Academic literature on the topic 'Anglophone short story'

A short story entitled "F–" was published in the January 15, 1949 issue of the Anglophone, Paris-based review transition. The author is listed as Suzanne Dumesnil (later Mme. Samuel Beckett), but no translator is named. Beckett told his bibliographers Federman and Fletcher that he was "certain" of having translated it. The University of Texas Beckettiana catalogue describes it as: "A short story by Beckett's wife, written at the time Beckett was writing En attendant Godot. The translation is unsigned." (74). Several Beckett scholars suspect that Beckett wrote the story, since it resembles his short fiction of the 1940s in its repetition, fragmentation, interrogation, self-address, and in the immediacy of its rendition of experience.

Abstract This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

Looking at short stories by writers as diverse as Brian Glanville, Ruth Fainlight, Clive Sinclair, Jonathan Wilson, James Lasdun, Gabriel Josipovici, Tamar Yellin, Michelene Wandor, and Naomi Alderman, and extending from the center of Jewish British writing to its margins, this article seeks to locate the defining feature of their ‘Jewish substratum’ in conditions particular to the Jewish post-war experience, and to trace its impact across their thematic plurality which, for the most part, transcends any specifically British concerns that may also emerge, opening up an Anglophone sphere of Jewish writing. More specifically, it is argued that the unease pervading so many Jewish British short stories since the 1970s is a product of, and response to, what may very broadly be described as the Jewish experience and the precarious circumstances of Jewish existence even after the Second World War and its cataclysmic impact. It is suggested that it is prompted in particular by the persistence of the Holocaust and the anxieties the historical event continues to produce; by the confrontation with competing patterns of identification, with antisemitism, and with Israel; and by anxieties of non-belonging, of fragmentation, of dislocation, and of dissolution. Turned into literary tropes, these experiences provide the basis of a Jewish substratum whose articulation is facilitated by the expansion of Jewish British writers into the space of Anglophone Jewish writing. As a result, the Jewish British short story emerges as a multifaceted and hybrid project in continuous progress.

In the present article I seek to discuss, following a diachronic approach, the close-knit relationship that can be found between journalistic discourse and the genre of the short story in Anglophone South African literature over a time span of fifty years, between the late Twenties and the Eighties. In particular, I intend to explore this genre negotiation by close reading selected short stories and/or newspaper articles by four non-white South African writers: R. R. R. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Miriam Tlali. The intersections between the two different genres and discourses in these hybrid texts can be identified at the level of both content and form. A close reading of selected short stories and/or articles may call for a revaluation of this “South African New Journalism” as a creative experimentation that challenges conventional generic categorisations.

AbstractThis essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

"Convention, Context and Critical Discourse Analysis: 'Jim The Boatman' and The Early Fiction of Trinidad" re-evaluates the claim of colored authorship which has been attributed to a short story published anonymously, in the Trinidad Spectator in 1846. This re-evaluation is significant since 'Jim the Boatman" has been cited as part of a collection of writing in the emerging literary tradition of nonwhite authors of nineteenth century Trinidad. A critical discourse approach to identifying the writer, in this essay, proposes an alternative paradigm to traditional "plantation power structures" which have been used for identifying writers of anonymous texts, as they may override the cultural context of literary discourse formation in complex Anglophone Caribbean societies like Trinidad. Critical Discourse Analysis focuses specifically on the ways in which writers’ discursive behavior is the result of external sociopolitical pressures, and the strategies they use for textualizing their worldview, in their cultural contexts. This alternative paradigm is based on the researcher’s critical observation of the social context, discourse conventions, and language use in relation to anonymous texts.

In an epoch which has to do fundamentally with space, the concept of home has entered the epistemic scene, both as a commodity and a discursive formation. Contemporary Indian women writers, who are a major facet of present Anglophone literature, have often chosen the domestic sphere as the structural framework of their stories. However, despite the traditional idea of home as a static physical site where women’s lives unfold, a more complex and fluid concept emerges from their narratives. After discussing conflicting definitions of home both as a site of belonging and becoming, I will provide a comparative analysis of the short story Mrs. Sen’s by Jhumpa Lahiri and the novel Ladies’ Coupé by Anita Nair. By looking at the transitional spaces inhabited by the women protagonists—respectively, the diasporic space in the U.S. and a train car in India—I will show how home is a psychic-inhabited place taking shape in memory, imagination, and desire. In conclusion, home is an unreal site at the core of women’s subjectivities, transcending the physicality of the homeland or the household and assuming a metonymic significance. Its inward or outward-moving force gives birth to “homeworlds” made of liminal paths where new possibilities of identity construction are produced.

The panel entitled “Arab Diasporic Writing: Figurations of Space andIdentity” was held on Friday, February 27, at the 2004 Twentieth CenturyLiterature conference at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Organized by Carol Fadda-Conrey, the panel featured presentations by Professor SyrineHout and Lisa A. Weiss on two Arab diasporic writers, Rabih Alameddineand Leïla Sebbar, respectively.Syrine Hout, an associate professor of English at the AmericanUniversity of Beirut, presented a paper entitled “Lebanon ‘Revisited’:Memory, Self, and Other in Rabih Alameddine’s The Perv.” Singling outAlameddine as an example of Anglophone novelists of the Lebanese diaspora,Hout’s presentation handled complex themes of memory, nostalgia,the homeland, and relationships that generate binding ties in her analysis ofthe short stories featured in The Perv. Published in July 1999, this isAlameddine’s second work of fiction. Comprising eight short stories, ThePerv presents in-depth portrayals of characters in various states of exile anddisplacement, both mental and physical, cultural and psychological.In her analysis, Hout presented the cogent case that Alamaddine shows,by way of his characters, all of whom have been affected by the Lebanesecivil war, how homesickness is more of a “sickness of home,” manifested bywhat Hout defines as “critical memory of the immediate past of the civilwar.” The presentation’s overriding argument, systematically upheld byHout, shows how the notion of “being at home,” as represented in this work,“is not about belonging to a piece of land but about having a peace of mindwhich can be enjoyed anywhere.” In her reading of the first story, “ThePerv,” and the subsequent stories, Hout arrived at an interesting conclusion:Sammy, the title story’s main character, is actually the creator of the othercharacters in the collection to such an extent that he and Alameddine becomeone and the same person. Hout’s analysis of “being at home” in The Perv asbeing engendered “by an emotional reality [more] than a spatial one” bringsto the forefront significant concerns in the study of diasporic literature.Such thematic concerns were also addressed and probed by Lisa Weissin her presentation entitled “‘Arab’ Paris: Reinterpreting the City-Centerthrough the Writings of Leïla Sebbar.” Weiss, a Ph.D. candidate in Frenchand Francophone literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz,lived in Paris during 2003, teaching at the UC Paris Study Center andresearching “Beur” cultural production. She identifies “Beur” as a “colloquialidentification-term from the 1980s used for second- and third-generationFrench citizens born in France to North African immigrant parents.” ...

First up for review here is a timely collection of essays edited by Joseph Farrell and Damien Nelis analysing the way the Republican past is represented and remembered in poetry from the Augustan era. Joining the current swell of scholarship on cultural and literary memory in ancient Greece and Rome, and building on work that has been done in the last decade on the relationship between poetry and historiography (such as Clio and the Poets, also co-edited by Nelis), this volume takes particular inspiration from Alain Gowing's Empire and Memory. The individual chapter discussions of Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, and Horace take up Gowing's project of exploring how memories of the Republic function in later literature, but the volume is especially driven by the idea of the Augustan era as a distinct transitional period during which the Roman Republic became history (Gowing, in contrast, began his own study with the era of Tiberius). The volume's premise is that the decades after Actium and the civil wars saw a particularly intense relationship develop with what was gradually becoming established, along with the Principate, as the ‘pre-imperial’ past, discrete from the imperial present and perhaps gone forever. In addition, in a thought-provoking afterword, Gowing suggests that this period was characterized by a ‘heightened sense of the importance and power of memory’ (320). And, as Farrell puts it in his own chapter on Camillus in Ovid's Fasti: ‘it was not yet the case that merely to write on Republican themes was, in effect, a declaration of principled intellectual opposition to the entire Imperial system’ (87). So this is a unique period, where the question of how the remembering of the Republican past was set in motion warrants sustained examination; the subject is well served by the fifteen individual case studies presented here (bookended by the stimulating intellectual overviews provided by the editors’ introduction and Gowing's afterword). The chapters explore the ways in which Augustan poetry was involved in creating memories of the Republic, through selection, omission, interpretation, and allusion. A feature of this poetry that emerges over the volume is that the history does not usually take centre stage; rather, references to the past are often indirect and tangential, achieved through the generation and exploitation of echoes between history and myth, and between past and present. This overlaying crops up in many guises, from the ‘Roman imprints’ on Virgil's Trojan story in Aeneid 2 (Philip Hardie's ‘Trojan Palimpsests’, 117) to the way in which anxieties about the civil war are addressed through the figure of Camillus in Ovid's Fasti (Farrell) or Dionysiac motifs in the Aeneid (Fiachra Mac Góráin). In this poetry, history is often, as Gowing puts it, ‘viewed through the prism of myth’ (325); but so too myth is often viewed through the prism of recent history and made to resonate with Augustan concerns, especially about the later Republic. The volume raises some important questions, several of which are articulated in Gowing's afterword. One central issue, relating to memory and allusion, has also been the subject of some fascinating recent discussions focused on ancient historiography, to which these studies of Augustan poetry now contribute: How and what did ancient writers and their audiences already know about the past? What kind of historical allusions could the poets be expecting their readers to ‘get’? Answers to such questions are elusive, and yet how we answer them makes such a difference to how we interpret the poems. So Jacqueline Febre-Serris, for instance, argues that behind Ovid's spare references to the Fabii in his Fasti lay an appreciation of a complex and contested tradition, which he would have counted on his readers sharing; while Farrell wonders whether Ovid, by omitting mention of Camillus’ exile and defeat of the Gauls, is instructing ‘the reader to remember Veii and to forget about exile and the Gauls’ or whether in fact ‘he counts on having readers who do not forget such things’ (70). In short this volume is an important contribution to the study of memory, history, and treatments of the past in Roman culture, which has been gathering increasing momentum in recent years. Like the conference on which it builds, the book has a gratifyingly international feel to it, with papers from scholars working in eight different countries across Europe and North America. Although all the chapters are in English, the imprint of current trends in non-Anglophone scholarship is felt across the volume in a way that makes Latin literature feel like a genuinely and excitingly global project. Rightly, Gowing points up the need for the sustained study of memory in the Augustan period to match that of Uwe Walter's thorough treatment of memory in the Roman republic; Walter's study ends with some provocative suggestions about the imperial era that indeed merit further investigation, and this volume has now mapped out some promising points of departure for such a study.

In this thesis I argue for a repositioning of Edith Wharton’s short stories in relation to both the twentieth century and modernism. Whilst Wharton was acclaimed for her novels, I argue that the short story, the genre in which she felt most proficient as a writer, yet is still habitually overlooked by critics, presents Wharton at her most experimental and "renovat(ive)", to use her own words. I consider how the restrictive confines of the short story, both in terms of its brevity and commercial value, particularly in relation to the magazine market, were exploited by Wharton to her own advantage, and how her literary craft flourished in such a contained form. I do not argue for a re-envisioning of Wharton as a modernist writer, rather for recognition of her modernist tendencies both in terms of her narrative technique and her interaction with the literary marketplace. Accordingly this thesis is divided into two parts; the first considers Wharton's poetics: her use of myth, modes of narration, creation of narrative gaps, and her notable use of ellipsis points (closely associated by critics such as Henry with modernist writing). The second part of this thesis explores Wharton's modernist practices outside her texts. Here I investigate Wharton's short story magazine publication history, outlining the uneasy balance between her challenges to editorial policy in both the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and her businesslike attitude toward the profession of writing. Finally, given recent critical reassessments of modernism and its relationship with both the short story and the magazine industry, I argue for the timely recognition of the distinctly modernist nature of Wharton's popular, mass marketed short fiction.

The article deals with the realisation of expressive means on the lexical level of the text. Special attention is paid to the study of such lexical expressive means as epithets, similes, metaphors and their various types. The paper represents the results of the analysis of the above-mentioned stylistic means on the material of Anglophone short stories. The research has shown that Anglophone short stories are characterized by the prevalence of neutral lexical units, however it does not mean that this type of text lacks expressiveness. The most widespread lexical expressive means in Anglophone short stories are epithets, similes and metaphors. Epithets are used to give a detailed description and evaluation of some characters, objects or phenomena and to make a profound impact on a reader. Similes are expressions that create vivid, impressive images, actualise mental activity and develop imagination of a recipient. Metaphors are represented to underline individuality of a certain object, subject or phenomenon and make fictional texts valuable. All these lexical means contribute to expressiveness of the whole Anglophone short story and its separate components and have the pragmatic potential, with the help of which an addressee is influenced in a particular way. Therefore, we can conclude that these lexical expressive means fulfil a pragmatic function, expressing the author’s intentions and attitude to certain characters, phenomena etc. and evoking the reader’s feelings and emotions.