Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

THE URDUNIZATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF THREE SHORT STORIES FORM SHORT STORY COLLECTION, “IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS”

This paper investigates the use of Urdu words by Post-colonial writer Daniyal Muneenuddin in his short stories. A content analysis of four short stories from the short stories collection “In other rooms, Other wonders”, published by Random House Group Limited, UK, has been conducted carefully. The three short stories are “NAWABDIN ELECTRICIAN”, “SALEEMA”, and “IN OTHER ROOMS, IN OTHER WONDERS”. The current research answer many questions like why have English words are replaced with Urdu Word in English short stories? Is the English Language is failed to convey contextual meanings? The frequency of Urdu words in the written discourse of short stories indicates the Multilingualism phenomenon in given texts. The analysis also highlights the emerging trends in Pakistani English writings and language mixing as multilingualism in written text. The post-colonial literature written by Pakistani writers provides a clue of the emergence of Pakistani English, and the use of Urdu words in Pakistani English variety anticipates its different forms and functions in written discourse.

Postmodern/Post-mortem Human Body-Parts: Grotesque Subjects in The Melancholy of Anatomy

This paper critiques the literary representation of the human body as a “clean” slate, an organically wholesome subject by delving into the postmodern body-writing of Shelley Jackson’s short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002). Building upon the idea of “metabody” or grotesque body-part as subjects, the flesh-characters, namely Egg, Sperm, Foetus, Cancer, Nerve, Phlegm, Blood, Milk and Fat, breaks apart from their marginality, and evolves in a rhizomatic structure, pressing their possibilities of manifold existence in a fantastical world. Through the lens of body studies critics (Mikhail Bakhtin and Elisabeth Grosz) and recent postmodern scholarship, the paper studies the performance of flesh-characters, creating a post-mortem pathology in literature. Jackson’s deviant approach re-maps the anatomy of the human body and engages in psychophysiological parodies, thereby disclosing social phobias pertaining to the repulsive sides of the human and feminine body. Metabodies are self-reflexive, postmodern grotesque, with micro-narratives; and their innovative representations give agency and consciousness to the usually discarded body-parts and fluids, thereby making the human body a non-normative and discursive text and context.

Contesting Homogeneity: Stereotypes and Heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease

This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

Галерея мужских образов в рассказе А.К. Гольдебаева Галчонок

The motif of the Apocalypse passes through all the works of the Samara writer A.K. Goldebaev (Semenov). But if in his early works he did not highlight the end of the world (It seems distant and therefore not so scary to the author), years later he realizes the seriousness of what is happening – death isapproaching. In the story The Young Jackdaw (In the Established Order), published in 1910 in the short story collection Knowledge, the writer starts a conversation about the fallen women. However, this topic is not the leading one, and the female characters are not central ones. In this article, the author attempts to reveal the true meaning of the work through the analysis of the system of male characters.

Reading and analysing short story collections. An empirical study of readers’ interpretation process of Benni’s Il bar sotto il mare

This article confronts the theoretical tenets of reader-oriented short story collection theory and its implications for a literary analysis of Benni’s Il bar sotto il mare (1987) with the results of an empirical study of 12 readers. Through free recall tasks and open questions, we collected their recall of stories, specific passages, recurring topics and general interpretation to assess the processes of reticulation (i.e. searching for recurring elements in stories) and modification (i.e. modifying initial hypotheses based on the identification of new elements) advanced by Audet (2014). This confrontation revealed noticeably disagreeing results. Our findings suggest that flesh-and-blood readers adopt a more straightforward and intuitive approach when reading and interpreting collections as they are subject to a strong primacy effect, privilege personal appreciation of specific stories and passages, and rely on a disinclination to alter initial interpretative hypotheses. The findings pave the way for further investigation into the readers of SSCs.

The War of the Worlds May Well Start in Latin America

This article analyses the literature-cinema dialogue established by the Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán in her short story collection La muerte silba un blues (2014). Firstly, I revise how Alemán borrows the production methods of the cult Spanish filmmaker Jesús “Jess” Franco to craft a collection that aids us to see the world as an interconnected whole. Secondly, I close read the story that opens the collection, El extraño viaje, which takes Orson Welles’ radiophonic adaptation of The War of the Worlds to the Ecuadorian context. My argument is that, in making the city of Quito the target of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion, Alemán engages with a rich history of multimedia adaptations and places Ecuador’s capital at the centre of a global narrative. I argue that her work decentres and recentres world literature dynamics where Latin American literature in general, and Ecuadorian writing in particular, sit at the periphery of world literary systems.

The Gender of Public Opinion

As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.

C. C. Martindale (1879–1963), the History of Religions, and the Theological Imagination of David Jones (1895–1974)

Although the work of his Jesuit contemporaries Ronald Knox and Martin D’Arcy is perhaps better known today, C. C. [Cyril Charlie] Martindale’s (1879–1963) thinking about “the relationship between paganism and Christianity” in the early twentieth-century theological debates surrounding the field of “History of Religions” would have a profound effect on the unique intersection of theological thinking and artistic form in the work of the British Catholic poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974). Jones’s reading of Martindale’s short story collection The Goddess of Ghosts (1915) in 1919 would help to resolve a “religious crisis” Jones experienced in his exposure to the arguments of the skeptical scholar of “History of Religions,” James Frazer. Martindale’s presentation of his ideas in a literary form not only provided Jones with a hermeneutic (derived from the church fathers) for thinking about the relationship between paganism and Christianity, but also suggested an artistic model for exploring theological ideas with literary language.