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Re-reading the Short Story PDF

145 Pages·1989·14.179 MB·English
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RE-READING THE SHORT STORY Also by Clare Hanson KATHERINE MANSFIELD (with Andrew Gurr) SHORT STORIES AND SHORT FICTIONS, 1880--1980 THE CRITICAL WRITINGS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD (editor) Re-reading the Short Story Edited by CLARE HANSON Senior Lecturer in English College of St Paul and StMary, Cheltenham Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-10315-7 ISBN 978-1-349-10313-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10313-3 © Clare Hanson, 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46814-2 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-02398-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Re-reading the short story. Includes bibliographies. 1. Short story--Congresses. 2. Short stories, English-History and criticism--Congresses. 3. Short stories, American-History and criticism Congresses. I. Hanson, Clare. PN3373.R5 1989 809.3'1 88-18402 ISBN 978-0-312-02398-0 Contents Notes on the Contributors vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Text and Affect: A Model of Story Understanding 10 David Miall 3 'Things out of Words': Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction 22 Clare Hanson 4 Too Short for a Book? 34 Nicole Ward Jouve 5 Time and the Short Story 45 Jean Pickering 6 Gender and Genre 55 Mary Eagleton 7 Johnny Panic and the Pleasures of Disruption 69 Robert Hampson 8 High Ground 86 Nicola Bradbury 9 Hemingway and Fitzgerald: Two Short Stories 98 Lionel Kelly 10 Genre Reversals in Doris Lessing: Stories Like Novels and Novels Like Stories 110 Claire Sprague 11 Crystals, Fragments and Golden Wholes: Short Stories in The Golden Notebook 126 Ellen Cronan Rose v Notes on the Contributors Nicola Bradbury is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. Her publications include Henry James: The Later Novels (1979) and A Select Bibliography of Henry James (1986). Mary Eagleton lectures in Literature at the College of Ripon and York StJohn. She has been closely involved in the development of Women's Studies and is the editor of Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (1986). Robert Hampson is Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. Clare Hanson is Lecturer in English at the College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham. Her publications include Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (1985) and, as editor, The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (1987). Nicole Ward Jouve is Reader in English at the University of York. She is the author of two novels, Le Spectre du Gris (translated by herself as Shades of Grey, 1981) and L'Entremise (1980). She is the author too of a critical work on Baudelaire, A Fire to Conquer Darkness (1980). She has written numerous articles, especially on women's writing, and has recently published a study of the Yorkshire Ripper (The Streetcleaner: The Yorkshire Ripper on Trial, 1986). She has also published a book on Colette (1987). Lionel Kelly teaches English at the University of Reading. His special interests are 18th-century and modern English literature, and 20th-century American literature. He is the editor of Tobias Smollett in the Routledge Critical Heritage series, and of Richard Aldington, Papers from the Reading Conference. David Miall is Senior Lecturer in English at the College of St Paul and StMary, Cheltenham. He is the author of many articles on literary theory and hermeneutics, contributing to the British Journal of Psychology as well as to specialist literary journals. vii viii Notes on the Contributors Jean Pickering is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno. Apart from publishing her own short stories, she has contributed to G. K. Hall & Co's forthcoming seven volume history of the short story, and has written on English women writers, including Vera Brittain and Margaret Drabble. Ellen Cronan Rose is Associate Professor of English at Drexel University, Philadelphia. Her publications include Margaret Drabble: Equivocal Figures (1980) and several essays on Doris Lessing. She is currently preparing a handbook on The Golden Notebook for the Modern Language Association. Claire Sprague is Visiting Professor of English at New York University. She is the editor of Twentieth Century Views: Virginia Woolf (1971) and, with Virginia Tiger, of Critical Essays on Doris Lessing (1986). She has recently published a critical study, Rereading Doris Lessing (1987) and is the editor of the Doris Lessing Newsletter. 1 Introduction CLARE HANSON For a complex of reasons the short story has been largely excluded from the arena of contemporary critical debate: this collection of essays aims to re-establish the short story as a legitimate subject for discussion. Each of the essays was first presented at a Sympo sium on the Short Story held at the College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham, in September 1986. The idea for the symposium came from a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the current level of debate on the short story form. Some of the contributors had previously worked on the short story, and all shared a sense that a unique area of literary activity was being neglected in critical terms- and this, paradoxically, at a time when it seemed that the short story would prove a particularly fruitful area of study in the light of recent developments in literary theory. In this intro duction I have attempted to chart some of the reasons for this paradoxical situation. It caused mixed feelings of exhilaration and frustration for the contributors to this collection: exhilaration at working on such an untouched area; frustration at seeing a wide communication gap and feeling a need to persuade others of the importance of a field which was becoming almost ghettoised. The publication of these essays is a step towards bridging this gap, making for necessary communication. Why has the short story been neglected, in both academic and non-academic critical circles? It is a form, after all, which is immensely popular with readers, and, perhaps more importantly, with writers. Doris Lessing, for example, confesses, as Ellen Rose points out in her essay in this collection, to an 'addiction' to the short story form. Does the problem lie in the fact that the short story is not quite respectable as an art form precisely because it is 'popular' in the pejorative sense? It took a long while for the novel to establish itself as a 'serious' art form: the short story-a relatively recent form- is still struggling. Also, the phenomenal success of the 'woman's short story' in the weekly magazines- comparable 1 2 Introduction to the success of Mills and Boon fiction - has undoubtedly helped to fix the form as popular and I or inferior in the minds of literary critics. Because of the economic difficulties of short story publishing, even the more serious new writers, Tama Janowitz for example, appear not only in the prestigious New Yorker but in the more humdrum British Woman's Journal: so in the late 20th century the short story form is still tied to the magazine outlet and to a potentially disabling publishing context. Over the last ten years a handful of academic books have grappled with the thorny question of short story theory.1 However, the best theory and criticism of the short story form has come from practising writers: Frank O'Connor, for example, in his pioneering study The Lonely Voice (1963); Eudora Welty in her subtle and oblique The Eye of the Story (1978). Nadine Gordimer, too, contributing to the 1968 Kenyon Review 'International Symposium on the Short Story' has pointed suggestively to the special possibilities of the short story form: Each of us has a thousand lives and a novel gives a character only one. For the sake of the form. The novelist may juggle about with chronology and throw narrative overboard; all the time his characters have the reader by the hand, there is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience that cannot and does not convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fire-flies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment. Ideally, they have learned to do without explanation of what went before, and what happens beyond this point. 2 A further point suggests itself. Is it not the case that the short story is or has been notably a form of the margins, a form which is in some sense ex-centric, not part of official or 'high' cultural hegemony? If by literary form itself we mean the expectations which we as readers bring to a genre, then the form of the short story has lent itself to the presentation of the partial, the incomplete, that which cannot be, as Nadine Gordimer suggests, entirely satisfactorily organised or 'explained'. The short story has offered itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks - writers who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling 'narrative' or epistemological I experiential framework of their society. So

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