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Intellect is happy to announce that Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 8.1-2 is now available! For more information about the issue, click here >> https://bit.ly/2yVzwIe

Contents

‘The Child of the Century’: ‘Reading and writing short fiction across media’

Authors: Ailsa Cox 
Page Start: 3

Segmentivity, narrativity and the short form: The Twitter stories of Moody, Egan and Mitchell

Authors: Elke D’hoker 
Page Start: 7

This article seeks to complement existing media-based approaches to Twitter fiction with a genre-based approach that considers it in the context of the genre and the tradition of the short story. After a brief introductory overview of Twitter fiction, I discuss three Twitter stories, written by established authors: Rick Moody’s ‘Some Contemporary Characters’ (2009), Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ (2012) and David Mitchell’s ‘The Right Sort’ (2014a). In a close textual analysis of these stories, I trace the impact of the Twitter format on the style, plot, themes and narrative techniques of these short stories. More particularly, I show how each of these works combines poetic and narrative techniques, or what DuPlessis has called ‘segmentivity’ and ‘narrativity’, in a different way. Finally, the conclusion considers the characteristics of these Twitter stories in the light of the tradition and the genre of the modern short story more in general.

Curating conclusions in ‘Among Us’: Collaborative Twitter fiction and the implied author

Authors: Emma Segar 
Page Start: 21

This article seeks to complement existing media-based approaches to Twitter fiction with a genre-based approach that considers it in the context of the genre and the tradition of the short story. After a brief introductory overview of Twitter fiction, I discuss three Twitter stories, written by established authors: Rick Moody’s ‘Some Contemporary Characters’ (2009), Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ (2012) and David Mitchell’s ‘The Right Sort’ (2014a). In a close textual analysis of these stories, I trace the impact of the Twitter format on the style, plot, themes and narrative techniques of these short stories. More particularly, I show how each of these works combines poetic and narrative techniques, or what DuPlessis has called ‘segmentivity’ and ‘narrativity’, in a different way. Finally, the conclusion considers the characteristics of these Twitter stories in the light of the tradition and the genre of the modern short story more in general.

On writing ‘Woods for the Trees’ and the spaciousness of collaborative short fiction

Authors: Micaela Maftei And Laura Tansley 
Page Start: 37

A co-written short story, ‘Woods for the Trees’, is followed by an essay reflecting on its composition. The authors focus especially on character, story and the complexities of expressing transitional moments in women’s lives.

‘We are cyborgs’: Technology in Hari Kunzru’s short fiction

Authors: Bettina Jansen 
Page Start: 53

This article argues that a concern with technology and the social transformations initiated by the cyborgization of contemporary life permeates the semantics and aesthetics of several short stories by Hari Kunzru. Not only do the ‘cyborg stories’ address the increasingly tangled interface between human being and machine as a subject matter, but they also use the flexibility of the short story form to explore the ways in which technology, social media and the Digital Revolution alter human communication and modes of narration. By analyzing Kunzru’s stories through the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and deconstructive philosophies of community, I will show that these short stories are ultimately concerned with the construction of community or, as Haraway says, ‘relationality’ in the Cyborg Age.

Revealing as concealing: The photographic flash of the epiphany in the modernist short story

Authors: Sophia Kier-Byfield 
Page Start: 69

Despite a recent rise in interest in the history and material aesthetics of photographic flash, its relationship with the short story form is yet to be investigated. Such a critical gap exists even though there is an obvious association between a visual technology that seeks to expose the hidden and a genre knitted together with the notion of epiphany, a supposed moment of revelation. The focus of this article is directed towards the history of flash photography and its inherent aggression, apparent in the early technologies of the flashgun and the chemical compounds of flash powder (in steady use until the termination of their production in 1941, despite the coexistence of the flash bulb). Early flash erupts, bleaches and blinds, interfering with the illumination that it promised to establish: flash photography achieves disorientation, not lucidity. A photographic reading of the epiphany moment in examples of the modernist short story will therefore be stimulated, discussing how these moments, like instances of flash, actually hinder the acquisition of knowledge: both character and reader are left dazzled, rather than closer to the truth.

Beyond cinema: Daphne du Maurier’s intermedial experiments in ‘The Little Photographer’ (1952)

Authors: Christine Reynier 
Page Start: 89

Among the short stories du Maurier wrote, ‘The Birds’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’ stand out. The first has famously been singled out by Alfred Hitchcock and the second by Nicolas Roeg for their respective film adaptations. The fate of these two short stories confirms Elizabeth Bowen’s statement according to which the short story, apart from being close to other literary genres, such as poetry and drama, developed alongside cinema. Although du Maurier has often been acclaimed as a peerless storyteller, critics have generally focused on these two short stories, especially ‘The Birds’, and almost entirely neglected the others. This article takes a close look at ‘The Little Photographer’ (1952) and explores its affinities with other art forms than cinema, namely, photography. Beyond the motif of photography and the visual qualities of the narrative, the mediating function of photography within the narrative will first be analysed. The manipulative skills of the photographer and the narrator will then be confronted and the dialogue between the art of photography and writing explored. Finally, du Maurier’s ability to work across media will be shown to reverberate on her perception and (re)definition of modernism.

Intertextuality and intermediality in Janice Galloway’s ‘Scenes from the Life’ (Blood 1991)

Authors: Jorge Sacido-Romero 
Page Start: 99

Janice Galloway’s ‘Scenes from the Life’ are a set of five pieces collected in Blood (1991), her first book of stories. As in the case of the rest of her production, these stories are highly experimental texts that convey the author’s criticism of dominant patriarchal ideology by rehearsing different combinations of narrative, intertextual and intermedial elements, which entail different modalities of intratextual witnesses of the action and potential surrogates of the reader. Resorting to Irina O. Rajewsky’s concepts of ‘intertextual reference’ and ‘intermedial reference’ as analytical tools, this article reorders the otherwise random appearance and numbering of the five pieces by establishing a logical line of progression derived from the different proportions of intertextual and intermedial referencing that each of the text contains. Though they remain stories, ‘Scenes from the Life’ are good examples of the author’s poetics of liminality, which, according to recent commentators, the short story comes closer to than any other literary genre.

The Secret Self: ‘Literary’ women-only short story anthologies and the modernist paradigm

Authors: Aleix Tura Vecino 
Page Start: 111

Identity-themed short story anthologies are a technology that has been particularly impactful in the development and transmission of short stories since the 1980s. By associating the short form to critical discourses of identity formation, these often overlooked publications have been, and continue to be, key in granting commercial success and academic consideration to the genre. One of the most fruitful relationships these anthologies have exploited is the one between short stories and female identity, grounded on a theoretical tradition connecting ‘minor’ forms with women writers. This article explores how a certain kind of gender-themed short story anthologies perform this association. Through focus on the exemplary case of Hermione Lee’s three-volume anthology The Secret Self, it argues that so-called ‘literary’ or ‘general’ anthologies typically establish a connection between the notion of ‘woman’ and the short form through the undeclared lens of modernism. Realizing this, it proposes and opens up a space for re-evaluating the cultural role that these texts play in our society.

Book Reviews

Authors: Elizabeth Baines And Emily Devane 
Page Start: 123

• Conradology: A Celebration of the Work of Joseph Conrad, Becky Harrison and Magda Raczyńska (eds) (2017)
• Four voices: Recent short story collections
• The Missing Girl, Jacqueline Doyle (2017)
• The Liars’ Asylum, Jacob M. Appel (2017)
• Mothers, Chris Power (2018)
• Dazzling the Gods, Tom Vowler (2018)

Cards and needles

Authors: Roman Ehrlich And  Trans. Lyn Marven 
Page Start: 133

‘The constant failure to articulate the world in words’: An interview with Roman Ehrlich

Authors: Lyn Marven And Andrew Plowman 
Page Start: 139