A Seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 19-22, 2020. Organizers: Gavin Jones (grjones@stanford.edu) and Mike Collins (michael.collins@kcl.ac.uk).
We welcome proposals for papers on aspects of the short story for the seminar described below. Please send proposals to the Seminar’s organizers by August 30, 2020.
Here is a link to the Seminar on the ACLA conference website
The genre of the short story can seem compounded into a national narrative of emergence, theorization, and outsized importance in the United States. As Michael Collins has noted, the formal closure of the short story as described by “Short Story Theory” has served as an aesthetically-potent metaphor for the development of a unique and distinctive national culture, while the form’s reliance on epiphanic moments seemingly dramatized the revolutionary rupture that birthed the U.S. political scene. Yet from its inception, the short story was an item of global commerce, as Washington Irving remodelled German folk tales into the “native” material of the Hudson Valley, or as Edgar Allan Poe’s tales impacted the emergent modernism of Charles Baudelaire, to offer the most obvious examples. Our seminar calls for papers that recognize the extreme mobility, diversity, and contingency of the short story as a genre of transcultural movement and refiguration. Transcending the rigid concept of influence, we encourage work that explores the intersectionality of the short story, its anti-essentialist orientation (even as short story theory has been doomed by the essentialism of genre criticism itself), and its capacity to move across dividing lines, whether they are cultural, temporal, national, generic, or media-driven. We may be interested in the American short story’s global passages, but more important to this seminar is scholarship from any comparative perspective (and any period) that stresses diverse — even “weak” — theories of the genre through attention to what it does, across time, space, and media, rather than what it supposedly is as a form. Hence we also encourage work that seeks either to embed or displace the short story within critical contexts or theoretical methodologies, whether or not they are nationally inflected. In this regard, then, the panel has a broader aim: to consider how the nature of comparativist scholarship itself changes when it confronts a genre whose purportedly minor status challenges the world-building, colonizing claims of the novel.