M.A. THESIS DEFENSE PRESENTATION SPEECH

José Flávio Nogueira Guimarães, M.A.

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

The germ of my research was a book, indirectly given to me through a gift card from the publishers Barnes & Noble when I lived in New Jersey in 2006. The book I chose from the shelves of the bookstore at the time was "Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories," first printed in 1986, published by the editors and literature critics Robert Shapard and James Thomas. This short-short story collection was the first ever published in the United States. However, before I read this book, I had taken a course as an undergraduate called “The Short Story Tradition,” that sparked my interest in for short fiction in general.

Charles E. May, who is the most frequently cited critical expert on the short story as a genre, argues in his book The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, that the short story preceded the novel in its primal origins: “Studies in anthropology suggest that brief episodic narratives, which constitute the basis of the short story, are primary, preceding later epic forms, which constitute the basis of the novel”. Mary Louise Pratt also claims that in the short story, we can perceive “remains of oral, folk, and biblical narrative traditions, like the fairy tale, the ghost story, parable, exemplum, fabliau, (and) animal fable” (108).

Throughout my thesis there is an attempt to show that the taxonomic principles and the concept of generic identity that have been brought forward by critics are insufficient to limit this literary genre, especially postmodern and hybrid forms such as the short-short story. The boundaries between those literary genres seem blurred and there would be an ideological and cultural interest in those classifications, as Pratt argues. She proposes genre criticism based not only on supposed criterial features, but also on “non-essential and occasional ones … characteristics that aren’t relevant points of contrast with other genres, or with vaguer tendencies and trends not visible in all members of the genre, but present often enough to be noticed” (93).

Nevertheless, it is important for the study of such literary genres that some distinguishable features be pointed out. In my thesis, therefore, I attempt to describe the genre of the short-short story and delineate its differences from other prose forms, distinguish as far as possible the relatively new literary phenomenon of the short-short. As the critic Gitte Mose claims, it can no longer be denied that the short-short is a separate genre and not simply a sub-category of the short story.

There are several categories of short fiction that are informally taught or referred to as “short story”; nevertheless, depending on certain features or cluster of features, they might be a tale, a novella, a modern short story (or short-story, as Brander Matthews insisted), a contemporary short story or even a short-short. The basic distinction between the novella, the fictional form shorter than the novel itself, and the modern short story has usually been length. Regarding length, the novella is placed between the novel and the short story; a narrative of middle length – roughly 15,000 to 50,000 words. Is a novel shorter than 50,000 words a short novel, or a novella? There are also short stories longer than 15,000 words.

I have tried to suggest some features other than length to classify fictions. The tale, a short fiction piece from the 19th century had characters that are romance figures or stereotypes illustrating popular values and ideals… They tend to be overtly allegorical… Tale writers of the time built their themes on didactic passages avoiding ambiguity, complexity, and richness … Plots [were] designed to prove the moral, regardless of violations of a work’s basic premises, as Marler describes them. The modern short story at this juncture is considered better the more it conforms to realism.

Now, the contemporary short story I refer to in my thesis is the one influenced by Anton Chekhov’s style and voice. Chekhov was the first writer to free himself “from the literary conventions of the highly plotted and formalized story [which] marked the beginnings of a new or ‘modern’ kind of short fiction that combined the specific detail of realism with the poetic lyricism of romanticism,” as Charles May states in his essay “Chekhov and the Modern Short Story.” Some of the characteristics of Chekhov’s writing also listed by May in this essay, are the association with lyric poetry, the freedom from highly plotted stories, the sparing use of language, the minimal plot as a lyricized sketch, atmosphere as an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projections, the spare dialogue of characters, the focus of reality as a fictional construct, hybridism, and a perspectival point of view. The characters often have no names or only first names and are briefly described - character as mood rather than realistic depiction. Those characteristics suit perfectly the perceived features of modern short fiction, such as that found in Joyce’s Dubliners, as well as examples of contemporary short-short story writers.

Chekhov’s most immediate impact was on three important modernists of the English language: the Irishman James Joyce, the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, and the American Sherwood Anderson. Subsequently, these writers would influence other important short story writers, such as Bernard Malamud, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Robert Coover whose samples of short fiction, short story and short-short, I analyze in my thesis. Due to those sequences of influences, it may be stated that Chekhov has not solely fathered the contemporary short story but also, indirectly, the short-short story.

It is difficult to give a single definition for the short-short, as for any other genre since genres develop and change over time. Every genre has a trajectory in which a form develops as a deviation from an earlier one, reaches its peak of quality, and then is so repeated that it becomes overused and begets its successor. In my work, I describe this event, particularly the transition from tale to what is called today the modern short story. A different case would be the epic, a dead genre that maintains an agreed upon set of features. On the contrary, the short-short story is a hybrid genre with more than one source of influence, namely the classic short story in form, poetry in condensation and journalism in style. It is an emerging genre that is still being developed, as is shown by the fact that currently there is no notice of short-short story theories, only collections and anthologies of examples. This new literary genre has not yet been studied in depth by the academy.

The journalistic writing has influenced the short-short story because the pioneering short-shorts were originally published in magazines and newspapers and at the time, the nineteen-eighties, those pieces of short fiction began to appear as “generic markers.” They combined characteristics of the short story, the poem, and the journalist article. The hybridism, what is called bricolage - “a literary piece created from diverse resources” - and pastiche - “a literary piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources” – indicate that this is a prose postmodernist form without a single identity but with features and traits from distinct sources. A short-short writer has confessed in an interview that before writing her piece of fiction, she had all the textual fragments laid scattered before her and “the composition was solely directed by the mood of the text bits themselves, not by characters or ideas about plots and events.” A tendency to disregard “the literary conventions of the highly plotted and formalized story marked the beginnings of a new or ‘modern’ kind of short fiction” which some critics think occurred as far back as the nineteenth century, with the no-beginning, no-end stories, all-middle stories of Anton Chekhov and his “new” realism. American and English writers had access to Chekhov’s short stories by the beginning of the twentieth century. These stories focused “on fragments of everyday reality – and so [were] characterized as ‘sketches’, ‘cross sections’, or ‘slices of life’” even while they did not have the formal construction of what was regarded as the good short story of the time. For instance, such stories “did not embody the social commitment or political convictions of the realistic novel… [rather they] combined the specific detail of realism with the poetic lyricism of romanticism.” Short-shorts can be seen as descending from this kind of story, but is a new hybrid form. W. S. Penn, in his article “The Tale as Genre in Short Fiction,” writes: “It [does not] mean that a combination of elements from different genres could not be used by the story writer. What it means is that generic theory must evolve – grow or completely change – along with the development of new genres.”

In terms of condensation, the short-shorts are, as their name indicates, even briefer than the short story and may be seen as akin to poetry in their brevity. Regarding fictional elements, the new genre, especially the “flash fictions,” one of its sub-genres, suggests the tale. Concerning limits, the limits and boundaries that settle the borders of this new genre still seem rather blurred, that is also a characteristic of postmodernism, within which the new genre emerged.

In my work, I suggest rather than a definition a cluster of features for the short-short story and its sub-genres, which have been called “the new sudden fiction” and the “flash fiction”. Samples of short-shorts and short stories from different anthologies were used for the sake of comparison and analyses as well as short story theories, such as the classifications of Shapard and Thomas. In my analyses of these samples, furthermore, I found a story that could not be classified neither as a new sudden fiction nor a flash fiction, but a hybrid of a hybrid.

Among the features that characterize the short-short story are those that characterize postmodern fiction in general: the focus on reality as a fictional construct, character as mood; a form minimally developed; atmosphere with a mixture of a familiar setting with strange psychic projections. Overall, the short-short story is deliberately unconventional, eccentric, and formally experimental. It is always condensed, making use of colloquial language. The characters are not well-developed within the limits of space but are used as tools to move the plot along. The descriptions of the setting are limited to the strictly necessary. Often, as shown in my examples, the outcome suggests a parable or may be summed up in a maxim or familiar saying, which, however, does not really serve as a “moral” in the traditional sense but may be ironic. Black humor is a tone and effect often achieved in the short-short, especially in the flash fictions.

As for the two types, basically, stories of 1/3 of a page to two pages or 250 to 750 words are different not only because of their brevity and lack of space to fully develop a plot and characterization, but seem to evoke a single idea or moment, have a reversal, usually comic, in which the initial circumstances of the plot are reversed at the end and as a result are called flash fictions. Meanwhile, stories of one to five pages or 1,000 to 2,000 words, also experimental, which, however, share features more akin to the traditional short story, are called new sudden fictions.

My study has attempted an overall description and taxonomy of the new and emerging genre in prose fiction by summarizing and citing critical positions, organizing ideas, and suggesting connections. Further research on the short-short story might focus on how generic boundaries tend to blur as new examples of each form emerge. One might expect that the short-short will develop further “wrinkles,” new subjects, new modes of narration from the most current tendency, the flash fiction.