of |its own~ signifier" (Derrida lxxvii).(1) I want to address this issue by looking at two complementary cases in which character and mimesis are "put into question" on just this ground of fixity of definition. I am under no illusion that character can, or even should, be rescued in our affections (after all, as Edmund says in King Lear, "men are as the time is"), but it is tempting at least to examine what is being questioned, what may and may not be "fixed" in the character construction, and why mimesis is so troubling to postmodern critics. In the end, I suspect it all comes down to whether one chooses to regard character (and mimesis) as an affective contract between reader and author based on a (naive?) belief in shared experience or as a "tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" in the very writing that would constitute it (Barthes, Image--Music--Text 146). Obviously these are mutually exclusive philosophies of reading, perhaps even the extremes among "schools" of readers today. Even so, they are parasitic on each other in interesting ways. For example, the character illusion is composed of signs, but these disappear as signs and reappear as mimetic features much as pigment disappears in the features of the portrait "beyond"; signs, in their turn, can only be seen as signs if one maintains some sense of what they are signifying: that is, a mimetic illusion. In either case, it is a symbiotic dependency. The latter is clearly the more difficult trick, for sign and illusion are constantly changing places as one's frame of reference alters, whereas most readers would be as surprised as Monsieur Jourdain to learn they had been reading signs all their lives. This problem is illustrated perfectly in my first text, J. Hillis Miller's essay on character in his new book Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines (1992). The essay is based on work appearing as far back as the early 1980s, but Miller tells us that it has been "thoroughly recast, augmented, and revised to reflect |his~ present understanding" of the subject (xviii). So we have a relatively up-to-date opportunity to examine the deconstructionist position on literary character, less so on mimesis, that "fiercely maintained and yet manifestly absurd theory . . . still imperturbably, or almost imperturbably, assumed by many critics and readers today" (99). But the problem is still there: one cannot go into the fictional labyrinth without encountering word creatures that have certain alluring resemblances to real people. As Miller puts it, "If I speak or write of fictional characters as if they were real people, have I not myself passed through the mirror into the wonderland of fiction?" (30). Nevertheless, "to read a novel properly," even for deconstructive purposes, one must temporarily allow oneself to be seduced by the mimesis into taking the characters as real even though character is finally nothing more than "a fluid assemblage of fleeting catachreses" as opposed to "a fixed personality" (117). …

«I only said-the syntax-»: Elision, recoverability, and insertion in Emily Dickinson's poetry

Abstract: Modele macro-structurel d'insertion pour la recuperation de la syntaxe poetique de E. Dickinson

Criminal slang in Oliver Twist: Dickens's survival code

Abstract: Le fonctionnement social de l'argot criminel dans Oliver Twist de C. Dickens. Implications ideologiques de la non/traduction de ses codes linguistiques par les personnages. Contraste entre la logique du secret et l'affirmation de l'identite, face a la culture dominante de la societe victorienne

«The words had been right and necessary»: Doris lessing's transformations of utopian and dystopian modalities in The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five

Abstract: L'espace exterieur de la zone marginale indechiffrable comme autre metaphore de la domesticite dans The Marriages de D. Lessing. Strategies alternatives de la fable speculative, fluidite et dissolution des dualismes masculin/feminin, revision du symbolisme spatial a lumiere des theories de Lacan et Irigaray

Stops on the Way to "Shiloh": A Special Case for Literary Empiricism

Abstract: One of literature's memorable semiotic moments occurs in Stephen Crane's classic short story "The Open Boat." The desperate men in the lifeboat see a speck on the distant shore. Eventually, the speck becomes a man. He is waving his arms at the crew. Relief! Rescue at last? No, it appears that the man is only giving them a friendly hail, misreading their condition as they misread his signal. This essay is about other semiotic moments, some of them in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason, some of them in the history of short-fiction theory. I will be waving my arms too, but let me begin by listing my premises: 1) storying is a primary mode of cognition (counting, for example, is another); 2) the short story--that singly authored, culturally specific, densely signifying art form--is a primary site for literary investigation; it cannot be explained by an aesthetics based on poetry or a narratology based on the folktale or a script based on cultural studies although each of these approaches has contributed to short-fiction theory. These premises have led to a kind of literary empiricism. This is not the same thing as an empirical approach to literature, a growing area of interest for many scholars in other disciplines. It does, however, mean an openness toward the findings of other people who do research on storying: namely, psychologists, discourse theorists, and cognitive scientists. This kind of literary empiricism is descended from three very central traditions in short-fiction studies: genre criticism, reader-response theory, and formalism. I will begin with a little of this family history, and then move on to a discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh." "But genre criticism. isn't it--dead?" I often hear those words (or get that look) when I say I am interested in the short story. Perhaps it is too late in the day to ask, "What is a short story?" We can, however, ask a more primary question: "What is storyness?" In the 1970s, psychologists working with memory looked at regularities in what subjects recalled from the stories they had read and found that texts with a normative event structure were most easily remembered (Mandler and Johnson 111-15). In other words, storyness is a condition of narrative that fulfills a story grammar. In the 1980s there were many challenges to these story grammars, and the emphasis shifted from a linguistic to a cognitive model or schema. According to many psychologists, stories are about people trying to solve problems or achieve goals; thus, a model for comprehending plan-based behavior should explain how readers or listeners comprehend stories. A variety of models was developed and, of course, allowed for subgoals, thwarted goals, and even negative or absent goals. Then, in 1982, the same year Bobbie Ann Mason published "Shiloh" in book form, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, William F. Brewer, challenged both the story grammars and the plan-based comprehension models, saying that neither was truly specific to the experience of reading "stories." He had an understanding of both literary and rhetorical theory and knew that discourse has to be understood in the context of its function or purpose. So he claimed that stories are a class of narratives meant to entertain, and he developed experiments for testing the arousal, intensification, and release (or resolution) of three affects within readers: surprise, suspense, and curiosity (473). For many reasons, his "structural-affect" theory, as he called it, is alien to the literary scholar. Still it warrants attention. Brewer was trying to anatomize story processing, trying to determine its stages: the sequence of its cognitive strategies and affective states. He was interested in the way readers determine the "storyness" of stories and wanted to test empirically for this intuition. I shared his goal, though not his method. My working assumption was as follows: storyness inheres in any narrative segment that tells about a significant risk to some form of human wellbeing that is subsequently either lost or gained/regained. …

The Long and the Short of It

Abstract: I have chosen a title with a familiar ring to it not merely out of facility and because length is perhaps the most significant feature in short story definitions but also in order to repeat (in part) the title (or some segment) of earlier discussions of the short story. I am thinking of Herbert Gold's "The Novel and the Story: the Long and Short of It," for example; of Mary Louise Pratt's interesting "The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It"; and of Susan Lohafer who, in her splendid Coming to Terms with the Short Story, considers "the long and the short of prose fiction" (13). Besides, my repetitious title is emblematic of the repetitions found in a good number of essays on the topic, consisting of comparisons between short fiction and the novel, for instance; of complaints about the unjust lack of regard for even great exemplars of the former in comparison with a concentration on long fiction, poetry, or drama; of laments (which sound increasingly less persuasive) on the paucity of "serious" or "theoretical" criticism devoted to the short story; of claims of the latter's resistance to (illuminating) definitions (similar claims can, of course, be made about the service encounter, the conversation, the essay, the poem, or even the novel); and of attempts to define it, nonetheless, in terms of at least some of the features I will use for my own definition (see, among others Clare Hanson, Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, Charles E. May, Allan Pasco, and Valerie Shaw). In order to belong to the class of short stories, a text must be short: not long (War and Peace, say, Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past), not medium (The Stranger, Strait Is the Gate), and not, as Poe himself pointed out, very short. "Undue brevity," Poe noted, "is just as exceptionable |in the short: story~ as in the poem," where it "degenerates into epigrammatism" and fails to produce "an intense and enduring impression" (47-48). A minimal story like "Mary was very happy, then she lost a lot of money, and she became very sad" does not quite a short story make; neither does the anecdote by Enrique Anderson Imbert called "Taboo," which uses just thirty-one words in the original Spanish version;(1) and, more generally, neither does any text that can be read in less time than it takes to sit down. Furthermore, and regardless of its degree of narrativity (regardless of how narrative it is), the text must satisfy not simply the requirements of narrativehood (represent one or more events) but the requirements of storyhood (represent a series of situations and events involving anthropomorphic beings such that at least one nonlinguistically bound transformational relation obtains between an earlier situation and a later one). At least some of these situations and events must be fictional (they have never had any empirical existence: their meaning and force depend on a feigned context). At any rate, their historical veracity, their factual truth, is not relevant to their significance. The text must also be written and it must be written in prose (as opposed to verse rather than to poetry). It must be "literary"; offered for "display"; intended or taken to be beautiful, pleasing, aesthetically affecting (I stress, in passing, that just as not every story is a fiction and vice versa, not every fiction is literary: think of grammatical examples or philosophical suppositions). Finally, the text must be autonomous. It must not (primarily) depend for its import on another text in which it is embedded or with which it is conjoined or alternating and it must not have as its (primary) purpose the illumination of such a text. Whatever its ultimate worth, this relatively standard definition would allow us to distinguish the short-story genre from a multiplicity of other (more-or-less related) genres: tragedy, the essay, the sonnet, but also verse narratives, so-called natural narratives, myths, jokes, anecdotes, or news stories, novels, short novels, annals, long stories, scientific reports, plot summaries, and so on and so forth. …

The "Feminine" Short Story: Recuperating the Moment

Abstract: Under the light of recent theorizing, especially the theorizing based upon the Continental break with phenomenology, the dimension of time implicit in narrative tends to be hypostatized into spatial figures in a way that emphasizes conceptual structure over the dynamics of chronicity. Working as figures themselves in a diagram in which the text provides but one of the points of reference, critics "situate" themselves, "locate" the text within some context, identify "margins" and "centers," and "colonize" this or that "sphere." Locutions like "site" and "scene" may help to describe the rhetorical architecture of stories, but they also obscure the temporal preoccupations of narrative.(1) Thus, in a critical environment that is suspicious of formalism, the vocabulary of spatial ordering seems as insistent now as it was in the heyday of New Criticism.(2) Such spatial terminology may point to the wariness that poststructuralist theory harbors about the metaphysical danger of becoming preoccupied with the representation of time at all. J. Hillis Miller's attack on Paul Ricoeur's exhaustive study of time and narrative may suggest why: the phenomenological heritage of temporal preoccupation has a tendency eventually to engage conceptions of causality through the emphasis on the sequentiality of memory and expectation, and such matters may move the critic to celebrations of myth, symbol, transcendence, presence.(3) Paul de Man's essay on the rhetoric of Romantic temporality is perhaps the locus classicus for this theoretical suspicion of the "cult of the moment" (204). De Man's critique of Romantic symbolism defends against its temptation to make the ontologically bad-faith identification of the subject with nature through an assertion of the "factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self" (226); a more "authentic" representation signals temporality's relation to its subjective construction through "distance and difference" (222). If some current theorizing suspects the representation of the moment for its nostalgic invocation of phenomenological metaphysics, some feminist theoretical positions embrace temporality as a gendered modality of the feminine imagination. I am thinking here of Helene Cixous's evocation of a flowing, "feminine" writing that counters the static forms of masculine inscription with an ongoingness that resists the interruption of symbolic abstraction: "her writing also can only go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours, daring these dizzying passages in other, fleeting and passionate dwellings within him, within the hims and hers whom she inhabits just long enough to watch them, as close as possible to the unconscious from the moment they arise. . ." (88). I want to suggest a connection between the notion of an ecriture feminine as inflected by an atunement to the moment and the concerns of women who have chosen the short story as a form that permits the representation of time passing without making rhetorical gestures toward universal meaning. I want to suggest here, indeed, that the dialectic between the "temporal" writing of women and the "spatial" writing of men can be seen to recapitulate major issues in the evolution of the twentieth-century epiphanic short story as a woman's tradition that is intent upon the intimation of a signification that punctuates rather than halts the density of flowing sensation. Although the designation of this instant as an epiphany originates with James Joyce's discussion in Stephen Hero, its evolution in the short story owes greatly to the narrative experiments of writers like Virginia Woolf, even as these would be critiqued by an alternate feminist tradition that was suspicious of Woolf's brand of narrative impressionism as both philosophically naive and politically powerless. Woolf understood the presiding motive of the modernist experiment in prose as an attempt to represent slight markers of implication within the structure of an intensively managed fictional form like the short story (or the "lyrical" novel). …

After Epiphany: American Stories in the Postmodern Age

Abstract: Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. (Italo Calvino) To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded. (Aldo Rossi) To talk about short stories as small things is to risk a return to that lowest of common story denominators: a short story is a story that is short. I want to begin there, nevertheless, by positing some connections between the petits recits, the circumstantiated struggles, the perishing trajectories of love and thought--the materials and occasions of postmodern culture--and some American stories of our time. In these stories, small figures large. It disfigures teleology, displaces universal truths and eternal verities, and eventually the epiphany itself, that point of contact with meaning or wholeness, which has stood so long at the center of our understanding of the genre. To make such a claim, to suggest that contemporary stories do not inevitably advance toward and can no longer be read in terms of epiphany, is to challenge short-story theory at the point of greatest consensus. The epiphany is, even among critics of widely divergent opinion on other matters, almost a given. "Short stories often work towards a single moment of revelation . . . an epiphany, or instant of radiant insight," Valerie Shaw observes in her volume on the story. "Suddenly the fundamental secret of things is made accessible and ordinary circumstances are transfused with significance" (193). In his widely cited essay on "The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction," Charles E. May writes: "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" (329). Mary Rohrberger suggests, likewise, that the story is metaphysical in its orientation and that it represents "the author's probing of the nature of the real." "As in the metaphysical view," she writes, "reality lies beyond the ordinary world of appearances, so in the short story, meaning lies beneath the surface of the narrative. The framework of the narrative embodies symbols which function to question the world of appearances and to point to a reality beyond the facts of the extensional world" ("Short" 81). And in his very recent essay on the genre, Allan H. Pasco concludes that the movement of the story is toward "the essential truth or idea or image which rises above time" (420). Such views essentialize, I would suggest, what is arguably modern. "I shall call modern," Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, "the art which devotes its 'little technical expertise' . . . to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible" (78). Shaw's concluding description of the short story as a genre is strikingly similar to Lyotard's account of the modern. "The short story's success," she writes, "often lies in conveying a sense of the unwritten, or even unwriteable things" (264). Rohrberger, too, finds "at the very base of the short story" the unpresentable, "the that that is unsaid but somehow manages to be said" ("Between" 43). This assimilation of modernist epistemology into definitions of the genre is doubly problematic for the critic of the contemporary story, in which essentialist notions have given way and metanarratives--whether of cosmic truth, self-knowledge, or, in Eudora Welty's words, "emotions which are eternally the same in all of us" (108)--are increasingly met with what Lyotard terms "incredulity" (xxiv). Thomas M. Leitch is the only critic to date who has vigorously challenged the claim that "all short stories proceed to a revelation that establishes a teleology, a retrospective sense of design" (131). …

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Bowles

Abstract: La recurrence du modele syntaxique et prosodique de W. L. Bowles dans les sonnets de S. T. Coleridge et W. Wordsworth

Taxonomy and the undoing of language: dialogic form in the universal languages of the seventeenth century

Abstract: Sur l'echec des languages universels a faire correspondre la taxinomie de l'ordre naturel et la logique de la representation syntaxique dans les discours scientifiques du XVII e siecle. La suppression du dialogisme du langage unitaire et l'utilisation des ressources de la taxinomie aristotelicienne

The Short Story: The Short of It

Abstract: A number of significant changes in our understanding of the short story have occurred since the 1983 publication of two major books: Susan Lohafer's Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Valerie Shaw's The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. Perhaps most important, we have turned away from the unhelpful posture that generic distinctions are pernicious, a position that dominated criticism growing out of the Nouvelle Critique. Rather than struggling to show that we cannot know--that prose fiction may be referred to only as recit or narrative or fiction, that rare exceptions invalidate any generic rule--most professional readers have accepted the common knowledge that there is such a thing as genre and that delineating the various manifestations helps to understand what creative writers are about. Among the advantages that could be claimed for current definitions of the short story, I might cite the effort to avoid emphasizing technique and to focus on function. Just as building codes that made lead pipes a legal requirement became needlessly restrictive when the much cheaper and more effective PVC pipe came into general usage (since lawmakers codified the material rather than addressing the issue of strength, durability, and capacity), so short-story definitions that turned around devices and vehicles (even one as important as plot or a narratively based conception of "story") crumbled when artists rolled out legions of "stories" that go nowhere, that exemplify what Joseph Frank has called "spacial form" and I have termed "image structure" (Pasco, Novel Configurations). Take, for example, the case of Dominic Head's persuasive analysis of conflicting voices and cultural context in the modernist short story. His additional claim, however, that these traits have the status of generic characteristics for the short story as a whole fails to convince anyone who has read widely in the genre. As Head defines the qualities that interest him, there is no question that they occur in many short stories, but they are not universal traits. Despite the undoubted importance of work by such writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Malcolm Lowery, as Lohafer put it, "|t~he modern story is merely a kind of story" (Coming to Terms 10). It is no more or less a short story than the preceding generation's creations, which tended to be dominated by a single, narrative voice. And, as Miriam Marry Clark makes clear in her consideration of recent short fiction (above), the postmodern story has carved out yet another set of characteristics. Generic definitions based on devices, techniques, subject matter, in short on the short story's paradigm of interchangeable parts, have historically limited life and usefulness. Almost always, they exclude the preceding generation's creations, though the next generation takes revenge by rejecting these strategies for others. Most recent attempts at circumscribing an appropriate definition have, however, succeeded in minimizing emphasis on the constituent elements to center on the essential, core characteristics. Still, although I do not dispute the usefulness of definitions advanced by Norman Friedman ("Recent"), Lohafer (Coming to Terms), Michel Viegnes, Gerald Prince (above), and others, for the sake of simplicity, perhaps even of elegance, I turn to the formula I advanced several years ago: a short story is a short, literary prose fiction ("On Defining Short Stories"). I do so because, after reading the contributions to this special issue on the short story, I believe it appropriate to expand on a portion of my earlier essay and discuss the implications of one of the qualities incorporated in the definition: shortness. Although I had thought to avoid the dangers of dark ice in these remarks, and not return to a defense of my definition, I find myself skating around the thinning edge when I turn towards brevity. As William Carlos Williams put it, however, "The principal feature re. …