Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English, 2012
Abstract This essay discusses the different approaches to modernism and postmodernism together wi... more Abstract This essay discusses the different approaches to modernism and postmodernism together with the development of the modern short story in English and its theorisations. Drawing on Dominic Head's The Modernist Short Story (1992), the essay highlights the genre's importance in the genesis of modernism as a significant instance of artistic and personal autonomy, a key modernist issue which is linked to a mode of subjectivity in conflict with social totality to which the literary text gives formal expression. The abandonment of previous realist models meant the problematisation of representation and interpretation in modernism and their abrogation in postmodernism along with the evanescence of modernist autonomy and subjectivity. These issues re-emerge at later stages in answer to the need of accounting for the experience of the Other, a re-politisation of postmodernism that links it in some way to the historical avant-garde (Huyssen). The essay tackles in passing the controversial distinction between the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, sees in recent approaches to the postmodern short story a reformulation of a previously theorised association between the short story and the marginal, and closes by stating that postmodernism continues nowadays in the works of some talented innovators of the genre.Keywords: short story, modernism, postmodernism, (anti-) representation, subjectivity, autonomy.The Modern Short Story: BeginningsAs is commonly acknowledged, the modern short story in English is American in origin and is linked to Edgar Allan Poe more than anyone else. Poe had a great influence on writers such as Charles Baudelaire, the French symboliste poet to whom we owe the stock definition of "modernity" as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent" (qtd. in Nicholls 5). Poe's dictum (published in 1842) that the structuring principle and aim of "the tale proper" was "the unity of effect or impression" (46) was echoed by later critics and practitioners such as Brander Matthews, in whose 1901 book-length study "the tale proper" became the "true Short-story" (52). Central to all these writers' arguments was the definition of the modern short story as a genre distinguished from other pre-existing shorter forms and from the novel in particular. Poe began his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales by making clear that not all of the pieces collected there were "tales"; some were "pure essays" that lacked the remarkable "precision and finish" of the others which, unlike "the ordinary novel", were endowed with "true unity" and organic "totality" (45, 47). In Poe' s wake, Mathews affirmed that a "true Short-story is something other and something more that a mere story which is short" (57). Thus, he "perceive [d] that the Novel and the Short-story are essentially different - that the difference between them is not one of mere length only, but fundamental" (57). If, for Matthews, characteristics such as "symmetry of design", "compression" and "ingenuity" (57) were essential to the genre, for Elizabeth Bowen "the short story proper" exhibited features like "oblique narration, cutting (as in the cinema), the unlikely placing of emphasis, or symbolism [... which] were unknown" to those nineteenth-century English authors for whom the short story was just "the condensed novel" (153). Among the latter, Bowen counted James and Hardy, authors in whose stories "shortness is not positive; it is nonextension" (153). She echoed Poe' s insistence on the genre's organic unity ("spherical perfection", she called it), while at once declaring the short story "exempt from the novel's conclusiveness", "the crux of the plot" (156-57). By forsaking the novel's "too often forced and false" closure, the short story comes nearer "aesthetic and moral truth", and renders and perpetuates the subjective experience of "amazement" which "was in life a half-second of apprehension" (155).Writing in 1939, Bowen affirmed that the short story - meaning the English short story - was "the child of this century" (152). …
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on the national and, even, the transnational context. The present article focuses on a story titled “tourists from the south arrive in the independent state” (1996), a fantasy of an independent Scotland of the future, in which “the tourist gaze” (Urry), articulated in an ungendered third-person plural “they,” is undermined. This gaze (clearly, that of English visitors in this case) was constructed by Scotland’s tourist industry from the 1970s onwards, a process which entailed the commodification of Scottish identity. Scotland and, particularly, its heritage became a brand. The tourists’ expectations are systematically frustrated in the story, which ends with Scottish female characters occupying positions of authority.
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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are "All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
well known. However, his texts also articulate the author’s
life-long interest in sound(s), in the aural or acoustic. The
present article focuses on two regions of the sonic domain
in Dahl’s work which may be dubbed “limitrophies” following
Derrida’s definition of the term. It deals with what nourishes
and is nourished by two limits which, against our common
expectations, are not visual, but acoustic. The first acoustic
limitrophy is none other than language itself, but language
understood as “lalangue”, a neologism coined by the late
Jacques Lacan and recently theorised by Mladen Dolar
(2006), where it is singled out as the concept that signals
the internal limit of language as such (144). If ”langue” refers
to the linguistic system which generates meaning through
differential operations, the extra ”la” points to sonic reverberations,
consonances, and identities in Dahl’s use of wordplay,
neologisms and nonsense. The second acoustic
limitrophy is related to Dahl’s fictional exploration of the
relationship between the human ear and what is commonly
considered mute per se: namely, plants. The vegetal world
does make sounds of its own and reacts to sounds, even if we
cannot hear them.
objet a that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence
of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and
from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object
voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form
which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic
nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging
for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and
diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked
by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and
often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on
the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial
subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from
the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts
become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central
characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain.
on the national and, even, the transnational context. The present article focuses on a story titled “tourists from the south arrive in the independent state” (1996), a fantasy of an independent Scotland of the future, in which “the tourist gaze” (Urry), articulated in an ungendered third-person plural “they,” is undermined. This gaze (clearly, that of English visitors in this case) was constructed by Scotland’s tourist industry from the 1970s onwards, a process which entailed the commodification of Scottish identity. Scotland and, particularly, its heritage became a brand. The tourists’ expectations are systematically frustrated in the story, which ends with Scottish female characters occupying positions of authority.
https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4122
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are "All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
well known. However, his texts also articulate the author’s
life-long interest in sound(s), in the aural or acoustic. The
present article focuses on two regions of the sonic domain
in Dahl’s work which may be dubbed “limitrophies” following
Derrida’s definition of the term. It deals with what nourishes
and is nourished by two limits which, against our common
expectations, are not visual, but acoustic. The first acoustic
limitrophy is none other than language itself, but language
understood as “lalangue”, a neologism coined by the late
Jacques Lacan and recently theorised by Mladen Dolar
(2006), where it is singled out as the concept that signals
the internal limit of language as such (144). If ”langue” refers
to the linguistic system which generates meaning through
differential operations, the extra ”la” points to sonic reverberations,
consonances, and identities in Dahl’s use of wordplay,
neologisms and nonsense. The second acoustic
limitrophy is related to Dahl’s fictional exploration of the
relationship between the human ear and what is commonly
considered mute per se: namely, plants. The vegetal world
does make sounds of its own and reacts to sounds, even if we
cannot hear them.
objet a that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence
of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and
from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object
voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form
which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic
nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging
for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and
diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked
by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and
often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on
the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial
subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from
the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts
become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central
characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain.