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ENSFR Reading Group

The ENSFR reading group

The ENSFR reading group aims to provide a digital space for early career researchers and postgraduate students to come together and discuss classic and new short fiction. The reading group is co-coordinated by Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick), Paul Knowles (University of Manchester) and Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck).

The group usually meets once per month during term time on Zoom. The link to the meeting room is circulated in advance via a mailing list, together with the set reading for the next meeting. For each meeting, there is a short story to read. There are also some questions to guide our reading and get the discussion started.

New members are always welcome! To sign up for the reading group, please send an email to the contact email address of the reading group: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com

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CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024

Painting by Julia Himmelstein, “3 a.m”, from her Portland exhibit Bodies of Water

Blue Short Stories

Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)

 Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024”

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Symposium: “The Persistence of the Short Story: Traditions and Futures” — 10-12 July 2024, University of Mainz, Germany

“The Persistence of the Short Story: Traditions and Futures” — 10-12 July 2024, University of Mainz, Germany

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story, The American Literature Association, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, in collaboration with the ENSFR, have organized a three-day seminar series on the short story.

Here is the link to the programme: https://www.obama-institute.com/shortstoryconferencemainz2024/

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Call for Articles: Theorizing Short Story Practice in the 21st Century

You are invited to submit a full article for possible inclusion in a special issue of Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. The issue theme is “Theorizing Short Story Practice in the 21st Century.”

It has been thirty years since Charles E. May edited the influential The New Short Story Theories (1994). In those thirty years, Creative Writing programs from undergraduate to PhD levels have grown from a few specific sites to become a pan-global provision. This proliferation has been further increased by the Covid-19 pandemic, with online MA programs now offered alongside traditional face-to-face programs.

While some critics argue that this widening of the curriculum leads to a production line of writers, there is clear evidence that Creative Writing is one of the last crafts to become widely offered in universities (Cowan, 2022). Far from producing uniform writers, it has instead precipitated the emergence of contemporary fiction with a range of voices that are reimagining the short story across genres.

Furthermore, this widening of participation has led to a growth of experimental writing by marginalized people. It is the emerging strategies of these writers, and the new forms and stylistics of their writing, that require a re-evaluation of short story practice and theory.

The guest editor is interested in short story practice and stylistics, and how narrators can be used for what Brian Richardson (2015) terms as “unnatural narratives,” specifically what he calls “oppositional literature” by minority or oppressed groups, such as working-class writers, people of color, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized writers. The editor is especially interested in work where these marginalized positions intersect. How can narrative strategies be employed by writers to build storyworlds that communicate the lived experience of characters? How might these contemporary stories implicate readers in the events of the narrative?

Submissions of 6,000-8,000 words should be sent to guest editor Andrew McDonnell (andrew.mcdonnell@ieg.ac.uk) and to Storyworlds’ editors Avril Tynan (avril.tynan@utu.fi) and Benjamin Williams (benjamiw@andrew.cmu.edu) by July 31, 2024. Submissions should follow the journal’s submission guidelines.