Access Provided by University of Glasgow Library at 05/25/12 1:14PM GMT

Per Winther, Michael Trussler,

Michael Toolan, Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer

Introduction

Susan Lohafer has taught in both the American Literature area and the MFA Program in Nonfiction at
The University of Iowa. She is the author of Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Reading for Storyness:
Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story, as well as the co-edited collection Short
Story Theory at a Crossroads. Her essays on short fiction theory have appeared in various journals and col-
lections, and she has published short stories in The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. 

Charles E. May is professor emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is the au-
thor of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction and The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, and editor
of Short Story Theories, New Short Story Theories, Fiction’s Many Words, The Twentieth Century European
Short Story, and Flannery O’Connor: Critical Insights. His edited collection, Alice Munro: Critical Insights,
will be released in 2012. He has published over 300 articles and reviews, mostly on the short story, in a va-
riety of journals, books, newspapers, and reference works. He maintains a blog entitled Reading the Short
Story at may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com

Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he convenes
the MA programme in Literary Linguistics and is also editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics. His books
include Language in Literature and Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction and most recently, Narra-
tive Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach.

Michael Trussler has published literary criticism, poetry and short fiction. Encounters (short fiction) won
the City of Regina and Book of the Year Award from the Saskatchewan Book Awards in 2006. Acciden-
tal Animals (poetry) was short-listed for the same awards in 2007. A Homemade Life, an experimental
Chapbook of text and photographs, was published by JackPine Press in 2009. He teaches English at the
University of Regina.

Until his retirement in August 2010, Per Winther was for many years Professor of American and Canadian
Literature at the University of Oslo, with the Anglo-American short story as a major critical and theoretical
interest. His publications include The Art of John Gardner: Instruction and Exploration and, co-edited with
Jakob Lothe and Hans H. Skei, The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis and, with
the same co-editors, Less Is More: Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia in Vancouver, researching leading Canadian short story writers: Mavis Gallant,
Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Rohinton Mistry.

Narrative, Vol 20, No. 2 (May 2012)

Copyright 2012 by The Ohio State University
136   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

I. What IS a Short Story? Problems of Definition

Per Winther

Edgar Allan Poe’s review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales must surely be one of
the most influential book reviews ever written; there is rarely an article or a book on
the short story form which fails to summon up for discussion Poe’s description of the
short story in that review. The query “What Is a Short Story?” survives in the title of
Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick’s collection of essays, reviews, and ar-
ticles addressing that question. Their book traces the continued interest in the genre
issue among critics as well as practitioners of the short story from the time when Poe
canonized the form in 1842 to 1961, when the first edition of Current-Garcia and Pat-
rick’s book appeared. Interest in the question of definition has continued to play a part
in short story theory, as witnessed, for instance, by the fact that Short Story Theory at
a Crossroads, the collection of theoretical essays which Lohafer and Clarey published
in 1989, also has a sub-section entitled, “What Is a Short Story?”
Why this theoretical solipsism, one may ask? Why this passionate interest in fell-
ing an animal who refuses to play dead? After all, very few people bother to ask the
question, “What is a novel?” The reason Mary Louise Pratt offers to explain this con-
tinued interest in arriving at precise definitions of the short story while the novel
does not give rise to a comparable activity, seems convincing. In literary history, she
remarks, the short story has been cast in the role of little brother to the novel from the
beginning, not only in physical terms (everyone, after all, recognizes that the novel
is bigger than the short story), but more importantly in terms of artistic prestige. For
instance, the short story has often been seen as a convenient starting place for writ-
ers with ambitions of becoming respected novelists (182–86). Indeed, often one finds
typical short-story writers defending their preferred genre one suspects at least partly
out of a sense of inferiority. Already Poe seems to have felt that need, claiming for the
short prose tale a much higher prestige than literary historians at the time were will-
ing to accord. “The tale proper, in our opinion,” said Poe in his review of Hawthorne,
“affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which
can be afforded by the wide domains of mere prose” (106).
In terms of artistic and aesthetic viability the position of the short story is firmly
secured by now, everyone will agree; the little brother stigma seems more and more to
be a thing of the past. But the proliferation of excellent short stories has made things
more difficult rather than easier for critics with an interest in definitions. Already
during the nineteenth century it became clear that short stories would not always be-
have the way Poe and his followers thought they should. Certainly, with the advent of
Modernism, not to speak of Postmodernism, the definitional plot has thickened even
more. Hence a need has arisen for a more sophisticated approach to definitions, one
that could account in more adequate theoretical terms for all those types of short fic-
tion never dreamt of in Poe’s philosophy of genre.
 Introduction  137

Essentialist Definitions

Before 1980 definitions were as a rule essentialist. Whenever a definition was

ventured it set out to name a range of essential qualities that short stories possess, such
as describing a single event, a moment of revelation, and so on. Posterity has cast Poe
as the first essentialist. His recommendations for a tightly structured story, or prose
tale, as he called it—the term “short story” was not coined until the 1880s—soon be-
came prescriptive. Poe, famously, spoke of the need for a preconceived idea behind
the story, “a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out,” and he went on: “In the
whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or
indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (108).
In the hands of Columbia University Professor Brander Matthews, who is now
being cited almost as frequently as Poe himself, these recommendations hardened
into dogma. He first stated his famous ideas on the short story in a brief article pub-
lished in the London Saturday Review in 1884 (July 5), simply entitled “Short Stories,”
thereby establishing the genre’s future name in English. He restated them more fully
in Lippincott’s Magazine the year after (“The Philosophy of the Short-Story,” Octo-
ber 1885) before giving final expression to his theory in his book, The Philosophy of
the Short-Story, which came in 1901. The point of departure for Matthews is Poe’s
brief statements in his Hawthorne review. “A true Short-story differs from the Novel
chiefly in its essential unity of impression,” Matthews argues, reformulating Poe’s no-
tion of “single effect.” “A Short-story,” he goes on to say, hammering out his prescrip-
tive definition in considerable detail, “deals with a single character, a single event, a
single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation. … Thus
the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of ‘totality,’ as Poe called
it, the unity of impression” (33). Matthews’s essentialist orientation is clearly revealed
in his detailed list of genre characteristics, and is stated explicitly in the Appendix to
his book, where he claims to be the first to suggest that “the Short-story is in reality a
genre, a separate kind, a genus by itself.” But Poe had “felt it,” he says, “even if he did
not formulate it in set terms” (37–38).
As the American short-story market became flooded with well-made formula
stories, serious writers and commentators started to become wary of the Poe–Mat-
thews concept of short fiction.1 Local-color realism around the turn of the century
introduced more loosely plotted, slice-of-life stories, characterized by what John Ger-
lach has termed indirect form.2 Modernism brought non-linear and open-ended sto-
ries, as in the case of Katherine Anne Porter, or the elliptical stories of Hemingway,
where the importance of plot and event is seriously downplayed. It became clear that
the Poe–Matthews genre definition could not accommodate these new forms.
New forms gave rise to new definitions. Commentator after commentator re-
marked on the elusiveness of genre distinctions, while nevertheless resting convinced
of the short story’s generic distinctiveness. One of the most famous attempts at a
“new” definition is the one by Frank O’Connor, the Irish short-story writer. O’Connor,
although in no way as rigid as Matthews, also turns out to be an essentialist. From
138   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

the beginning, O’Connor argues, “the short story has functioned in a quite different
way from the novel” (“The Lonely Voice” 84). The novel and the short story are, in
his opinion, “distinct literary forms” (“The Lonely Voice” 88). Since Modernism had
made it difficult to maintain the strict formalist argument of Poe’s followers, the defi-
nitional focus shifted to other categories, like subject matter. The novel typically deals
with people in society, O’Connor claimed, whereas the short story is peopled by char-
acters belonging to what he called “submerged population groups,” that is, “outlawed
figures wandering about the fringes of society. … As a result there is in the short story
at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel––an intense
awareness of human loneliness” (“The Lonely Voice” 87).
Other commentators, many of them like O’Connor practicing short-story writ-
ers, have made similar points. Elizabeth Bowen ends her introduction to The Faber
Book of Modern Short Stories with a description of the short story which echoes that
of O’Connor: “The short story, within its shorter span than the novel’s … is able, like
the poetic drama, to measure man by his aspirations and dreads and place him alone
on that stage which, inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone” (158). Im-
plied in that remark is an idea voiced even more clearly by Nadine Gordimer: the
short story, by its form, is better equipped artistically to capture a modern sensibility
than is the novel. The strongest convention of the novel, Gordimer asserts, is “pro-
longed coherence of tone,” but such a coherence

is false to the nature of whatever can be grasped of human reality. … [T]

here is a consistency of relationship throughout the experience [generally
described by novels] that cannot and does not convey the quality of human
life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, 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. (179–80)

The argument of these commentators thus seems to boil down to a question of mime-
sis: a modern sense of fragmentariness is best reflected in short fiction. As recently as
1989, in an essay entitled “‘Things out of Words’: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction,”
the British scholar Clare Hanson confirmed her commitment to an essentialist posi-
tion in very definite terms: “I would argue strongly that the short story provides or
makes for a kind of experience for the reader which is quite different from that which
she or he gains from the novel. I think that the difference, too, is one of kind, not of
degree” (22–23).
I shall mention two more examples of essentialist definitions, formulated by two
scholars who have been important contributors to short story theory since the 1960s:
Mary Rohrberger and Charles E. May. Influenced by the New Critical slant of her
graduate studies, Rohrberger’s dissertation on Hawthorne defined the short story in
terms of its artfulness. In her book Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in
Genre from 1966 she argues that the definitions of Poe and Matthews are too impre-
cise. How brief is brief? How long is long? Unity of effect, she points out, “can apply
to all art forms” (141). Similarly she finds that the “idea that a short story deals with
a single character in a single action is useful but not always applicable.” Rohrberger
 Introduction  139

finds it more rewarding to “define the short story in terms of its overall purpose and
structure.” Her starting point is the short story’s origin in the Romantic tradition.
From the beginning the American short story based itself on Romantic metaphysics,
which held that there is a reality transcending the one humans can perceive with their
senses. Rohrberger wants to ground her definition of the genre in this central aspect
of Romantic aesthetics:

As in the metaphysical view, reality lies beyond the ordinary world of ap-
pearances, so in the short story, meaning lies beneath the surface of the nar-
rative. The framework of the narrative embodies symbols which function to
question the world of appearances and to point to a reality beyond the facts
of the extensional world. (81)

A short story, then, to Rohrberger, is a piece of short fiction which through its struc-
ture, and especially through its use of symbol and metaphor, points beyond its sur-
face meaning. She realizes that this definition rules out a group of stories which most
readers would want to call short stories even though they may fail to meet her de-
mand for layered meaning; this problem she solves (some would argue rather too
easily) by calling these other stories “simple narratives.”
Assumptions similar to those of Rohrberger underlie Charles May’s many writ-
ings on the short story. May made an early and lasting contribution to the debates
over definition by collecting many of the statements quoted above in the 1976 anthol-
ogy Short Story Theories. He has addressed the issue of definition in several essays
published during the 1980s and 1990s. One of these is “The Nature of Knowledge in
Short Fiction,” first published in Studies in Short Fiction in 1984. His position on the
short story is aligned, he says, with that of Boris Éjxenbaum, who saw the difference
between the novel and short story as one of essence. “The short story is short precisely
because of the kind of experience or reality embodied in it” (328). As May sees it, the
novel, which for him seems to be synonymous with the realist novel, describes man’s
relation to the facts of the external world, whereas “the short story attempts to be au-
thentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal
rather than temporal reality. … The novel exists to reaffirm the world of ‘everyday’ re-
ality; the short story exists to ‘defamiliarize’ the everyday” (328–29). The point about
immaterial reality and the short story echoes Rohrberger’s transcendentalist orienta-
tion, but May principally anchors his aesthetic convictions in theories developed by
phenomenology and perception psychology. The domain May assigns to the novel is
that mode of being where we participate in shared experiences. The notion of shared
experiences is a “pragmatically motivated idealization,” phenomenologists remind us,
a construction we depend on to order our daily lives in a community; “we take for
granted that the life-world accepted by me is also accepted by everyone” (332), oth-
erwise it would be impossible to organize one’s daily shopping, catch planes, or find
publishers for one’s books. This is not the world we meet in short stories, May argues:
“In the short story we are presented with characters in their essential aloneness, not
in their taken-for-granted social world” (333).
140   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

Non-Essentialist Definitions

A watershed in the discussion of short story definitions is Mary Louise Pratt’s

article from 1981, entitled “The Short Story: The Long and Short of It.” She brought
contemporary genre theory into the discussion of short story definitions. “Genres
are not essences,” she argued. “They are human institutions, historical through and
through” (176). Pratt builds on the structuralist position that genres “are never com-
pletely autonomous, but are always defined within the genre system with respect to
each other” (180). Length, she points out, an essentialist criterion of the highest order
for Poe, Matthews et al., is in itself not an essential, but a relational category. Short as
a concept has no meaning unless it is paired with the notion of long (181).
Later critics have built, at least partly, upon Pratt’s article. One of them is Nor-
man Friedman.3 In the essay “Recent Short Story Theories: Problems in Definition” he
brings the discussion back to basics, to the foundations of the theory of science, viz.
the principled difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive rea-
soning begins with the definition of a category and then looks around to find speci-
mens that fit into that category; inductive reasoning works in the opposite direction,
starting with a large selection of examples, looking for common denominators that
allow for the formulation of a definition. Friedman’s key argument may be summed
up as follows: too many commentators interested in definitions have fallen into the
trap of more or less narrow essentialism because they have used deductive reasoning
where clarity of argument would have been better served had they reasoned induc-
tively. Thus, when Brander Matthews says that a short story “deals with a single char-
acter, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single
situation” (33), he deduces from Poe’s observation and example that all short stories
behave in this manner. In other words, he appropriates for a special type of story a
generic label that confuses rather than clarifies the issue.
This is not to say that definitions are not possible. Definitions can still be useful,
Friedman points out, “so long as we remember that we can only come up with central
tendencies rather than absolutes” (16), so long as we bear in mind—and here Fried-
man refers specifically to Pratt’s article—“that we may not assume that there is only
one correct way of defining something; a definition is always relative to the context
and purpose of the inquiry” (17).
What is required if definitions are to be of any analytical help at all, says Fried-
man, is a set of multiple differentiae, allowing for subdivisions, “to be applied in vari-
ous combinations so as to do justice to the variety of potentialities involved.” He il-
lustrates the need for this strategy by adding: “Short stories, common sense tells us,
are short in various ways and for various reasons” (17–18). Examining in detail the
concept of length Friedman concludes that the linking of length to the notion of unity
of impression, a connection insisted upon in essentialist definitions all the way back
to Poe, does not have a basis in fact. There are many ways of achieving unity of im-
pression also in the novel. Rather than insisting on differences in kind in genre defini-
tions as the essentialists have continuously done, one would do better to be looking
for differences in degree.
 Introduction  141

Friedman’s position is a pragmatic one. Working inductively from a wide sample

of texts understood by most readers to be short stories, one may arrive at a set of
characteristics that allows for meaningful groupings of short story types. Thereby one
would recognize more readily that when, for instance, theorists like O’Connor speak
of the short story as an essential form, particularly well equipped to dramatize hu-
man loneliness, they are operating with what in large measure is a period concept.
O’Connor’s description of the short story does fit a high number of Modernist short
stories, but seems much less appropriate in talking about, say, Postmodernist short
fiction.
Friedman speaks of the need for multiple differentiae; Austin Wright has devel-
oped this notion further, arguing for a concept of genre as a cluster of characteristics:

If a genre is a cluster of characteristics … borderline and original works can

be handled easily and naturally. We can speak of ways in which a work par-
takes of the short story and ways in which it does not, and the discrimina-
tion will enhance a fine description of what the work actually does. (“On
Defining” 48)

The operative phrase for Austin Wright in matters of definition, then, is “tends to”:
the short story tends to be this or that. This emphasis on tendency allows for an
approach which in this view takes adequate account of the many nuances in short-
story writing. Wright discusses, by way of example, six different sets of genre tenden-
cies, aimed at including rather than excluding short-fiction texts from the canon. He
examines a number of these categories at length; in summary form, his main points
are:

• The short story tends to be between five hundred words long and the length
of Joyce’s “The Dead.”
• It tends to deal with character and action in its fictional world.
• This action tends to be externally simple, with few developed episodes and no
subplots or secondary lines of action.
• The short story tends to be more strongly unified than other short prose nar-
rative forms.
• There is in short stories a preference for plots of small magnitude, plots of
discovery, static or disclosure plots, Joycean epiphanies, and the like
• There is a tendency, especially in modern stories, to leave significant things to
inference. (“On Defining” 51–52)

Wright’s list does not at all represent a dramatic break with the categories employed
by essentialist critics all along. However, in insisting on differences in degree rather
than in kind he has fashioned a set of genre criteria which seeks to liberate rather
than restrict. Approaching definitions in this manner, students of the short story need
no longer trouble themselves with questions to which there is little hope of ever ar-
riving at final, or satisfactory answers. For instance, this approach makes redundant
142   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

the frequently asked question, “Is text X really a short story?” Instead one may now
more comfortably ask, “What type of story does the text under discussion resemble
the most?”

II. Influences of Phenomenology and Reader-Response Theories

Per Winther

In the 1980s and 1990s, the question changed yet again: theorists stopped asking,
“What is a short story?” and began wondering, “What does a short story do?” The fea-
ture once considered the defining characteristic of the genre—brevity—now became
its behavioral signature. How does shortness affect narrative strategies, subject mat-
ter, and other authorial choices? How does it affect readers? Austin Wright is again
a pivotal figure. In an essay from 1989 entitled “Recalcitrance in the Short Story,” he
speaks of the “intensity of detail that shortness confers” (120). Wright had already un-
dertaken a book-length study of the modernist American short story in 1961. Where-
as The American Short Story in the Twenties was predominantly a thematic study, in
his 1989 essay Wright’s focus is on the formal aspects of the genre.
The essay shares the phenomenological orientation of another book by Wright,
The Formal Principle in the Novel (1982). By form he understands “the work’s unique
principle of wholeness, its organizing, shaping, unifying principle (or the possibility
of such a principle, whether or not it can be finally described)” (116). A central point
in the 1989 essay is that a reader’s perception of form during the reading of a novel
differs markedly from how readers experience form in the short story. Wright orga-
nizes his discussion of this difference around the way readers respond to what he calls
“formal recalcitrance”; by this term he understands the opposing forces of “shaping
form and the resistance of the shaped materials” (115). Recalcitrance can take a num-
ber of forms. Examples in a work of fiction are the following:

[T]he original resistance of the language itself, which has to be understood

or interpreted, before a story can be seen. There is the generic resistance of
fiction as such, the implicit conventions (so familiar we scarcely notice the
impediment) by which we relegate people, events, world, to the category
of the fictitious, the imaginary, the “not necessarily real.” Then there is the
dense substance of the fictional world itself, the multi-faceted resistances to
our efforts to conceive the characters, what they are doing, and how they
are to be judged, recalcitrance that increases as they depart from the stereo-
types. There is recalcitrance in every restrictive convention, such as a limita-
tion upon the point of view, or narrative manner. (118)

Novels and short stories obviously have these forms of formal resistance to under-
standing/interpretation in common. But specific to the novel is “the special and pow-
erful recalcitrance in its great length. As it extends, as the material adds up, our per-
ception is impeded in almost every aspect, both of the fictional world and of the
formal composition” (118).
 Introduction  143

Shortness, on the other hand, confers the “intensity of detail” referred to above:
“In general, the shorter the work, the more prominent the details. Words and images,
as well as characters and events, stand out more vividly than they would in a larger
context. This attention to the parts, found in all short fiction and poetry, implies re-
calcitrance in the act of attention, the arresting of notice at every significant point”
(120). Wright groups these forms of resistance to reader comprehension under the
rubric of “inner recalcitrance.”
However, his main focus in the essay is on another kind of recalcitrance, “the ef-
fect of shortness [that] is concentrated in the ending”; this he refers to as “final recal-
citrance.” Whereas in novels and traditional short stories the effect of an ending typi-
cally is to lessen recalcitrance, the open endings characteristic of short fiction since
Modernism intensify the reader’s sense of recalcitrance, forcing the reader to reenter
the world of the text to make sense of the story as a whole: “Final recalcitrance is an
obstacle to artistic comprehension caused by the seemingly premature placing of the
end, an effect of incompleteness requiring the reader to look back, recalculate, and re-
consider, so as to satisfy the expectation of wholeness that he has brought to the story”
(121). While the ending of a novel may also force the reader to review the entire text
for illumination of the fiction as a whole, Wright’s assertion is that the reader’s view of
the form “is seldom drastically altered by the end” (124):

Although the length of the novel allows the form to escape us, the tendency
of almost any novel’s end is to mitigate this resistance by seeming to confirm
one or another interpretation of form already building in the novel, whereas
the ending of a short story aggravates recalcitrance by cutting off our expec-
tations for clarification. (124)

Wright then distinguishes five types of final recalcitrance, emphasizing that his list is
not to be thought exhaustive, nor the items on it seen as mutually exclusive:

• unresolved contradiction at the level of character or action

• unexplaining explanation (the reader is none the wiser and has to provide his
own interpretation)
• unexplained juxtaposition (disparate materials presented without an explana-
tion of what unites them)
• symbolic recalcitrance (a symbol or a symbolic scheme is introduced without
explanation of its import)
• modal discontinuity (“resistance is produced by a contradiction in what we
may call the ‘fictional mode’ in the piece—the primary assumptions on which
the coherence of the fictional world depends” (127). Example: the mixing of
religious and realistic explanations for violence switch from comic expecta-
tions to serious violence in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find.”)

Austin Wright’s examination of recalcitrance in the short story is informed by a

phenomenological approach to thought. In the reader’s response to a work, primacy
144   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

is given to the details of the text. The emphasis is on reading as process, the reader be-
ing forced by the text to hold together in the mind a range of particulars while search-
ing for an inherent formal unity that is hypothesized but typically eludes complete
realization.
Another way of analyzing the way readers respond to texts is to emphasize the
manner in which universal cognitive patterns direct the reading process. Students of
closure in short fiction generally take this as their starting point. What these short fic-
tion theorists have in common with Wright is the conviction that careful examination
of endings and their relationship to the rest of the text provide powerful clues to the
interpretation of the individual story, as well as holding an important key to under-
standing the aesthetic properties of short fiction in general.
The concept of closure was first linked, not to short fiction but to the novel, and
to poetry. Before short fiction theorists like Susan Lohafer, John Gerlach, and I began
to examine the importance of closure in the short story during the last two decades
of the twentieth century, there existed a solid, albeit somewhat neglected, critical dis-
cussion of closure. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending from 1966 applied no-
tions of closure (without using that term) to the novel, followed two years later by
Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Since then
further studies on closure and the novel appeared, dovetailing with developments in
narrative theory at large.5 By 1990 interest in the structure of narrative and, by im-
plication, closure, had become truly interdisciplinary, to include also cognitive psy-
chology, certain aspects of discourse analysis, as well as reader response theory and
historiography.
Kermode introduces an early formulation of the basic premise of this theory-
building by quoting St. Augustine: “Who can deny that things to come are not yet?
Yet already there is in the mind an expectation of things to come” (34). Kermode
tentatively tied the structure of narrative to cognition in terms that were later to find
a powerful resonance in the study of narrative. It seems, he argued, that “in ‘making
sense’ of the world we still feel a need … to experience that concordance of begin-
ning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions” (35). These
are thoughts that have since become more or less axiomatic in narrative theory. Some,
like Seymour Chatman and Hayden White, have in the manner of structuralism seen
these narrative structures as pre-dating human cognition. This is the view underly-
ing Chatman’s Story and Discourse. Behind any discourse, he argues, elaborating on
Claude Bremond’s theory of narrative, is a deep structure story which “may be trans-
posed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties,” a fact
which “is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures inde-
pendent of any medium” (20).6 White argues a similar point; narrative, he suggests in
The Content of the Form, “far from being merely a form of discourse that can be filled
with different contents, real or imaginary as the case may be, already possesses a con-
tent prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing” (ix).
Barbara Herrnstein Smith has taken issue with the structuralist premise of such
a view, contending that the fact that we recognize deep “story” in surface “discourse”
is due to the fact that we “are responding to similar conditions and similar restraints”;
 Introduction  145

that is, we perceive more or less identical underlying stories because we have learnt to
respond in similar manner to discourse (“Narrative Versions” 217). Smith is skepti-
cal about the dualistic language model of structuralist thought, which confines nar-
ratology “to the examination of decontextualized structures”; in her view, narratives
should be seen as social transactions, and the circumstances of the transaction must
be considered when taking account of the structure of the narrative.
This position is supported by the findings of cognitive psychologists like Jerome
Bruner, who grounds his theory of narrative as cognition in a transactional rather
than a structuralist model:

[W]e organize our experience and our memory of human happenings main-
ly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing or not
doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally
and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomer-
ate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. (4)

This psychologically-based model of narrative illustrates the bridge provided between

a narrative theory rooted in “traditional” literary theory and the increasing concern
with narrative on the part of cognitive psychologists. Cognitive psychology has in
recent years confirmed that one of the most basic ways of knowing the world is to tell
stories about it. The most elementary of these stories are developed from our organic
experiences: the patterns and rhythms of the body (example: eating stills hunger),
say, or our physical environment (night follows day); other stories we learn through
culture, important among them the literary fictions we are exposed to in our daily
lives. This has given rise to the notion of “storying” as a primary mode of human
cognition.7 Discourse analysts have in their turn looked to the cognitive sciences for
empirical support in developing a complementary set of concepts to describe how
we make sense of our reading by activating prototypical expectations in the form of
“frames” and “scripts” connected with the settings, situations and episodes rendered
in a piece of writing.8
In explaining why they see the study of closure as a particularly rich field for
short fiction theory, critics make a point similar to that made by Austin Wright above:
given that brevity confers extra intensity to the particulars of texts, the endings, too,
take on extra significance compared to the way they function in longer texts. In his
seminal study of closure in the American short story, John Gerlach acknowledges
that the short story shares the closural signals he identifies in his book with poetry,
the novel, and drama, but he argues that they take on greater structural prominence
in short fiction than in the novel/drama—“[have] a greater structural significance”
(7)—because of the genre’s brief format. It is this greater prominence that motivated
Gerlach’s study, which analyzes how “anticipation of the ending [is] used to structure
the whole” (3). Different approaches to closure among writers produced “direct and
indirect form” in the nineteenth century, “compressed and imagist form” in the twen-
tieth, and in his book he discusses the defining characteristics of these short story
traditions. In so doing, he has demonstrated new ways of grouping stories which use-
146   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

fully complement more traditional period-concepts like Romantic, Realist, Natural-

ist, and Modernist.
Central to Gerlach’s study is the idea that readers come to texts with certain in-
grained anticipations9 about what constitutes a logical narrative trajectory, and that
writers actively draw on the reader’s anticipation of endings in structuring their sto-
ries; for the critic, tracing this interplay between endings and the rest of the text may
provide important heuristic clues. Surveying the field of American short fiction in the
nineteenth and twentieth century he detected five different basic narrative trajecto-
ries, which he identifies as “signals of closure.” Briefly, these are:

• solution of the central problem (a character faces a problem or wants to reach

a goal; when the problem is solved/goal is reached, the reader has a sense of
closure in that the plot has reached a natural resting place)
• natural termination (“the completion of an action that has a predictable end”
[9]; night follows day, storm followed by calm, a traveler arrives at his destina-
tion, et cetera)
• completion of antithesis (“any opposition, often characterized by irony, that
indicates something has polarized into extremes”)
• manifestation of a moral (“the reader’s sense that a theme has emerged”)
• encapsulation (“a coda that distances the reader from the story by altering the
point of view or summarizing the passing of time”)

It is important to note that these signals of closure operate on the level of nar-
rative and are not understood to imply thematic or heuristic closure, even though in
some cases the two may coincide (e.g. in a typical O. Henry story). However, in more
artistically ambitious stories, congruence between narrative and thematic closure is
less frequent. Given the many particulars of the preceding narrative, Bartleby’s death
at the end of Melville’s story brings the scrivener’s life to a “logical” narrative conclu-
sion (natural termination). However, as I have argued elsewhere, the description of
Bartleby’s dying moment, him lying fetus-like facing the walls of the prison garden, as
well as the narrator’s exclamation, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity” (encapsulation), will
send most readers back into the text looking for clues that might explain the causes
behind the scrivener’s many refusals to participate in life (Winther 63–64).
Two years prior to the publication of Gerlach’s study of closure appeared Susan
Lohafer’s Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983). This book is among other
things a study of closure on the level of the individual sentence in stories, analyzing
aspects of what Austin Wright refers to as “inner recalcitrance.” Over the next several
decades Lohafer returned to the way closure operates in short fiction from a number
of angles. Via the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden and the discourse analysis of
the Amsterdam School headed by Teun van Dijk, she turned to cognitive science in
her continued search for a set of analytical categories that could help elucidate the
many ways that readers perceive closure in a story. Cognitive psychologists intro-
duced her to the notion of storyness, an ingrained “neuroscenario” by which a child
learns how to behave in the world. In the Introduction to Reading for Storyness, Loha-
fer describes the process this way:
 Introduction  147

Before the legends and myths, before the hunting stories and the war stories,
before the folk tales and fairy tales, was the neuroscenario. A hand reaches
out, touches a flame, starts back in pain, and registers a meaning. Antiquity’s
child and tomorrow’s infant are equally equipped. Both have this built-in
plot-making talent, although it takes several years before humans can recog-
nize or tell “a story.” My notion of “storyness” is based on this neuroscenario,
which is infinitely rewritten in simple or complex form, with infinite variety,
to produce the world’s cache of short stories. (3)

Over the years Lohafer has conducted a series of reading experiments in the form of
directed exercises in “text processing” designed to query the matter of “storyness.”10
Into the discussion of closure she brought the notion of “preclosure,” those places
in a short fiction text where the story could have ended but doesn’t. In an early such
experiment she asked 180 readers (high school and college students) to mark any
sentence in a short story by Kate Chopin (“Aunt Lympy’s Interference”) prior to the
very last one that in the student’s opinion could have ended the story. She grouped
the sentences picked as preclosure points in the story and found that the sentences
tended to cluster around four basic choices before the main character, only one of
which becomes the one the protagonist goes for at the end. Lohafer then subjected the
findings of the experiment to “chunking” procedures described by discourse analysts
like Teun A. van Dijk., such as the activation of “frames” and “scripts.” Through this
method she was able to provide empirical data to back up inferences concerning the
misunderstanding of certain text elements on the part of some of the readers, as well
as the importance of historical/social/cultural knowledge for a nuanced understand-
ing of Chopin’s text.
The method Lohafer adopted for her Kate Chopin experiment became a blue-
print for a series of other text processing experiments involving trained as well as
untrained readers. She has collected the findings of several of these in Reading for
Storyness; in the Introduction to the book she offers the following justification for the
relevance of her methodological approach: “Preclosural study yields relatively direct
access to readers’ story-making and story-recognizing habits, and this information is
a rich resource for the scholar seeking to understand a particular story, author, or pe-
riod, as well as the genre itself ” (4) Chief among her concerns in Reading for Storyness
are the varied ways in which the identification of preclosural points in short stories
influence the heuristic status of the text; furthermore she has used her experiments to
explore genre boundaries between short fiction and creative nonfiction.

III. Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and the

Short Story as Threshold
Michael Trussler

“A good theory does not have to provide an ‘essential’ definition of a form,”

Charles E. May once recommended to future genre critics of the short story in a
1996 essay, “but it is worth developing if it heuristically enables one to see previously
148   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

neglected features and relations” (“Prolegomenon” 463). Partially responding to M.

H. Abrams, May has followed this advice over his career, articulating (and expand-
ing upon) the quite suggestive approach that sees short fiction embodying a different
form of knowledge than other literary genres.11 His differentiation between genres
on the basis of their epistemological function has often been linked, by himself and
by others, to the work of the Russian Formalists. There are ties, as well, to phenom-
enological, hermeneutic, and other approaches to literature. Consider, for example,
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the specific chronotope he calls the “threshold,” which
may be of particular heuristic use in analyzing short stories generically.
According to Bakhtin, Leo Tolstoy’s central way of organizing narrative is
through the chronotope of “biographical time, which flows smoothly in the spaces—
the interior spaces—of townhouses and estates of the nobility” (249), whereas Fyodor
Dostoyevsky prefers the “threshold.” The threshold accentuates “the breaking point of
a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life” (248). While the threshold
can be found in various kinds of narratives, it does appear that short fiction is often
structured around this spatial/temporal device at both the level of showcasing a cen-
tral visual image of a physical threshold and as the dramatic situation that seems to
give rise to narrativity. That older short stories (from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wake-
field” to Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” to James Joyce’s “The Dead”) often
feature material thresholds such as doorways, staircases and the like when they de-
pict characters in life-changing events makes this case compelling for so-called “clas-
sic” short fiction, but when we further consider the degree to which a contemporary
short-story writer such as Alice Munro has spent a career creating stories that primar-
ily revolve around sudden “moments of crisis” we can grant the descriptive value of
the threshold to the genre itself. The threshold chronotope, when used in short fic-
tion, not only grants structural emphasis—stories seem to be organized around such
a moment—it also compounds numerous thematic concerns frequently underscored
by this genre: the way human beings experience time and memory, encounter ethical
problems—to name the most basic.12 Three well-known stories can serve as examples:
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,”
and Ann Beattie’s more recent “Snow.”
After Laura, the central character and chief focalizer of the “The Garden Par-
ty,” has had her upper-class mores radically challenged by the death of a workman,
she eventually (and inadvertently) confronts the man’s widow, a traumatized woman
who’s been thrown from everyday life into complete chaos:

But at that moment the woman at the fire turned round. Her face, puffed
up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible. She seemed as
though she couldn’t understand why Laura was there. What did it mean?
Why was this stranger standing in the kitchen with a basket? What was it
all about? And the poor face puckered up again. (“Garden” 260; emphasis
mine)

Occurring almost literally in a physical threshold, and using language that signals
an abrupt shift in sensibilities, this scene illustrates the genre’s predilection for cre-
 Introduction  149

ating situations of hermeneutic crisis that often have an implicit corollary of ethical
confusion: for most of the story, Laura has been perplexed by the moral question
of whether her family should cancel its long-awaited party to convey respect to the
stricken family living just down the street. With its general Edenic overtures, and
structural emphases on a face-to-face encounter (the story’s climax shows Laura hav-
ing to look directly at the widow and then the corpse), “The Garden Party” summons,
both literally and almost allegorically, Emmanuel Levinas’ belief that the origin of
ethics derives from encountering the Other. “A being (l’êtant),” Levinas says, “is a hu-
man being and it is as a neighbor that a human being is accessible—as a face” (8). This
isn’t to argue that this foundational moment for ethics is necessarily coeval with the
threshold, but it is to note that very often in short fiction this fundamental encounter
of the face accompanies the threshold chronotope.13 Given its general accentuation of
such moments, which often blur existential and ethical problems together, the genre
implicitly asks not only whether the meaning of a human life can be compressed into
a single event or a brief series of events,14 but it also raises the problem as to how char-
acters who have been given shape by the threshold chronotope will be affected as they
(presumably) resume their lives. Put in narrative terms: some short stories depend
on readers needing to imagine how the threshold experience will influence a given
character’s post-narrational existence (such as Gabriel or Gretta in “The Dead” and
numerous Mansfield characters); other stories imply that it has been the threshold
that has stimulated the desire to narrate in the first place.
The narrator of O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” is emblematic here. After the
English soldiers have been executed and quickly buried, he notes:

Then, by God, in the very doorway, [the landlady] fell on her knees and be-
gan praying. … I stood by the door, watching the stars and listening to the
shrieking of the birds. … And anything that happened to me afterwards, I
never felt the same about again. (1246)

For O’Connor’s anguished narrator, the threshold as spatial/temporal event has be-
come what Frank Kermode (following Wilhelm Dilthey), refers to as an “impression
point,” that crucial moment of a life or text that “gives articulation to the whole” (Gen-
esis 147n4). While it’s unclear as to whether either a life or a text actually contains
sufficient unity to be explained by such an impression point, it is apparent that short
fiction is typically fascinated by interruptions, by crises that imply an epistemological
version of the hermeneutic circle.
Beattie’s highly compressed short story “Snow” is a kind of disembodied mono-
logue that, in less than three pages, sketches the discontinuities resulting from
a broken love affair. Positing that certain subject matter is more suitable for some
genres than others—the narrator offers that some details would be more believable
in a poem—“Snow” quietly observes that “[p]eople forget years and remember mo-
ments” (23). To appreciate how this truism functions in this story and perhaps the
genre itself, recall how Bakhtin differentiates between chronotopes. Tolstoy is obvi-
ously aware of memory’s frailty; however, Bakhtin’s point regarding the chronotope
of a seamless “biographical time” (underscoring Anna Karenina for instance) would
150   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

seem to be that narratives which employ the threshold render time differently. “In
this [threshold] chronotope,” Bakhtin argues, “time is essentially instantaneous; it is
as if … it falls out of the normal course of time” (248). If Tolstoy’s narrative can dis-
sect the enormous pain of a sundered relationship, it is nonetheless “welded firmly”
(249) to an experience (and rendition) of time that gathers moments into a steady
accumulation. Repeatedly asking the story’s narratee to “remember” certain events,
and discovering that there is no shared memory between them (and presumably nei-
ther amongst the other characters mentioned in the story), the narrator in Beattie’s
story, different from Tolstoy, seems to repudiate the very possibility of continuity. Be-
attie’s story is in fact completely at odds with itself. It deconstructs the various familiar
semiotic codes that readers rely upon to decipher a given story; the conventions of
realism, the rhetorical use of language, the efficacy of sequential narrative are all held
up in the air for examination and then disregarded, so to speak.
“Snow” encapsulates the philosophical skepticism that often accompanies texts
that use the threshold. More important, it also subtly points to what is perhaps the
most rudimentary narrative available, effectively abandoning not only the herme-
neutic impression point but the threshold chronotope as well. Take the first word of
“Snow” and then jettison everything but the final word, and this sentence occurs: “I
was.” Ursula Le Guin’s commentary on one of the most basic narratives in Western
culture is useful as a gloss on Beattie’s story:

I know a very short story … which was carved in runes [on the north tran-
sept of Carlisle Cathedral]: Tolfink carved these runes in this stone. … As a
story, it does not really meet the requirement of Minimal Connexity. … Yet I
would say Tolfink was a reliable narrator. Tolfink bore witness to at least the
existence of Tolfink, a human being unwilling to dissolve entirely into his
surroundings (“Dark” 194).

Paying close attention to the elegiac snow falling and disappearing outside Gabriel
Conroy’s window, only then to strip everything away—including self-consciousness
and the various ploys of literature—Beattie’s story suggests that the core of narrative
(whether in a short story or novel) is merely a voice that has already receded into the
past as it begins to speak.

IV. Links with Text-Processing, Stylistics, and Cognition

Michael Toolan

The history of short fiction studies, as reviewed above, shows the influence of
several broader streams of literary theory, most obviously New Criticism, but also
Structuralism, Phenomenology, and Reader Response. From a certain point of view,
however, the most intriguing developments toward the end of the twentieth century
remained invisible to the general population of teachers and researchers on literature
faculties around the world.
 Introduction  151

The new areas of interest are rooted in the past, beginning with the work of psy-
chologists studying reading comprehension, memory, and other components of text
processing. This is not the place to review that history, but only to say that it fed into
the work of linguists and cognitive scientists doing empirical research into the way
the human mind deals with narrative texts. Much of the initial work was done on
invented and maximally simple stories, often only a few sentences long, but eventu-
ally, in some quarters, the chosen texts were canonical works of art. Story grammar-
ians devised schematic representations of normative narrative syntax; psychologists
studied the way models of causality shaped expectations of plot; cognitive scientists
programmed computers to generate sequences that looked like stories. For the pur-
poses of this introduction, the field known as literary stylistics is of particular interest.
Also known as literary linguistics, it is the attempted systematic, inspectable
study of all aspects of literary texts (and their making and their reception) drawing
on the concepts and categories of linguistics. In very broad terms, modern stylistics
emerged sometime after Roman Jakobson’s famous Closing Statement on Linguis-
tics and Poetics, published in 1960. Early contributions looked mostly at short po-
ems which usually featured striking semantic or syntactic deviation. Only later, now
openly accepting that the sheer length of the target texts made even a notional “com-
prehensiveness” of treatment impossible, did stylisticians tackle prose fiction. Shifting
away from locally “complete” stylistic analyses of short poems undoubtedly ushered
in changes in methods and assumptions.
While literary linguists have treated short stories as frequently as novels, there
is little evidence as yet of a genre-specific stylistics of the short story as distinct from
the novel. This is presumably because all the linguistic resources found deployed in
the short story (whether older features like tense, aspect, anaphora and deixis, syn-
tactic complexity, semantic processes and roles [“transitivity”], modality, free indirect
discourse and other speech or thought representations; or newer explanatory tools
such as conceptual metaphor theory, blending theory, cognitive attractor mapping,
integrated multimodal parsing, etc.) are found also in the design and effects in novels.
But are they equally central, and used in entirely parallel ways? The possibility that,
in particular systematic respects, the language of short stories is generically different
from that of novels (and of plays, sonnets, etc.) needs fuller consideration.
One area of literary linguistic study of fiction is corpus stylistics, where corpus
linguistic methods, digitized databases of text, and literary description come together,
often with claims confirmed by experiments with or responses from real readers. I at-
tempt to demonstrate some of this in my contribution to these essays, using corpus
linguistic tools in a stylistic analysis of two very brief, nearly contiguous, passages in
“Passion.” The textual moments occur near the story’s close; I argue that they function
as a representation (or performance) of moments of high emotional intensity, or HEI,
within the story and in the reading of the story. I propose that in a number of lin-
guistically-describable ways—chiefly relating to mental projection, negation, lexical
repetition, syntactic complexity, presence of descriptors from “elemental” semantic
categories such as heat and light—the HEI passages stand apart stylistically from what
precedes and follows them in the narrative text. By this close focus on high emotional
152   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

intensity passages, I hope to show that a stylistic approach can contribute to a narrato-
logical understanding of this story, of short stories by Munro and similar modern and
contemporary writers generally, and ultimately of the different affordances of both
short narrative fiction and the longer form of the novel.
Corpus or narrative stylistics of the kind advocated here makes attention to the
linguistic texture of the narrative text (short story, novel, or other) a first consider-
ation. But a very close second consideration is the reader or readers, and the impact
on their experiencing of the text of the identified linguistic patterns and techniques.
In these ways there is a direct connection with cognitive studies of the reading of
narrative, and the sequential processing and evaluating of vastly more material than
can be retained in working memory. Like Susan Lohafer, I wish to attend to the short
story as sequentially-experienced, as a process of reading, not a totalized product.
Therefore my study tries not to venture too far from the given wording and presen-
tation of the text itself, the stable prism through which one can peer with difficulty
back at the psychology of the author and forward into the receptive minds of the
readers.
Despite the (belated) growth in studies of the stylistics of narrative fiction over
the past thirty years, there has been surprisingly little systematic work so far in the
stylistics of fiction that has looked closely at contrasts (in style, discourse, narration)
between the short story and the novel; hitherto, it has been generally assumed, one
literary linguistic set of analytical instruments has been deemed equally fit for use on
short stories as on novels. True though this may be in theory, it may be that in the
practice of analysis, interesting differences emerge between the deployment of lin-
guistic resources in the story and in the novel. The short story is just about the longest
form of written fiction where we can continue to claim that “every sentence” (perhaps
not every word) counts, would be noticeable in its absence, and must contribute to
the sustained and developing rhythm of unified reading that Poe long ago identified.

V. “Special-case Status” of the Short Story as Prose Narrative

Charles E. May

If, indeed, the short story has the integrity Poe ascribed to it, and if, as Fredric
Jameson once suggested, narrative is an epistemological category, one of the abstract
coordinates by which we come to know the world, then how does a narrative that is
small “know the world” differently than a narrative that is large?
One of the most helpful discussions of the effect of artistic smallness on the per-
ceiver is Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Science of the Concrete,” in which he argues that
the reduction of scale or number of properties in an artwork creates a reversal in the
process of understanding. To understand a real object, says Levi-Strauss, we tend to
divide it and to work from its parts. “Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being
smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively dimin-
ished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified” (148). Thus, knowledge of the whole
seems to precede knowledge of the parts. This illusion of perceiving the totality before
 Introduction  153

perceiving the parts aligns the short story on the side of formal aesthetic experience
rather than, as does the novel, on the side of time-bound everyday reality.
The most difficult problem the aesthetic nature of the short story poses for crit-
ics at the end of the 20th century and beyond is that it necessitates approaching the
short story from the currently discredited formalist point of view characteristic of
Romanticism and Modernism. Douglas Tallack has lamented that despite its theo-
retical shortcomings the Modernist/formalist critical approach to the short story is
still intact and that a “positive alternative, free from the existing and very persuasive
Romantic-Modernist view of the genre, is unlikely to emerge” (x). Dominic Head has
also complained that short story theory has largely been determined by an oversim-
plified perception of modernist practice and urges critics to go beyond what he calls
the “visual artifact aesthetic” or the “unity aesthetic” that has dominated criticism of
the form since Poe (26).
However, although Tallack and Head make valuable contributions to short story
theory, their insistence on some nebulous connection between literary form and so-
cial context and their consequent effort to apply currently fashionable sociological
theories to the short story prevent them from developing an approach consistent with
the short story’s unique generic characteristics. Two basic characteristics of the short
story as a universal mode have been recognized by authors and critics throughout the
19th and 20th centuries, both of which are results of the shortness of the form and
the tradition from which the form derives: They are the story’s focus on a basic sense
of mystery unsupported by a social framework and its consequent dependence on
formal pattern and structure.
E. K. Bennett points out that every definition of the German novelle, the precur-
sor of the so-called “tale” proper for which Poe laid out characteristics in the famous
Twice-Told Tales review, has some cognate word that suggests strangeness, unusual-
ness, the unexpected, concluding that the “element of the strange, the unheard of
[is] certainly one of the essential ingredients of the novelle” (1–19). Throughout the
19th century, the short story continued to focus on the strange or unusual. Even the
development of realism in the short story began with so-called local color, which
featured marginalized characters and exotic locales unfamiliar to an urban educated
reading public. This typical short story focus continues in the 20th century. Flannery
O’Connor has said that short stories make “alive some experience which we are not
accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience
in his ordinary life. … Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns,
toward mystery and the unexpected.” The unique problem of the short-story writer,
says O’Connor, is “how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery
of existence as possible” (87–106).
Terry Eagleton has noted that whereas realism, the most common modal per-
spective of the novel, is primarily a “cognitive form concerned to map the causal pro-
cesses underlying events and resolve them into some intelligible pattern, the short
story, by contrast, can yield us some single bizarre occurrence of epiphany of terror
whose impact would merely be blunted by lengthy realist elaboration.” As Eagleton
notes, “since realism is a chronically naturalizing mode, it is hard for it to cope with
154   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

the ineffable or unfathomable, given those built-in mechanisms which offer to trans-
mute all of this into the assuringly familiar” (150).
Walter Benjamin makes an important generic distinction between primal sto-
rytelling and the traditionally realistic novel. Indeed, the development of the novel
is one of the primary symptoms of the decline of storytelling, Benjamin argues, for
it signals the rise of that form of communication that has come to predominate in
the modern world—“information.” The difference between storytelling and informa-
tion, argues Benjamin, is that whereas storytelling always had a validity that required
no external verification, information must be accessible to immediate verification.
Whereas story is borrowed from the miraculous and does not demand plausibility or
conformity to the laws of external reality, information must be plausible and conform
to such laws. When stories come to us through information, they are already loaded
down with explanation, says Benjamin; it is half the art of storytelling to be free from
information. Because the reader of story is free to interpret things the way he under-
stands them, story has amplitude lacking in information. According to Benjamin,
although realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus on the relatively limited ar-
eas of human experience that indeed can be encompassed by information, characters
in stories encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience that cannot be
explained by rational means.
That the short story’s focus on mysteries of human hopes, dreams, fears, and
anxieties that derive from unfamiliar experiences or perceptions is related to the for-
mal demands of the genre has remained a constant of short story criticism since Poe
insisted on unity of effect. This “artificial” patterning of the short story results in a
heightening of intensity and deepening of experience that often creates the cryptic,
elliptical nature of the form that has frequently caused critics concern. John Aldridge
has equated the lack of information in the work of Raymond Carver, Mary Robison,
and other contemporary short story writers, with a lack of “significance.”
Friedrich Schlegel, the first theorist of short fiction, said in his 1801 study of the
stories of Boccaccio that the form was so divorced from any cultural background that
might give it significance that it had to contain something in its form, something in
the art with which the narrator presents it, to give it its real reason for being. This fo-
cus on form, on the art of the short narrative rather than on its content, makes some
contemporary critics distrust short fiction as too formal and thus too distant from the
flesh and blood of ordinary reality. It has also made them distrust any approach to
short fiction that emphasizes form.
The highly formal nature of the short story has always been criticized by those
critics and novelists who have argued that literature has a responsibility to be socially
aware and involved. The short story was attacked by realistic writers in the 19th cen-
tury, such as William Dean Howells, for being false to reality (“Some Anomalies”).
James T. Farrell criticized the form in the 1930s for its failure to be a vehicle for revo-
lutionary ideology. Maxwell Geismar lashed out against short story writers such as
Salinger, Roth, Malamud, and Powers in 1964 for the narrow range of their vision and
their stress on the intricate craftsmanship of the well-made story. In 1971, Malcolm
Cowley criticized short story writers for having nothing to write about except their
 Introduction  155

own effort in finding it difficult to write about anything. And in 1992, John Aldridge
scolded short story writers for being too much technique and too little significance.
All these complaints boil down to the same thing—that the short story is too much a
matter of form and too little a matter of what social critics define as “real life.”
It should not surprise us that critics who reject formalism as a method for ap-
proaching the short story have rejected the short story for being too formal. It is un-
fortunate for the short story that an understanding of its form in American criticism
has been inextricably linked to that influential interpretive maneuver known as the
New Criticism, which, associated with Southern conservatism, has come under fire
for being, at the very least, naïve and nontheoretical. The problem, of course, arises
when a commitment to form leads the critic to ignore the human content of the work.
The related problem is how to attend to the human content of the work without laps-
ing into the gratuitous oversimplification that the artwork is merely an information-
bearing medium for the replication of everyday life or the rhetoric of ideology.
Umberto Eco says he looks to cultural history to explain why a particular literary
work operates in a cultural context in such a way that routine notions and attitudes
are broken down and a new direction of consciousness emerges.

In this way I hold that the formal analysis of a work’s structural mechan-
ics … does not lead one to treat the work as an end in itself … but serves
to provide the instruments by which to understand the relations between
work, cultural context and the personality of the writer. … I don’t believe
that “formal” consideration of a work means accepting any kind of aesthetic
“formalism” but rather the opposite: the formal approach is the sole way of
correctly clarifying relationships between the work and the world of other
values. (142)

Or as William H. Gass more emphatically reminds us: The artist’s “fundamental loy-
alty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. Every other
diddly desire,” says Gass, “can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession,
every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never
be allowed to carry the day” (33).
Whether one agrees with this stance or not, it remains true that the short story
has lost whatever privileges it once had as the closest relative of the lyric poem. With
the rise of cultural studies, what often matters now is the form’s intimate connec-
tion with a marginalized people’s history, mythology, oral voice, and oppressed sta-
tus in colonial and post-colonial societies. Stories become vehicles for ideas, and not
just those of the author and original audience. Brevity translates into convenience for
scholars focusing on issues of race, class, and gender. The question is no longer “How
does a short story work?” but “Who uses short stories, for whose gain?” As you will
see from the essays in the present collection, short fiction theorists prefer to end rather
than begin with social issues. They believe there is more to learn about the connec-
tion between the formal properties of this genre and the way the human mind works,
alone and in society, in this culture or that. These interests help explain the growing
156   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

curiosity about cognitive science, the new links with empirical research, and various
other kinds of neo-Formalism. It may be through these reinventions of aesthetic anal-
ysis that short fiction theory will have another renaissance in the twenty-first century.

VI. Short Fiction Theory and Narrative Theory at Large

When literary scholars think of narrative theory, who comes to mind? The lists
would be long and varied, but in all likelihood, they would not include theorists who
specialize in the short story. There are many reasons for the relative obscurity—or
parallel existence or deliberate insularity—of short fiction studies. Devoting a special
issue of Narrative to this smaller field implies that a divide exists, but also attempts to
explain it, and perhaps to lessen it. In this section of the Introduction, four contribu-
tors will discuss the relationship between their thinking (when performing specifi-
cally as short fiction specialists) and that of well-known theorists who would surely
appear on anyone’s list of major figures in the larger field. The fifth contributor, Per
Winther, is already well represented in this Introduction, and addresses his relation-
ship to key theorists in his essay for this collection.

Charles E. May discussing David Herman

In one of his communications about this special issue, James Phelan generously
requests that we, who are presenting ourselves here as short story theorists, find a
way to “engage” with those who have been identified as narrative theorists. Speaking
for myself, it’s not that I have ignored the work of narrative theorists. It is rather, as
Phelan himself suggests, that “those who get called narrative theorists tend to view
the short story as having much more in common with other narratives, especially
other literary narratives, while short story theorists are very much interested in the
distinctive qualities of the form.”
Phelan further notes how often narrative theorists turn to the short story to il-
lustrate or complicate theoretical points, citing, for example, David Herman’s use of
“Hills Like White Elephants” in Basic Elements of Narrative. I am happy to “engage”
briefly with Herman about that story, for it is near and dear to my own academic aspi-
rations—identifying the distinctive characteristics of the short story that might make
reading short stories more aesthetically pleasurable and intellectually profitable.
Herman, however, seems less interested in determining the unique characteris-
tics of “Hills” as a short story than he is in “using” the story to illustrate characteristics
of narrative in general. I have no objection to that; it’s just not what I am interested in.
Furthermore, I am not totally convinced that the approaches Herman delineates as-
sist readers in engaging with Hemingway’s stories any more actively than my own ap-
proaches, which are based on a fairly extensive knowledge of how short stories work,
as well as good old-fashioned close reading.
Herman says he draws on relevant research to suggest how particular textual
cues prompt interpreters to “spatialize” storyworlds, “that is, to build up mental rep-
 Introduction  157

resentations of narrated domains as evolving configurations of participants, objects,

and places” (131). In a text like Hemingway’s, Herman argues,

this approach can be used to examine how shifts between foregrounded

and backgrounded objects and regions in the text, as well as the directions
of movement traced by the main participants in the scene enable readers
to segment the narrative into small episodes, each situated in a particular
space-time region of the narrative world. This approach also sheds light on
other, related questions, such as how Hemingway uses particular sub-spaces
(the hills across the valley, the bar, Jig’s and the man’s table) to stage aspects
of the characters conflicts, and also how this constellation of sub-spaces co-
heres into a world—what net effect the process of moving from one space to
the next generates. (131)

Well, O.K., but I am not sure what this approach, or this terminology adds to the un-
derstanding I tried to develop of Hemingway’s story in the introduction to Fiction’s
Many Worlds almost twenty years ago, in language an undergraduate can understand.
I beg your indulgence if I revisit that introduction in the following consideration of
the spatial/temporal structure of the story.15
On the first reading of this story, the fact that the train will arrive from Barcelona
in forty minutes may seem to be merely a realistic detail. However, at the end, the time
is mentioned again, when the waitress comes out and says that the train will arrive
in five minutes. This means that the events of the story take place in a time span of
thirty-five minutes. However, we know that it only took about ten to fifteen minutes
to read the story. How do we account for this discrepancy? We probably wouldn’t no-
tice it in a novel, but in a short story written by an artist whose credo of salient omis-
sion influenced the genre for nearly a century, the gap is an integral part of the story’s
temporal framework. The fact that there is a fifteen- to twenty-minute discrepancy
between the announced span of the events and the time of the reading should lead
us to ask what happened to those extra twenty minutes. The only answer is that they
must be in the points in the story when the characters are not saying anything. Our
realization that there are more blank spaces in the time span of the story than spoken
dialogue should make us aware that the story is about something that is never explic-
itly mentioned, but only hinted at and referred to, if at all, by the neutral pronoun “it.”
Hemingway makes the spatial reality of the story as explicit as he does the tem-
poral reality. The first paragraph locates the couple at a station situated between two
lines of rails—one going the way they have come, the other going in the direction they
are heading. The spatial situation of the rails suggest where they have been, as well as
where they are going, which, of course, is precisely what is at issue here. She wishes to
go one way; he wishes to go another. As soon as we become aware that the couple is in
a valley with barren hills on this side and green fields on the other, we become aware
of another element of the story that is purely rhetorical. The girl says the hills look like
white elephants, to which the man says he has never seen one. Perhaps the girl has
never seen one either, but that is not the full import of the comparison. Eventually, the
contrast between barrenness and fertility will reinforce the subtext of pregnancy, and
158   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

the imagery of “white elephants,” with the implication of something valuable but un-
wanted, will add more layers to the story. However, for now, I want to stress another
way in which compression in short stories allows Hemingway to make meaning out
of apparently throwaway lines.
When two people are “at one” with each other, they can make trivial remarks
with full confidence that the remarks will be appreciated by the other. However, if
there comes a time in the relationship when that sense of union is broken, trivial re-
marks that may have been simple banter before now fall flat. It is as though there is
nothing to say no point talking about “it”—something the girl is quite aware of when
she says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
This is why there are so many silences in the story, why the story communicates more
by what is not said than what is said and why it takes place at a junction between two
hills that represent fertility and sterility.
I appreciate David Herman’s use of “Hills Like White Elephants” to illustrate cer-
tain general aspects of narrative, but I do not see how his theoretical comments assist
me in my endeavors to understand the short story as a genre and Hemingway’s story
in particular. Even when I am speaking more abstractly about the epistemology of
the genre, I would like to think there is an integral relationship between my teaching
untrained readers how to read stories and my theoretical formulations.

Michael Toolan discussing Susan Lanser

In “Toward a Feminist Narratology” (1986), Susan Lanser argues that the tradi-
tional plot is built around “units of anticipation and fulfilment or problem and solu-
tion” (623) that assume a power remote from what women have experienced both
historically and textually. Traditional plots mostly involve potent or enabled male
protagonists, and underpinning that norm, according to Maria Brewer (whom Lan-
ser quotes), is a “discourse of male desire recounting itself through the narrative of
adventure, project, enterprise, and conquest” (Brewer 1151). Much of this does not
speak to women’s own experiences, Lanser argues, and may even be antithetical to
female desire.
We can hardly deny these identifications, and can surely see them still at work
in much narrative fiction, literary or popular, written or filmic. We might even see
moments of it in “Passion”—the sophisticated assuredness of Neil Borrow, sweeping
Grace off her injured feet and taking her away on a magical carpet (car, anyway): in
her unreliable remembering of the abduction, Grace figures “more or less as a cap-
tive”, enjoying an “airy surrender” in which her flesh is “nothing now but a stream of
desire”. The intoxicating abandon of the act! But it doesn’t last. Soon the giddy flight
has turned into an incoherent ramble through a maze of back roads, no longer a quest
for romance and passion, but for bootleg liquor. High romance descends to bathos
and squalor—random movement rather than those initial intimations of “adventure,
project, conquest”: plenty of anticipation, no fulfilment. With hindsight we can see as
proleptic the story’s opening paragraph, where an older Grace wanders in a maze of
roads, searching for the Traverses’ house; Susan Lohafer’s student readers predicted
 Introduction  159

that haphazardly would be its most telling word. In Lanser’s terms, if there is a male-
oriented trajectory in this story, it is ironically Neil’s drive toward self-destruction.
Neil himself knows Grace might have expected more of or from him, and is soon
mocking his own situational impotence. Really he’s too much of a depressive and a
drunk to offer more passion than a hand-lick. It is her own desires and purposes, not
Neil’s, that have impelled her to take off with him. So, many of the pointers Lanser
gives to narratologists on how we might revise and broaden our conceptions of plot
and voice to fit female experiences (as writer, character, or reader) as well as male
ones, are already enacted in “Passion”, as in so many other Munro stories. Women’s
issues are unambiguously present, in Maury’s assumptions about marrying Grace; in
his misreading of her proto-feminism; in Grace’s hatred of “girls like Elizabeth Taylor”
in Father of the Bride; in the story title; in Neil’s bodice-ripper language when he asks
Grace “Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes?”; and so on. To some
extent, Munro has pre-empted Lanser’s themes.
But how might this theorist’s work be relevant to a more general study of the
short story? Lanser’s own way of proceeding is to argue that looking at certain texts
can bring to attention sexual or gendered narrative elements previously overlooked in
a category of texts. Does looking at “Passion” re-define our understanding or assump-
tions about sex/gender and its influence on the short story as a genre? The answer,
since they (sex and gender) have been shown to shape how novels are made and what
they include and what we attend to in them, is presumably yes; but it is noticeable that
stories have not been much commented upon in feminist narratology.
I suspect this is because such perspectives are already at the core of short story
theory and criticism. While the canon on which narrative theory was grounded may
have been “relentlessly if not intentionally man-made” (Lanser, Fictions 6), that seems
scarcely to apply to short story theory, whose most admired and discussed 20th-cen-
tury practitioners are as often women as men. Might it have been only the novel (and
narratologists’ analyses of novels) that was particularly in need of a firm feminist in-
flection in the 1980s and beyond, while short story theory and analyses had already
acknowledged the importance of women as writers and readers of short fiction?
Nathaniel Hawthorne was jealous of the “damned mob of scribbling women”
who made more money than he did, and William Dean Howells credited women
with a special gift for the realistic short story (“Criticism” 64). Magazine fiction in the
United States in the 19th century was, if not exclusively a female domain, certainly
hospitable to women writers. Thus, when Mary Louise Pratt carefully called the genre
a “little brother” to the novel, inescapably evaluated relative to its larger and more
powerful sibling, should she have called it, more appropriately, a younger sister?
That designation might also suggest the genre’s fate in the mid-to-late 20th centu-
ry, when magazine circulation faded and book publishers overtly favored novels over
collections of short stories. In the academic world, convenience turned the short story
into a teaching tool for both critical reading and creative writing. Being viewed as the
“beginners” form reinforced its status as the weaker, easier, second-class genre—a sta-
tus that might, indeed, align it with the so-called “weaker sex.” Does literary culture,
then, already classify short stories (the writing and the reading of them) as women’s
work?
160   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

If perceptions of the short story genre have been feminized by both historical and
practical circumstances, then Lanser’s approach to narrative may not be essential to
short fiction theory, but it may still be very useful for short fiction analysis, sharpen-
ing our alertness to narrative perspective, especially in stories by and about women.
Lanser has always drawn our attention to narrators and their relationship to the story
they narrate and, by extension, our often undeclared relationship to (or attachment
to) the narrator—who may be viewed as the author herself, barely masked, or as un-
reliable, or lacking in self-consciousness, etc. In Part II of this issue, Per Winther dis-
cusses the very significant role of the covert narrator in “Passion,” logically sexing it
as female. If we look for them, there are plenty of textual traces that suggest a female
heterosexual narrator, in late middle age, a double for the older Grace, and somewhat
like Miss Munro herself. The story’s encouragement of our readerly “attachment” to
this covert “I” may license the little conceit ventured towards the close of my own es-
say, where Grace goes to a Munro reading and finds her in the flesh to be not quite the
soeur, the semblable, that imagining had suggested.
Mindful of Lanser’s point that traditionally women’s writing has been “private
narration” for a private narratee (prototypical forms being the letter and the diary),
we might see ourselves positioned by the story as quite private readers, despite our
notionally external and “public readership” status. From that more internal perspec-
tive, we might more readily see that the story of “Passion” is not only about how, as
a young woman, Grace went off with Neil, straining several bonds of friendship and
marriage in the name of passion. It is also about how a woman’s opportunities, self-
image, and conscience were affected by that “going off ”. That inner story, which in-
cludes the complementary story of Mrs. Travers, is about the obstacles, triumphs, and
costs attending female empowerment; and part of the story whole is the older Grace’s
“expedition” (or is it pilgrimage of atonement?) back to the Ottawa Valley, unsure
whether she hopes to find a monument preserved, diminished, or gone altogether,
and a possible old attachment or obligation gone with it.
Thus, for a writer like Munro, who is openly interested in the social and private
struggles of women, Lanser’s approach can highlight core issues. Short story theorists
can appreciate these insights. However, I am not sure that Lanser’s feminist narratol-
ogy opens up much that we didn’t know about Munro’s work already, or tells us some-
thing new about short stories in general. Ever since Frank O’Connor’s commentary
on the short story, we’ve associated the form with the oppressed, their losses and their
victories.

Susan Lohafer discussing James Phelan

At first glance, it may seem that short fiction specialists and narrative theorists
are afloat in the same pond. As a case in point, here is a comparative look, from my
perspective, at two scholars—James Phelan and myself—whose principles and prac-
tices have interesting affinities.16 Here, as I see it, are three things we both believe:

1) that narrative is experienced as a progression, an evolving engagement between

reader and text/author;
 Introduction  161

2) that despite individual and cultural variations, most readers share certain nor-
mative assumptions (Phelan talks about ethical judgments; I talk about a sense
of storyness).
3) that theory should be formulated a posteriori—i.e., by “[r]easoning back from
effects to causes” (Experiencing 85).

Because of our similar orientation toward hands-on analysis and reader-involvement,

because we both want to formulate not just a theory but a “poetics,”17 I am all the more
struck by our differences. These flow, I think, from our disparate views on:
1) the role of genre: In Experiencing Fiction, Phelan says, “For [Wayne] Booth, un-
derstanding a work’s implied genre is the first step toward understanding its implied
standards of quality.” Phelan then “propose[s] to revise this element of Booth’s system
by replacing ‘genre’ with ‘purpose(s)’ as the source of our standards of quality” (142).
For me, genre remains central. Hence, my reference points are different. For example,
although Phelan and I both acknowledge the “lyrical” features of those narratives that
focus less on dynamic change than on conditions-of-being, my point of departure is
Eileen Baldeshwiler. Her 1969 essay on the lyrical tradition in the short story lists its
defining features and gives it a history. Few narrative theorists take note of this work,
unless they specialize in the short story.
Given Phelan’s orientation, he discusses normative ethical responses (“we judge
Cinderella positively and her stepmother negatively,” Experiencing Fiction 1) without
referring to the work of psychologists like William F. Brewer, whose study of young
readers’ “just world” expectations I’ve found useful for understanding how ethical
judgments affect text-processing (Brewer and Ohtsuka); Phelan notes the social crit-
icism embedded in Sandra Cisneros’s work without mentioning Frank O’Connor’s
“submerged populations” and their gravitation to the short form. Obviously, Phelan
could list scores of theorists whose work I ignore. We steer our boats by different
constellations.
2) the role of readers: Throughout his work, Phelan refers to “flesh-and-blood
readers,” even listing the term in the indexes of two books. Readers play a defining
role in his rhetorical approach to fiction; however, despite his distinction between
“real” readers and the “authorial audience,” both are, from my point of view (he might
disagree), conceptual entities. The natural tendency to imagine readers in our own
image is productive in Phelan’s case. However, I am slightly wary of scholarly assump-
tions about the world, and I believe that the short story is tied to primal sources of
narrative. For me, therefore, it’s the ordinary reader who knows the most about story-
ness. To access that cognitive and cultural resource, I’ve turned to actual, thinking-
and-breathing readers, conducting a series of relatively controlled experiments. These
occasions generate the data that inspire my interpretation of texts and my theories
about genre.
As an example of our different approaches, consider Phelan’s discussion of San-
dra Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q,” in Living to Tell About It (5–18). Although brevity figures
as a convenience rather than a signature—the text is “short enough to reproduce in
full” (5)—Phelan’s analysis of the narrator’s role is very helpful, especially the charac-
teristically intelligent analysis of “disclosure functions.” I also appreciate the “cultural
narratives” Phelan pertinently identifies, such as “Dangerous Role Model Barbie.” I
162   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

refer to meta-narratives as “cultural scripts,” and I call familiar plots “story-types,” but
the conclusion is the same: this little story is twirling big narratives on its finger-tip.
If I were targeting this story, I’d ask a group of readers to identify points where
they thought the story could end before it does. Were I to do the experiment, I might
find that the favored preclosure points, in order of occurrence, end in these words:

“… until they say okay.”

[The narrator and her sister, Chicana girls who create mini-dramas
with the broken-down Barbie dolls that mediate their relation to the main-
stream culture, have been coveting two apparently-new Barbie dolls discov-
ered at a flea market. They beg the adults to purchase the dolls. They get their
wish.]

“So what if our Barbies smell like smoke … even after you wash and
wash and wash them.”
[They discover many other Barbies for sale, learning that a fire de-
stroyed a warehouse, bringing these slightly damaged Barbies within reach
of girls who could never afford them otherwise. Later, after trying to restore
their damaged Barbies, the girls realize they can’t, and accept this reality.]

“… a left foot that’s melted a little—so?”

[The narrator’s realization crystallizes as defiance.]

“If you dress her in her new ‘Prom Pinks’ outfit, … so long as you don’t
lift her dress, right?—who’s to know.”
[This is the actual closure of the story. Her defiance becomes a
plan to control perceptions.]

The progression I’ve highlighted seems generally congruent with Phelan’s rea-
soning. Here is his conclusion:

On the one hand, the character narrator’s defiance underlines her na-
ïveté. … On the other, that defiance is a sign of her strong spirit, something
that Cisneros asks us to admire. … [The first emphasis shows the narrator as
victim, the second shows her as] an agent who is not totally defined by her
socioeconomic and racial position and who is determined to cope with her
situation. This emphasis neither cancels nor supersedes the first one, and the
power of the story arises from their coexistence. (Living 17; emphasis mine)

However, when I look at the “plot” graphed by the preclosure points, I do not see, as
a rhetorician does, a final “coexistence” of opposing statements; I see four story-types
succeeding and revising each other—coexisting—in a manner typical of the short
story genre: a traditional wish-fulfillment story; a tough-world, reality-check story; a
worm-turns, self-assertion story; a discovery-of-power story (in this case, the power
to shape the image others see). My analysis tells me that this is another of Cisneros’s
 Introduction  163

stories about a young Chicana girl using her spirit, ambition, and, above all, her story-
telling ability to negotiate socioeconomic barriers and win respect through artful rep-
resentations of her reality.
I’ve heard Cisneros talk about her negative experiences at the Iowa Poetry Work-
shop, until she found her voice as a “lyrical” prose writer, a teller of stories that, like
the magical tales of our ancestors, are about managing reality for human survival. Her
protagonists may be culture-heroines for Chicanas, they may have a rhetorical “pur-
pose” as thinly-disguised avatars of their creator, but they achieve their goals because
they control the way they—and we—see their reality. “Who’s to know” is not a ques-
tion or a challenge. It’s a credo. Knowledge is a function of imagination. For now, in
comparing my analysis to Phelan’s, I would claim only that mine is made to order for
short stories, while his, for good reasons, is not.
As this publication shows, I welcome his trust that scholars can talk to each other
across the borders of specialization. Yet, for me, the issue is not placement on a flow-
chart. The course of short fiction theory (or, more properly, its many theories) is nei-
ther an off-shoot nor a tributary of the mainstream. As a field of study, it has different
first principles. It takes artists more seriously as proto-theorists. It favors different
outlooks and practices, yielding its own insight into the enterprise of narrative.

Michael Trussler on Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Others

For simplicity’s sake let me divide narrative theory into two kinds: that which
seeks to uncover the epistemological dimensions of narrative (historiography, philo-
sophical hermeneutics) and that which attempts to anatomize the numerous mechan-
ics employed by narrative (narratology). While both approaches may grant consid-
erable sophistication to a reading of a specific short story, neither necessarily pays
significant attention to the short story as a distinct genre. Classical narratology’s sys-
tematic examination of narrative provides wonderfully nuanced tools for the analysis
of those narratives we call short stories; that said, however useful technical precision
may be in alerting us to the complexity of narration, this method doesn’t distinguish
between types of fiction: free indirect discourse, for instance, is a technique associated
with modernist narrative generally; it can be observed in both James Joyce’s “A Little
Cloud” and Ulysses. If we turn to speculative narrative theory such as that developed
by Hayden White or Paul Ricoeur, we find that neither White’s assessment of historio-
graphic modes nor Ricoeur’s interest in the dynamics between narrativity and tem-
porality pay any attention to the short story genre. That speculative narrative theory
doesn’t openly address the short story as a formal structure by no means lessens its
potential use for short story theory.
When White posits that “narrative might well be considered a solution to a prob-
lem of general human concern, namely the problem of how to translate knowing into
telling” (“Narrativity” 1), he implicitly underscores the communal aims of narrative;
not only do we rely upon narrative to escape the fear of isolation and the dangers of
solipsism, but narrative depends upon a given social group that is willing to “charge
[a set of events] with ethical or moral significance” (“Narrativity” 11). Perhaps one
164   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

could agree with White that narrative cannot be extricated from its communal func-
tion and yet maintain that some narratives are innately suspicious of community
and what passes for communicable knowledge. Numerous theorists have argued that
short fiction self-consciously engages the possibility that key components of human
experience might be incapable of discursive transmission. Furthermore, short fiction
persistently seems to question the validity of an individual’s (or a culture’s) claims to
knowledge. Building on the work of Charles E. May, Thomas M. Leitch argues that
“[short stories] constitute not a form of knowledge but a challenge to knowledge; that
is, a way of debunking assumptions which are not really true” (133). For Leitch, short
fiction’s skepticism doesn’t derive simply from textual content, but is built right into
the weave of a short story’s “antithetical structure.” Perhaps short stories are narra-
tives which are fundamentally skeptical about using narrative as a way of knowing the
world, or, in White’s terms, perhaps short fiction is deliberately stalled regarding “the
problem of how to translate knowing into telling.”18
In his efforts to delineate how narrative and temporality bear a reciprocal rela-
tionship to each other Ricoeur resorts to a Heideggerian analysis of repetition, but
it is worth observing that Ricoeur himself detects within Heidegger an “analysis of
temporality centered on the non-transferable experience of having to die, [a] perspec-
tive [which] must remain radically monadic” (178). This monadic situation troubles
Ricoeur, and he tries to resolve it by appealing to Heidegger’s “notion of a common
‘destiny’ (Geschick) [which permits people] to reach the communal dimension of his-
toricality” (179). That this solution further disturbs Ricoeur becomes clear when he
closes the paragraph discussing fate, repetition and destiny with “there is a dark ker-
nel of thought underlying the new equivalence between historicality and repetition”
(179); more important rhetorically, the sentence referring to this “dark kernel” closes
with an ellipsis in Ricoeur’s text, as if he feels so uncomfortable with these ideas that
he chooses to leave them alone on the page (rather than neatly resolve them) before
he moves to his next point in his essay. Given the short story’s preoccupation with
death from Edgar Allan Poe to Alice Munro, I would posit that the short story is pre-
cisely that kind of narrative which, to borrow from Ricoeur, “must appear scandalous
to historians and narrators of all kinds for whom historicality opens an endless space
for the course of events” (178). In his seminal book The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor
argues that short stories emphasize loneliness: “always in the short story there is the
sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” (“Lonely” 87). Per-
haps short fiction’s emphasis on private isolation versus communal recuperation de-
rives from the monadic existential situation that mortality forces upon us as indi-
viduals. As Ricoeur might put it, the short story offers the “scandal” of irrevocable
isolation and radical discontinuity in reply to those cultural and social forces that
would comfort (if not redeem) individual anguish by rendering human experience
into shared communal narratives.

Endnotes
1. For eloquent attacks on “the well-made story,” see for instance Henry Seidel Canby, “Free Fiction”
(51–61), Herbert Ellsworth’s “The Senility of the Short-Story” (62–66), and N. Bryllion Fagin’s
 Introduction  165

“O. Henryism” (67–69), as well as Sherwood Anderson’s “Form, Not Plot” (70–73); all printed in
Current-Garcia and Patrick.
2. Cf. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story.
3. Another is Gerald Prince whose title, “The Long and Short of It—The Short Story: Theory and
Practice” deliberately echoes Pratt’s. Prince identifies seven necessary but not sufficient features
of any member of the class: it will be short, fictional, written, in prose, autonomous, literary, and
have storyhood.
4. In “On Defining Short Stories” Alan Pasco discusses in a similar manner typical short story fea-
tures, using predominantly French short stories as examples.
5. For instance, David Richter’s The Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction
(1973), D. A. Miller’s Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel
(1981), and Marianna Torgovnick’s Closure in the Novel (1981).
6. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” 214. Chatman para-
phrases ideas expressed by Bremond in Story and Discourse, 20.
7. Cf. the suggestive title of Theodore R. Sarbin’s book, Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of
Human Conduct. For a useful summary of the application of cognitive psychology and “storying”
in short story criticism, see Lohafer, “A Cognitive Approach to Storyness” and Reading for Story-
ing discussed below. See also Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality.”
8. For an overview of the theoretical connections between “literary” narrative theory, the cognitive
sciences and discourse analysis, see Teun A. Van Dijk, “Story Comprehension: An Introduction.”
For a detailed illustrations of how discourse analysis categories may be applied in short story
analysis, see Lohafer, “Preclosure and Story Processing,” and Suzanne Hunter Brown, “Discourse
Analysis and the Short Story.”
9. In Coming to Terms with the Short Story, Susan Lohafer introduced the term “grammar of expec-
tation” to denote this kind of anticipation on the part of the reader.
10. An account of this experiment is found in “Preclosure and Story Processing”; the essay is re-
printed with some changes as Chapter 2 of Reading for Storying.
11. See May’s seminal article “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.”
12. Although not identical with the figure of the threshold, Susan Lohafer’s notion of “homecoming”
and “home leaving” is itself a chronotope that complements Bakhtin’s. For her, short fiction mani-
fests these two phenomena on primordial psychological and philosophical levels. “Homecoming
and home leaving,” she says, “rest on a very fundamental binary human experience of security and
insecurity. . . . As a metaphor for this primal, binary relationship to the world, homecoming and
home leaving . . . combines both the spatial and linear elements” (Trussler 20).
13. Such encounters are not, of course, the sole purview of the short story; David Mitchell’s recent
novel Cloud Atlas is comprised of six primary narrative threads, each of which contains a similar
face-to-face exchange that invites an ethical response. Also, it’s important to note that a face-to-
face encounter doesn’t automatically induce compassion and recognition of the Other. As Mitch-
ell’s novel and numerous short stories attest, one can refuse to admit the Other’s existence.
14. In “Passion,” Munro captures this part-to-whole relationship, derived from a face-to-face meet-
ing, when the lead character Grace considers a potential suitor: “‘What?’ he said painfully, and
then Grace did stop and look at him. It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that one
moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined” (163).
15. See Fiction’s Many Worlds, 18–26.
16. My comments are based on the following three books by James Phelan: Narrative as Rhetoric:
Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (1996); Living to Tell About It (2005); and Experiencing
Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007).
166   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

17. This had been my intention all along, and Phelan announces his own version of it in 2007: “In a
sense, Experiencing Fiction is an effort to write a third chapter to this narrative of the neo-Aristo-
telian movement by putting the poetic and the rhetorical strands of the tradition back together in
the construction of a rhetorical poetics” (81).
18. White’s thoughts on how narrative shapes our perception of reality could serve to illuminate nu-
merous specific stories and even movements within short fiction; for example, his observation
that medieval annals “figure[e] forth a world in which things happen to people rather than one
in which people do things” (“Narrativity” 10) elucidates Raymond Carver’s elliptical Minimalist
short fiction in terms of both content and form. From the other direction, a consideration of
the short story might complicate historiography which generally takes the nineteenth-century
novel to be the paradigm for much historical discourse. Perhaps there are “histories” that possibly
become more intelligible when viewed through the lens of short fiction.

Works Cited
Aldridge, John W. Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. New
York: Scribner’s, 1992.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. 1981. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990.
Baldeshwiler, Eileen. “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Sum-
mer 1969), 443–53. Reprinted in Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 202–213. Athens:
Ohio Univ. Press, 1976.
Beattie, Ann. “Snow.” In Where You’ll Find Me, 21–23. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations,
translated by Harry Zohn, 83–109.. London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1970.
Bennett, E. K. A History of the German Novelle. 2nd ed. London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories. London: Faber, 1936.
Reprinted in Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 152–58. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press.
Bremond, Claude. “Le Message Narratif.” Communications 4 (1964): 4–32.
Brewer, Maria Minich. “A Loosening of Tongues: from Narrative Economy to Women Writing.” MLN
99 (1984): 1141–61.
Brewer, William F., and Keisuke Ohtsuka. “Story Structure, Characterization, Just World Organiza-
tion, and Reader Affect in American and Hungarian Short Stories.” Poetics 17 (1988): 395–415.
Brown, Susan Hunter. “Discourse Analysis and the Short Story.” In Short Story Theory at a Crossroads,
edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 217–48. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press.
Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (Autumn 1991): 1–21.
Canby, Henry Seidel. “On the Short Story.” In What Is the Short Story?, edited by Eugene Current-
Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, 39–42. Rev. ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, and Company,
1974.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1978.
Cowley, Malcolm. “Storytelling’s Tarnished Image.” Saturday Review 25 (1971): 25, 27, 54.
 Introduction  167

Current-Garcia Eugene, and Walton R. Patrick, eds. What Is the Short Story? Rev. ed. Glenview, Ill.:
Scott, Foresman and Company, 1974.
Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995.
Eco, Umberto. “The Analysis of Structure.” The Critical Moment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
138–45.
Farrell, James T. “Nonsense and the Short Story.” In The League of Frightened Philistines and Other
Papers, 72–81. New York: Vanguard Press, Inc., 1945.
Friedman, Norman. “Recent Short Story Theories: Problems in Definition.” In Short Story Theory at
a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 13–31. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1989.
Gass, William H. Finding a Form. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Geismar, Maxwell. “The American Short Story Today.” Studies on the Left 4 (1964): 21–27.
Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. Tuscaloosa: Univ.
of Alabama Press, 1985.
Gordimer, Nadine. “The Flash of Fireflies.” Kenyon Review 30.4 (1968), 103–17. Reprinted in Short
Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 178–81. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976.
Hanson, Clare. “‘Things out of Words’: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction.” In Re-Reading the Short
Story, edited by Clare Hanson, 22–33. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge Univ. Press,
1992.
Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Howells, William Dean. “Criticism and Fiction, XXII.” In Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays,
edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk, 64. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959.
———. “Some Anomalies of the Short Story.” North American Review 173 (1901): 422–32.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as A Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1981.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. London and Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1979.
———. The Sense of an Ending. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966.
Lanser, Susan S. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1992.
———. “The ‘I’ of the Beholder.” In Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan
and Peter Rabinowitz, 206–19. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
———. “Sexing Narratology: Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative Voice.” Narrative Theory: Criti-
cal Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2004.
———. “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire and the Engendering of Narratology.” Narrative 3.1
(1995): 85–94.
———. “Toward a Feminist Narratology.” Style, 20.3 (1986 [1991]): 341–63. Reprinted in Feminisms:
an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol, 610–26. New York:
Rutgers Univ. Press.
168   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

Le Guin, Ursula. “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?”
In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 187–95. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981.
Leitch, Thomas, M. “The Debunking Rhythm of the American Short Story.” In Short Story Theory at
a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 130–47. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1989.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and
Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Science of the Concrete.” In European Literary Theory and Practice, edited
by Vernon W. Gras, 133–63. New York: Dell, 1973.
Lohafer, Susan. “A Cognitive Approach to Storyness.” In The New Short Story Theories, edited by
Charles E. May, 301–11. Athens, Ohio Univ. Press, 1994.
———. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983.
———. “Preclosure and Story Processing.” In Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan
Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 249–75. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989.
———. Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003.
Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State Univ. Press, 1989.
Mansfield, Katherine. “The Garden Party.” In Short Fiction: An Anthology, edited by Rosemary Sul-
livan and Mark Levene, 250–61. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003.
Matthews, Brander. “The Philosophy of the Short-Story.” In What Is the Short Story? edited by Eugene
Current-Garcia and Walton R. Patrick, 33–38. Rev. ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, and Com-
pany, 1974.
May, Charles E. Fiction’s Many Worlds. Lexington, MA: DC Heath, 1993.
———. “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction. 21 (1984): 327–38. Re-
printed. in The New Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 131–43. Athens: Ohio Univ.
Press, 1994.
———, ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1994.
———. “Prolegomenon to a Generic Study of the Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction. Special Short
Story Theory Number. 23.4 (Fall 1996): 461–73.
———, ed. Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976.
Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1981.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004.
Munro, Alice. “Passion.” In Runaway, 159–96. 2004. Toronto: Penguin, 2005.
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. NY: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1969.
O’Connor, Frank. “Guests of the Nation.” In The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th ed., edited by
Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill, 1238–46. New York: Norton, 2006.
———. “The Lonely Voice.” From The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Reprinted in Short
Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 83–93. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976.
———. The Lonely Voice. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1963.
 Introduction  169

Ortega y. Gasset, Jose. Meditations on Quixote. Translated by Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marín. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1961.
Pasco, Allan H. “On Defining Short Stories.” New Literary History 22 (Spring 1991). Reprinted in The
New Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 114–30. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1994
Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative.
Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 2007.
———. Living to Tell About It. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005.
———. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: The Ohio State Univ.
Press, 1996.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In The Complete Works of Edgar Allan
Poe, Vol. 11, edited by James A. Harrison, 104–13. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1902.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Short Story: The Long and Short of It.” Poetics 10 (1981): 175–94.
Prince, Gerald. “The Long and Short of It—The Short Story: Theory and Practice.” Style 27 (1993):
327–31.
Richter, David. The Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1973.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Time.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 165–86. Chicago: The
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981.
Rohrberger, Mary. “The Short Story: A Proposed Definition.” From Hawthorne and the Modern Short
Story: A Study in Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Reprinted in Short Story Theories, edited by
Charles E. May, 80–83. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976
Sarbin, Theodore R., ed. Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York:
Greenwood, 1986.
Schlegel, Friedrich von. Nachrichten von den poetischen Werken des G. Boccaccio, 1801. Cited by E. K.
Bennett. A History of the German Novelle. Revised by H. M. Waidson. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1965.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn
1980): 213–36.
———. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968.
Tallack, Douglas. The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form, and Ideology. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981.
Trussler, Michael. “The Short Story Today: An Interview with Susan Lohafer and Charles E. May.”
Wascana Review 33.1 (Spring 1998): 14–24.
Van Dijk, Teun A. “Story Comprehension: An Introduction.” In The New Short Story Theories, edited
by Charles E. May, 281–300. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1994.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987.
———. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T.
Mitchell, 1–23. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981.
Winther, Per. “Closure and Preclosure as Narrative Grid in Short Story Analysis: Some Methodologi-
cal Suggestions.” In The Art of Brevity, edited by Per Winteher, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei,
56–69. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2004.
170   Winther, Trussler, Toolan, May, and Lohafer

Winther, Per, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction
Theory and Analysis. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Wright, Austin. The American Short Story in the Twenties. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.
———. The Formal Principle in the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.
———. “On Defining the Short Story: The Genre Question.” In Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed-
ited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Elln Clarey, 46–56. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989.
———. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.” In Susan Lohafer and Jo Elln Clarey, 115–29. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989.