A growing field at the intersection of literary and trauma studies makes the persuasive case for creative writing as a means to represent and process trauma across a range of genres from traditional memoir to hybrid and fictionalized approaches. Yet, despite this, how the specific qualities of short fiction can expand on existing modes remains theoretically underexplored. This article offers an intervention into the aforementioned field through an exploration into how the qualities of brevity and experiment that are associated with short fiction can be employed to mirror and synthesize aspects of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s ground-breaking work on the unconscious and his narrative approaches to processing trauma. First, this article presents the short story ‘Disappearing Act’, a hybrid of memoir and short fiction based on a personal traumatic experience of childhood abuse and informed by the Jungian concept of individuation (commonly referred to in contemporary psychoanalytic circles as shadow work). Second, it includes an accompanying critical reflection on the story’s creative process and the ways in which autobiographical short fiction can be employed as a mode of shadow work to demonstrate how the form operated as a creatively rich device to process traumatic life material for this writer.
{"title":"Walking with shadows: Writing trauma, short fiction and Jungian psychoanalysis","authors":"Rachel Newsome","doi":"10.1386/fict_00049_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00049_1","url":null,"abstract":"A growing field at the intersection of literary and trauma studies makes the persuasive case for creative writing as a means to represent and process trauma across a range of genres from traditional memoir to hybrid and fictionalized approaches. Yet, despite this, how the specific qualities\u0000 of short fiction can expand on existing modes remains theoretically underexplored. This article offers an intervention into the aforementioned field through an exploration into how the qualities of brevity and experiment that are associated with short fiction can be employed to mirror and\u0000 synthesize aspects of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s ground-breaking work on the unconscious and his narrative approaches to processing trauma. First, this article presents the short story ‘Disappearing Act’, a hybrid of memoir and short fiction based on a personal traumatic\u0000 experience of childhood abuse and informed by the Jungian concept of individuation (commonly referred to in contemporary psychoanalytic circles as shadow work). Second, it includes an accompanying critical reflection on the story’s creative process and the ways in which autobiographical\u0000 short fiction can be employed as a mode of shadow work to demonstrate how the form operated as a creatively rich device to process traumatic life material for this writer.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"256 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77005290","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}
The first full day of it, emergency room admittance to the bed he died in four days later, all I could think to say was, ‘Dad, I’m here’. And then somehow, I was granted more. Something fuller, more creative, and infinitely better. This is what a writer hopes for. A daughter. A human being. A fragile baby soul emerging, in utero, as it were. We wish for the words and humility to say them ‐ voiced or penned ‐ and the miraculous understanding that their expression is received. Their intention is fulfilled, at least to some extent, and that pain’s at bay, even if only for a moment.
{"title":"‘Gate Five’","authors":"Nancy Freund","doi":"10.1386/fict_00052_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00052_7","url":null,"abstract":"The first full day of it, emergency room admittance to the bed he died in four days later, all I could think to say was, ‘Dad, I’m here’. And then somehow, I was granted more. Something fuller, more creative, and infinitely better. This is what a writer hopes for.\u0000 A daughter. A human being. A fragile baby soul emerging, in utero, as it were. We wish for the words and humility to say them ‐ voiced or penned ‐ and the miraculous understanding that their expression is received. Their intention is fulfilled, at least to some extent, and that\u0000 pain’s at bay, even if only for a moment.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91097216","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}
Lucy Dawes Durneen introduces the first of two Special Issues of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice dedicated to the theme of ‘the health of the short story’. She considers the short story’s formal affinity with instability, fractured spaces and the fragility of existence, along with its ability to heal. She also comments on the way in which metaphors drawn from health are often deployed in relation to anxieties about the status and the survival of the short story form. She reflects on the literary context of writing and publishing during the COVID-19 pandemic and introduces the reader to the contents of the journal.
{"title":"Contagious symptoms: The need to tell stories and the health of the form","authors":"Lucy Dawes Durneen","doi":"10.1386/fict_00044_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00044_2","url":null,"abstract":"Lucy Dawes Durneen introduces the first of two Special Issues of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice dedicated to the theme of ‘the health of the short story’. She considers the short story’s formal affinity with instability, fractured spaces and the fragility\u0000 of existence, along with its ability to heal. She also comments on the way in which metaphors drawn from health are often deployed in relation to anxieties about the status and the survival of the short story form. She reflects on the literary context of writing and publishing during the COVID-19\u0000 pandemic and introduces the reader to the contents of the journal.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73924290","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}
The ability for short fiction to address the issue of expansion might strike as a paradox. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, many fictional tales depicting augmented men or women were published in the form of short stories, dealing each in their own way with various scientific interventions altering, for better or worse, the health condition of their protagonists. Authors such as Edith Nesbit, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Clotilde Graves ‐ to name but a few ‐ experimented with the limits of human and textual bodies alike. This intersection will be examined in three of these writers’ narratives: ‘The Five Senses’ (1909) by Nesbit, ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896) by Braddon and ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’ (1915) by Graves. As this article argues, brevity creates a favourable environment for a poetic of expansion to emerge in these texts, thus allowing for the development of imaginative and meaningful representations of bodily and intellectual improvement. To support this claim, I will posit that suggestion and selection, two by-products of the economy of signs which characterizes short literary forms, provided creative ways for the authors to shape and deliver augmented texts.
{"title":"Short stories of expanded lives: The augmented human in Edith Nesbit’s ‘The Five Senses’, Mary E. Braddon’s ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ and Clotilde Graves’s ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’","authors":"Zoé Hardy","doi":"10.1386/fict_00048_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00048_1","url":null,"abstract":"The ability for short fiction to address the issue of expansion might strike as a paradox. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, many fictional tales depicting augmented men or women were published in the form of short stories, dealing each in their own way with various scientific\u0000 interventions altering, for better or worse, the health condition of their protagonists. Authors such as Edith Nesbit, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Clotilde Graves ‐ to name but a few ‐ experimented with the limits of human and textual bodies alike. This intersection will be examined\u0000 in three of these writers’ narratives: ‘The Five Senses’ (1909) by Nesbit, ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ (1896) by Braddon and ‘Lady Clanbevan’s Baby’ (1915) by Graves. As this article argues, brevity creates a favourable environment for a poetic of expansion\u0000 to emerge in these texts, thus allowing for the development of imaginative and meaningful representations of bodily and intellectual improvement. To support this claim, I will posit that suggestion and selection, two by-products of the economy of signs which characterizes short literary forms,\u0000 provided creative ways for the authors to shape and deliver augmented texts.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83393324","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 explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.
本文在乔安娜·沃尔什（Joanna Walsh）的《来自世界尽头的世界》（2017）中探讨了矛盾沉默作为当代女权主义短篇小说写作的一种策略。为了将故事与写作女性的能动性超越具体与非具体、被动与活动、内在与外在生活的二元对立，它在三个相互关联的传统的结合点上阅读了沃尔什的文本。首先，它将故事置于女性“非写作”的谱系中，通过短篇小说的形式，为书写和阅读女性的沉默发展了新的美学策略。其次，探讨了奥维德《变形记》中女性言语缺失对沃尔什沉默诗学变革动力的重要意义，并着重探讨了回声的形象。第三，通过与雨果·冯·霍夫曼斯塔尔（Hugo von Hofmannsthal）的《埃因简报》（Ein Brief）的比较阅读，将沃尔什的书信体短篇小说置于关于丰富与真空、超越与内在、人类与非人类的独特沉默的哲学辩论中。总之，有人认为，《来自世界尽头的世界》讽刺了沉默人物的奥维德式拓扑，尽管如此，她还是说出了自己的欲望，以困扰女权主义短篇小说中规范自愿沉默策略的二元对立。
{"title":"Silence, gender and metamorphosis in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’","authors":"P. Fagan","doi":"10.1386/fict_00038_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00038_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45236107","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}
{"title":"‘It is sound that lives in her’: An interview with Joanna Walsh","authors":"P. Fagan, Joanna Walsh","doi":"10.1386/fict_00043_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00043_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43937187","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 sound and the sonic aspects of voice and silence in two short stories by David Constantine – ‘Tea at the Midland’ and ‘Under the Dam’ – to show that they are not only relevant for an analysis of his poetry but also for his short stories. Employing Jonathan Sterne’s definition of sonic culture as a theoretical starting point, the phonotextual (Garrett Stewart) multiplicity of patterns in each text is seen as an alternative to the protagonists-focalizers’ ‘silenced’ situation and is associated with their desired joys in life. In ‘Tea at the Midland’ the withheld soundscape (R. Murray Schafer) of the bay can only be watched but not heard. In the opening of ‘Under the Dam’ the auscultator (Melba Cuddy-Keane) Seth is completely oblivious of his sonic surroundings and effaces sound on the story level, but the narrator reintroduces sound on the level of discourse. Sylvia Mieszkowski’s distinction between the sound of the text and the sound in the text constitutes one of the fundamental concepts of the analysis. The findings and conclusions are interpreted in the context of Constantine’s own poetics as regards the writing of short stories. The sounds of the two short stories reinforce, through metrical, rhythmic, syntactic and sound patterns, the scenes’ withheld sonic qualities that are only perceived visually and sensed emotionally by the protagonists. These soundscapes represent alternative worlds desired by the protagonists in ‘Under the Dam’ and by the woman in ‘Tea at the Midland’.
{"title":"‘I start again with every story, listening’: Sound, silence and voice in two short stories by David Constantine","authors":"Wolfgang Görtschacher","doi":"10.1386/fict_00037_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00037_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines sound and the sonic aspects of voice and silence in two short stories by David Constantine – ‘Tea at the Midland’ and ‘Under the Dam’ – to show that they are not only relevant for an analysis of his poetry but also for his short stories. Employing Jonathan Sterne’s definition of sonic culture as a theoretical starting point, the phonotextual (Garrett Stewart) multiplicity of patterns in each text is seen as an alternative to the protagonists-focalizers’ ‘silenced’ situation and is associated with their desired joys in life. In ‘Tea at the Midland’ the withheld soundscape (R. Murray Schafer) of the bay can only be watched but not heard. In the opening of ‘Under the Dam’ the auscultator (Melba Cuddy-Keane) Seth is completely oblivious of his sonic surroundings and effaces sound on the story level, but the narrator reintroduces sound on the level of discourse. Sylvia Mieszkowski’s distinction between the sound of the text and the sound in the text constitutes one of the fundamental concepts of the analysis. The findings and conclusions are interpreted in the context of Constantine’s own poetics as regards the writing of short stories. The sounds of the two short stories reinforce, through metrical, rhythmic, syntactic and sound patterns, the scenes’ withheld sonic qualities that are only perceived visually and sensed emotionally by the protagonists. These soundscapes represent alternative worlds desired by the protagonists in ‘Under the Dam’ and by the woman in ‘Tea at the Midland’.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43900015","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}
Jacques Lacan conceives of the voice as more than meets the ear: that is, as an objet a that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain.
{"title":"Sounding diasporic dislocation: The object voice in postcolonial short stories","authors":"Jorge Sacido-Romero","doi":"10.1386/fict_00033_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00033_1","url":null,"abstract":"Jacques Lacan conceives of the voice as more than meets the ear: that is, as an objet a that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45069699","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 her short story collection Krik? Krak!, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat realizes new formal strategies that integrate vernacular orality into her writings. She does so to construct evocative narrative soundscapes through which difficult memories can be processed. This article examines Danticat’s approach to otherness, migration, and displacement in an attempt to disentangle the function of language, sound, and memory in the development of authentic Caribbean identities and literatures. It aims to trace the workings of sound and mobility in the literary spaces Danticat creates to revisit colonial and patriarchal history and, in so doing, reroot and reroute cultural memories previously lost to violence and organized forgetting. In crossing and replicating the oceanic routes in which past and present intersect, Krik? Krak! opens critical sites of (d)enunciation that rework personal and collective memories of displacement by means of language and sound.
{"title":"Sounding displaced memories: Narrative soundscapes in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!","authors":"Paula Barba Guerrero","doi":"10.1386/fict_00035_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00035_1","url":null,"abstract":"In her short story collection Krik? Krak!, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat realizes new formal strategies that integrate vernacular orality into her writings. She does so to construct evocative narrative soundscapes through which difficult memories can be processed. This article examines Danticat’s approach to otherness, migration, and displacement in an attempt to disentangle the function of language, sound, and memory in the development of authentic Caribbean identities and literatures. It aims to trace the workings of sound and mobility in the literary spaces Danticat creates to revisit colonial and patriarchal history and, in so doing, reroot and reroute cultural memories previously lost to violence and organized forgetting. In crossing and replicating the oceanic routes in which past and present intersect, Krik? Krak! opens critical sites of (d)enunciation that rework personal and collective memories of displacement by means of language and sound.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49509775","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 presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.
{"title":"‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story","authors":"Michael Hedges","doi":"10.1386/fict_00042_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00042_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.","PeriodicalId":36146,"journal":{"name":"Short Fiction in Theory and Practice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47666282","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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