Category: Posts

CONSTRUCTING COHERENCE IN THE BRITISH SHORT STORY CYCLE

15-16 October 2015

Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany)

Patrick Alasdair Gill (Mainz) and Florian Kläger (Würzburg)

While the American short story cycle has recently been the object of extensive critical discussion, the same can hardly be said of its British counterpart. Still, thematically unified short story cycles would appear to constitute an established feature of the British literary landscape: recent specimens include Graham Swift’s Learning to Swim, Salman Rushdie’s East, West, Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel, Adam Thorpe’s Shifts, Sara Maitland’s Moss Witch, A. L. Kennedy’s What Becomes, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. By reference to these and other British examples of the form, this conference aims to explore the generic characteristics of the short story cycle alongside and against those of the novel and the short story collection, pursuing questions such as:

•  What are specific effects of a story cycle’s coherence as against that of a novel on one end of the spectrum and a story collection/compilation on the other?
•  How can the construction of coherence in the short story cycle be situated generically vis-à-vis other narrative cycles (e.g., in television, film, comics, web videos, etc.)?
•  How do readers participate in the production of such coherence? Does reader participation in the short story cycle differ qualitatively from the creation of coherence in other genres?
•  What aspects, other than recurrent themes or characters, can serve as agents of coherence?
•  If the cycle relies on recurrent themes and characters, how is their function enhanced by use in a story cycle rather than a novel or other longer narrative genres?
•  What insights are to be gained from comparisons between the short story cycle in the British Isles and in other literatures?
•  What are forms and functions of paratextual features in short story cycles?
•  Which economic or other material aspects have (had) a decisive impact on the development of the genre in Britain?

We invite twenty-minute papers on these or related questions. Please send a 250-word abstract along with your institutional affiliation and a short biographical blurb to <patrick.gill@uni-mainz.de> and <florian.klaeger@uni-wuerzburg.de> before the 15th of May.

 

European Network for Short Fiction Research

 * Reading Short Fiction in Transnational Contexts *

 Friday 17^th + Saturday 18^th April 2015

 Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, Ireland

 FINAL PROGRAMME
Continue reading “ENSFR Conference Programme: Reading Short Fiction in Transnational Contexts”

Call for Papers

Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations

20-21 November 2015, University of Angers, France (in collaboration with Edge Hill University, University of Leuven, University of Le Mans, and University of Nantes)

There is a long tradition of haunting in short fiction, often appearing in the form of ghost stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and legends. Short narrative indeed appears to embrace the supernatural. Elizabeth Bowen explains, for example, in the preface to A Day in the Dark and Other Stories that while she uses “the supernatural” in her short stories, she considers it “unethical’ to do so in a novel. In “The Flash of Fireflies” (1968), Nadine Gordimer similarly observes how short fiction navigates the uneasy borders of the supernatural and the rational world, explaining how “Fantasy in the hands of short story writers is so much more successful than when in the hands of novelists because it is necessary for it to hold good only for the brief illumination of the situation it dominates.”  Continue reading “Cfp ENSFR Conference “Haunting” (Angers 20-21 November 2015)”

Call For Papers: (Deadline 1 March 2015)

Short fiction writers with a theory: re-reading short fiction theory through the lens of new writing and new media

 11-12 June 2015, Université Catholique de Lille, France

(In collaboration with the University of Angers, France and the European Network for Short Fiction Research)

We are all familiar with the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor on the short story. Their fiction has often been studied through the lens of their own critical essays, now considered essential elements in the heritage of short story criticism. The history of the short story indeed resounds with authorial declarations, ranging from Poe’s “single effect” to Anthony Burgess’s declared ambivalence about the form when announcing the new Journal of the Short Story in English in 1983 (JSSE 2). Continue reading “CFP Lille Conference: Short fiction writers with a theory”