The author presents a highly personal case for considering Andrey Platonov as the third person of a ‘holy trinity’ of writers from early twentieth-century Russia. Where Chekhov foresaw huge social upheaval (but died before seeing it) and Gorky staged the beginnings of insurrection, Platonov explores the fallout of the Revolution. The malign impact of Gorky’s doctrine of Socialist Realism on Platonov’s life and work is tracked. The challenges of adapting Platonov’s fiction to the stage are examined, and a case study offered of the new play Bliss, based on ‘The River Potudan’, which premiered in Platonov’s hometown of Voronezh, in June 2019.
{"title":"Platonov or bust","authors":"Fraser Grace","doi":"10.1386/fict_00071_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00071_1","url":null,"abstract":"The author presents a highly personal case for considering Andrey Platonov as the third person of a ‘holy trinity’ of writers from early twentieth-century Russia. Where Chekhov foresaw huge social upheaval (but died before seeing it) and Gorky staged the beginnings of insurrection, Platonov explores the fallout of the Revolution. The malign impact of Gorky’s doctrine of Socialist Realism on Platonov’s life and work is tracked. The challenges of adapting Platonov’s fiction to the stage are examined, and a case study offered of the new play Bliss, based on ‘The River Potudan’, which premiered in Platonov’s hometown of Voronezh, in June 2019.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"9 1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88789897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the way Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Death by Landscape’ (1991) engages with the representational strategies of Canada’s celebrated Group of Seven artists. I situate my reading of Atwood’s work first within aesthetics, focusing on her subtle problematization of the masculine ideology and wilderness aesthetic of the Group of Seven. I argue that Atwood unsettles the dominant, virulently male tradition of representation of the wilderness by uncovering an alternative female narrative through an ekphrastic engagement with the paintings. By doing so she not only dismantles the concept of wilderness both as a physical space that women have limited access to and as an imaginary construct; but at the same time she also reconfigures the structure and the content of wilderness stories, and in fact the concept of wilderness itself. Atwood offers a counter-discursive revision of the male adventure and maturation story by deconstructing and restructuring traditional narrative practices to render the female experience visible. This article hopes to show that Atwood expands the possibilities of the adventure story and wilderness writing and creates room for a female version of the maturation story with a fundamentally different aesthetic.
{"title":"Reading the ‘wordless unease’ in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Death by Landscape’","authors":"Eleanora Togyer","doi":"10.1386/fict_00070_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00070_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the way Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Death by Landscape’ (1991) engages with the representational strategies of Canada’s celebrated Group of Seven artists. I situate my reading of Atwood’s work first within aesthetics, focusing on her subtle problematization of the masculine ideology and wilderness aesthetic of the Group of Seven. I argue that Atwood unsettles the dominant, virulently male tradition of representation of the wilderness by uncovering an alternative female narrative through an ekphrastic engagement with the paintings. By doing so she not only dismantles the concept of wilderness both as a physical space that women have limited access to and as an imaginary construct; but at the same time she also reconfigures the structure and the content of wilderness stories, and in fact the concept of wilderness itself. Atwood offers a counter-discursive revision of the male adventure and maturation story by deconstructing and restructuring traditional narrative practices to render the female experience visible. This article hopes to show that Atwood expands the possibilities of the adventure story and wilderness writing and creates room for a female version of the maturation story with a fundamentally different aesthetic.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86636814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: Reverse Engineering, Tom Conaghan (ed.) (2022) London: Scratch Books, 172 pp., ISBN 978-1-73983-010-6, p/bk, £9.99 Reverse Engineering II, Tom Conaghan (ed.) (2022) London: Scratch Books, 175 pp., ISBN 978-1-73983-013-7, p/bk, £9.99 A Very Short Introduction to the Short Story, Andrew Kahn (2021) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-19875-463-3, p/bk, £8.99
{"title":"Reverse Engineering, Tom Conaghan (ed.) (2022)","authors":"Aleix Tura Vecino","doi":"10.1386/fict_00076_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00076_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Reverse Engineering, Tom Conaghan (ed.) (2022)\u0000 London: Scratch Books, 172 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-73983-010-6, p/bk, £9.99\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 Reverse Engineering II, Tom Conaghan (ed.) (2022)\u0000 London: Scratch Books, 175 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-73983-013-7, p/bk, £9.99\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 A Very Short Introduction to the Short Story, Andrew Kahn (2021)\u0000 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 176 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-0-19875-463-3, p/bk, £8.99","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81268802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From the initial years when criticism on the writer Jean Rhys largely circled around Wide Sargasso Sea to an interest in her other novels growing since then, Rhys’s short stories have evoked comparatively scant critical interest. Yet the thematic concerns in her short stories contribute as vitally to the writer’s continuing close scrutiny of coloniality as her novels do. In this article, it is the criss-cross traffic of imperialist voyages that is looked at through Rhys’s short stories. The thematics of contamination, bastardization and halfness that these stories probe complicate more utopian theorizations of cosmopolitanization. The voyage into the imperial capital is inseparable from the experience of creolized, stigmatized, ‘halfness’ in Rhys’s corpus and that makes for a contestatory understanding of the polyphony often ascribed to these increasingly porous cityscapes. This article looks at two stories from the writer, ‘Overture and Beginners Please’ and ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’, both foregrounding the ex-centric position of the women protagonists who are specifically tied to a Caribbean background, to suggest how Rhys’s work haunts that writing of the trope of voyaging whereby the brutal abrasions of colonial history are retrospectively subsumed into the more pluralistic folds of hybridity. In these stories, the journey into the imperial metropolis sets up a probe into the limits and blindspots of cosmopolitan Europe in the early to mid-twentieth century. Rhys’s short fiction spectrally interrupts the modernist narrative of aesthetic border-crossings to tell another, more experiential, one, where boundary crossing is a haunted experience from the point of view of those voyaging in.
{"title":"‘Always half-and-half’: ‘Voyage in’ as halfness in Jean Rhys’s short fiction","authors":"Ruchi Mundeja","doi":"10.1386/fict_00073_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00073_1","url":null,"abstract":"From the initial years when criticism on the writer Jean Rhys largely circled around Wide Sargasso Sea to an interest in her other novels growing since then, Rhys’s short stories have evoked comparatively scant critical interest. Yet the thematic concerns in her short stories contribute as vitally to the writer’s continuing close scrutiny of coloniality as her novels do. In this article, it is the criss-cross traffic of imperialist voyages that is looked at through Rhys’s short stories. The thematics of contamination, bastardization and halfness that these stories probe complicate more utopian theorizations of cosmopolitanization. The voyage into the imperial capital is inseparable from the experience of creolized, stigmatized, ‘halfness’ in Rhys’s corpus and that makes for a contestatory understanding of the polyphony often ascribed to these increasingly porous cityscapes. This article looks at two stories from the writer, ‘Overture and Beginners Please’ and ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’, both foregrounding the ex-centric position of the women protagonists who are specifically tied to a Caribbean background, to suggest how Rhys’s work haunts that writing of the trope of voyaging whereby the brutal abrasions of colonial history are retrospectively subsumed into the more pluralistic folds of hybridity. In these stories, the journey into the imperial metropolis sets up a probe into the limits and blindspots of cosmopolitan Europe in the early to mid-twentieth century. Rhys’s short fiction spectrally interrupts the modernist narrative of aesthetic border-crossings to tell another, more experiential, one, where boundary crossing is a haunted experience from the point of view of those voyaging in.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"15 9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75861470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A conversation between acclaimed American short story writer and memoirist Carmen Maria Machado and writer A. J. Ashworth, with a particular focus on Machado’s story ‘Inventory’ from her collection Her Body and Other Parties. Machado discusses what drew her to the short story as well as her evolution as a writer of the fantastical. She also touches on writing about sex, formal innovation, rejection, endings and struggling to write during the COVID-19 pandemic.
{"title":"‘Mainlining Ray Bradbury’: An interview with Carmen Maria Machado","authors":"A. Ashworth","doi":"10.1386/fict_00079_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00079_7","url":null,"abstract":"A conversation between acclaimed American short story writer and memoirist Carmen Maria Machado and writer A. J. Ashworth, with a particular focus on Machado’s story ‘Inventory’ from her collection Her Body and Other Parties. Machado discusses what drew her to the short story as well as her evolution as a writer of the fantastical. She also touches on writing about sex, formal innovation, rejection, endings and struggling to write during the COVID-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"134 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74963721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In one of Alice Munro’s longer stories, the metafictional ‘Fiction’, readers encounter a series of contingent narratives in which characters exert explicit, self-constructing expressive labours. The text is split into two sections: in the first, the protagonist Joyce is betrayed by her husband, Jon and her life momentarily falls to pieces. In the second section, decades later, Joyce is remarried, surrounded by friends and family, her life replenished and thriving. A gamut of fictions suffuses this text, as if Munro’s scenes are case studies delivering heuristic knowledge and Joyce’s self-narrativizations act as if a generative mode of self-care (the talking cure for one, as such). At heart, Munro seems to explore for the possible functions of fiction: through Joyce’s example, it seems that part of the work of fiction remains intra-personal, in this text a means by which to switch trauma off. Joyce’s mind is shown to work in anti-repressive modes, creating clearly narrativized lines of self-understanding which, in this case, enable the protagonist to literally come to terms with a self-told story placing at the denouement her own blamelessness. Herewith, ‘Fiction’ can be read as a complexly woven narrative on modes of narrativization, Munro seemingly implying that memories retold and reframed are a functional gestalt enabling some to become more than the sum of past traumas. Through accepting that life sometimes can be as positively strange as fiction, Joyce is able finally to both rejoice and (as it were) re-Joyce.
{"title":"‘She would probably envy herself, from outside’: Auto-fictional narrations in Alice Munro’s ‘Fiction’","authors":"Dan Disney","doi":"10.1386/fict_00074_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00074_1","url":null,"abstract":"In one of Alice Munro’s longer stories, the metafictional ‘Fiction’, readers encounter a series of contingent narratives in which characters exert explicit, self-constructing expressive labours. The text is split into two sections: in the first, the protagonist Joyce is betrayed by her husband, Jon and her life momentarily falls to pieces. In the second section, decades later, Joyce is remarried, surrounded by friends and family, her life replenished and thriving. A gamut of fictions suffuses this text, as if Munro’s scenes are case studies delivering heuristic knowledge and Joyce’s self-narrativizations act as if a generative mode of self-care (the talking cure for one, as such). At heart, Munro seems to explore for the possible functions of fiction: through Joyce’s example, it seems that part of the work of fiction remains intra-personal, in this text a means by which to switch trauma off. Joyce’s mind is shown to work in anti-repressive modes, creating clearly narrativized lines of self-understanding which, in this case, enable the protagonist to literally come to terms with a self-told story placing at the denouement her own blamelessness. Herewith, ‘Fiction’ can be read as a complexly woven narrative on modes of narrativization, Munro seemingly implying that memories retold and reframed are a functional gestalt enabling some to become more than the sum of past traumas. Through accepting that life sometimes can be as positively strange as fiction, Joyce is able finally to both rejoice and (as it were) re-Joyce.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"253 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74088362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aldous Huxley wrote about education all his life. Most of his books of non-fiction contain essays that scrutinize problems in education and propose solutions, while his novels and short stories are full of characters that embody the peculiarities of various educational systems. This article will show that the majority of educational flaws that Huxley highlighted in his essays were first depicted in his short fiction, especially his criticism of conservative teaching methods, self-education and spiritual homeschooling, and so-called intellectual education that lacks a practical dimension and draws a sharp distinction between emotions and rationality. This analysis will also prove that some characters in Huxley’s short stories embody progressive teaching styles that were promoted at the time by Maria Montessori and John Dewey, educators Huxley praised in his essays on education, although he had reservations about their followers.
{"title":"Knowledge and understanding: Education in Aldous Huxley’s short stories","authors":"Andrija Matić","doi":"10.1386/fict_00075_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00075_1","url":null,"abstract":"Aldous Huxley wrote about education all his life. Most of his books of non-fiction contain essays that scrutinize problems in education and propose solutions, while his novels and short stories are full of characters that embody the peculiarities of various educational systems. This article will show that the majority of educational flaws that Huxley highlighted in his essays were first depicted in his short fiction, especially his criticism of conservative teaching methods, self-education and spiritual homeschooling, and so-called intellectual education that lacks a practical dimension and draws a sharp distinction between emotions and rationality. This analysis will also prove that some characters in Huxley’s short stories embody progressive teaching styles that were promoted at the time by Maria Montessori and John Dewey, educators Huxley praised in his essays on education, although he had reservations about their followers.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85231141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A recent short story I completed in a style area described as popular music fiction, using fiction to critically explore issues within popular music and communicate these to a wider audience, will be the main focus of this article. The ideas behind the short story and the incorporation of research and subject areas to create a fictional setting, especially intersections with otherness, diversity, resistance, technology, creative practice, business and the future, will be discussed. Key central themes were those relating to race, including lack of presence and attribution and concerns about AI, especially concerning how data is acquired to model music made by current music practitioners. The main character of the story is an AI and is used to foreground these concerns, the nature of musical work, its creation, transmission and consumption.
{"title":"Writing popular music fiction","authors":"Hussein Boon","doi":"10.1386/fict_00072_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00072_1","url":null,"abstract":"A recent short story I completed in a style area described as popular music fiction, using fiction to critically explore issues within popular music and communicate these to a wider audience, will be the main focus of this article. The ideas behind the short story and the incorporation of research and subject areas to create a fictional setting, especially intersections with otherness, diversity, resistance, technology, creative practice, business and the future, will be discussed. Key central themes were those relating to race, including lack of presence and attribution and concerns about AI, especially concerning how data is acquired to model music made by current music practitioners. The main character of the story is an AI and is used to foreground these concerns, the nature of musical work, its creation, transmission and consumption.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72789412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This report contributes to scholarship on the bestselling American writer Ernest Cline by examining his critically neglected short story ‘The Omnibot Incident’ (2014). It begins by revealing continuities between ‘Incident’ and his ambitious novels Ready Player One (2011) and Ready Player Two (2020). Across these works, we meet, for example, characters who turn to popular culture for compensation, and in the more recent titles, robots who go (or appear to go) rogue. I go on to suggest that the story’s form, particularly its economy, makes it especially hospitable for exploring how the central character Wyatt overcomes grief following his mother’s death. Notwithstanding the close resemblance in the names ‘Wyatt’ and ‘Wade Watts’, the protagonist of Cline’s novels, Wyatt is far more successful with prioritizing his family over the fantasies presented by science fiction. My broader claim is that we can deepen our understanding of and appreciation for Cline’s programme by looking at his short fiction.
{"title":"Resocialization and regeneration in Ernest Cline’s ‘The Omnibot Incident’","authors":"Tom Ue","doi":"10.1386/fict_00078_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00078_7","url":null,"abstract":"This report contributes to scholarship on the bestselling American writer Ernest Cline by examining his critically neglected short story ‘The Omnibot Incident’ (2014). It begins by revealing continuities between ‘Incident’ and his ambitious novels Ready Player One (2011) and Ready Player Two (2020). Across these works, we meet, for example, characters who turn to popular culture for compensation, and in the more recent titles, robots who go (or appear to go) rogue. I go on to suggest that the story’s form, particularly its economy, makes it especially hospitable for exploring how the central character Wyatt overcomes grief following his mother’s death. Notwithstanding the close resemblance in the names ‘Wyatt’ and ‘Wade Watts’, the protagonist of Cline’s novels, Wyatt is far more successful with prioritizing his family over the fantasies presented by science fiction. My broader claim is that we can deepen our understanding of and appreciation for Cline’s programme by looking at his short fiction.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73407594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A conversation between acclaimed Chilean short story writer and novelist, Carolina Brown and Lucy Dawes Durneen, including a focused reflection on the writing process for the accompanying short story, ‘House of the Red Deer’. Brown discusses aspects of her creative practice, touching on the relationship of her writing to photography, as well as the contemporary Latin American short story, the portrayal of the body, and the importance of nature and place in her work.
{"title":"‘Into the woods’: In conversation with Carolina Brown","authors":"Lucy Dawes Durneen","doi":"10.1386/fict_00068_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00068_7","url":null,"abstract":"A conversation between acclaimed Chilean short story writer and novelist, Carolina Brown and Lucy Dawes Durneen, including a focused reflection on the writing process for the accompanying short story, ‘House of the Red Deer’. Brown discusses aspects of her creative practice, touching on the relationship of her writing to photography, as well as the contemporary Latin American short story, the portrayal of the body, and the importance of nature and place in her work.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91081532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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