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On Defining Short Stories

1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/469046

1080-661X

Allan H. Pasco,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

OMPARED to the novel, the short story has had remarkably little criticism devoted to it, and what theory exists reveals few definitive statements about its nature.For the last quarter century, critics have neglected generic questions and turned to the consideration of narration or recit.They hedge on definitions, origins, major traits, on just about everything having to do with the short story as a genre.I make this observation without censure, for one is doubtless wise to be circumspect with a genre of unequalled antiquity and adaptability.As Gullason, May, and many others have pointed out, it may be an "underrated art" but it remains remarkably hardy, 1 so much so that Mary Doyle Springer and Elizabeth Bowen have attempted to distinguish a "modern" and "artistic" short story of the last one hundred years from a more antiquated, inartistic predecessor. 2The case is, however, difficult to make.Not only does one remember, with H. E. Bates, that "the stories of Salome, Ruth, Judith, and Susannah are all examples of an art that was already old, civilized, and highly developed some thousands of years before the vogue of Pamela," 3 Clements and Gibaldi have argued convincingly that recent masterpieces continue in an age-old genre. 4Indeed, without parti pris it is difficult to read certain Milesian tales or stories from the Arabian Nights, not to mention more recent masterpieces by such writers as Marguerite de Navarre, Chaucer, or Boccaccio, without being struck by the modernity of these creations from long ago.The subject matter may be different, the devices at variance, but no substantive trait or quality distinguishes them from the products of nineteenth-and twentieth-century practitioners.I do not say there is no difference.I argue rather that, similar to archetypes, which have certain key elements that are combined with other traits specific to a given epoch and are thus reconstituted, the short story genre has a central, identifiable set of characteristics which each age and each author deploys in different ways and with different variables.The result is generically recognizable, allowing for parallel and oppositional play, but specific to the author, age, and culture.