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17th International Conference on the Short Story in English

The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English   directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, in June 2025.

Theme: “How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story.”
Often, the short story is defined by what it is not: the novel. Yet perhaps the better question to ask is what does it uniquely offer that other forms of fiction cannot? What effect does the concentration of story and human experience into a few thousand words have on the reader? The shortness of form puts focus on individual experience, containing ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (Frank O’Connor). It is a form that insists on removing everything non-essential and demands a ‘large deal of detection’ (Mary Lavin). This spareness requires total concentration from its reader to understand its profound wordless elements. Most importantly it seduces, with seeming simplicity, calling on our empathy; it creates a ‘transference of emotion’ (James Joyce) with a few carefully crafted lines. It is a form that is effortful, in some respects, for the reader, yet maintains a keen focus and is unmatched in its precision. What is so unique about this conference is that writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South Africa, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English, together with scholars of the genre will all come together to discuss that seductive unmatched precision.

Further details on the conference website.

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Special issue, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, deadline extended to November 15th.

Short Fiction Theory and Practice

‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

 

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

 

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
  • Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
  • Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging, Marxist theory.
  • The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
  • Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
  • Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
  • Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
  • Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
  • Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
  • Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
  • Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
  • Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
  • Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

 

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

 

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.

 

NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.

 

 

 

 

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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.