Style articles from September 1993

Style archives from September 1993

The long and the short of it. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

Beyond what meets the eye: the photographic analogy in Cortazar's short stories. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

A poetics of immediacy: oral narrative and the short story (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

Reality in the modern short story. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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 "feminine" short story: recuperating the moment. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

After epiphany: American stories in the postmodern age. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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)...

Stops on the way to "Shiloh": a special case for literary empiricism. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

The narrated and its negatives: the nonnarrated and the disnarrated in Joyce's Dubliners. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...

Recomposing "Valdemar": Graham Greene reweaves a tale by Poe. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... Despite his relatively short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe has left an indelible imprint on a vast range of writers from Baudelaire to Borges to Barth. Graham Greene, too, sees the footsteps of Poe before him, as allusions to Poe's work in...

The short story: the short of it. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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....

The mirror and the labyrinth: the further ordeals of character and mimesis. (The Short Story: Theory and Practice)
September 22, 1993... 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...