Pragmatic and stylistic aspects of expressing tolerance in modern American short stories

In the article, the aspects and types of such stylistic device as foregrounding are investigated in the short stories of contemporary American writers. The quantitative aspect of foregrounding prevails in flash fiction stories which is realized by means of stylistic convergence and parallelism. Convergences are mainly used in strong positions, especially in the endings, as in the stories by J. Updike, D. Galef, D.Eggers. The qualitative aspect of foregrounding is expressed with the help of tropes such as metaphor, simile and oxymoron which are also present in strong positions – titles, beginnings, endings (the stories by G. Paley, D. Galef, J. Updike). The idea of tolerance, sympathy, understanding is dominant in many flash fiction stories. Foregrounding, especially in the strong positions of the stories, emphasizes this idea, thus producing a strong pragmatic, emotional effect. Due to such device in the endings many flash fiction stories can be called modern parables of life, love, justice.

The Anthology Game

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's failed attempt to publish a mainstream literary anthology of science fiction stories centered on Mars. The development of the Illinois novel was slowed by Bradbury's increased focus on the science fiction stories he was writing and revising with more and more frequency. Despite Don Congdon's influence with a wide range of editors, these stories were still not selling to the major magazines at all. What sustained both his spirit and his reputation during this period was his almost phenomenal success with the premier award anthologies of the day such as the Best American Short Stories annual and the O. Henry Prize Stories. This chapter considers the impact of Bradbury's anthology awards on his writing life by focusing on his membership in the leftist poetry magazine California Quarterly, founded by Dolph Sharp and others. It also discusses Bradbury's idea for an anthology that would consist of twenty-five science fiction stories, a project that he called “The Martian Chronicles. Edited by Ray Bradbury” and never came to fruition.

A New World of Reading

This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury extended his reading of mainstream modern and contemporary British and American writers in all genres during the final years of World War II and beyond. Bradbury's road to all his mature fiction was paved to a large extent by a great wartime shift in his personal reading agenda. The most surprising transition in his reading is his sudden and permanent shift away from reading new science fiction sometime in 1944. This chapter discusses Bradbury's broadening reading and maturing tastes in literature by looking at some of the stories he read, from Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and The Leaning Tower to Thomas Wolfe's The Face of the Nation, Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories of 1944, Cornell Woolrich's Rendezvous in Black, and A Touch of Nutmeg and More Unlikely Stories by John Collier.

Cohesion in 20th Century American Short Stories Compiled By Jean A. McConochie, and Its Contribution to Teach Reading in Senior High School

<p>Five types of cohesive devices are identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976), namely, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Each of the five types is about the formal links within sentences. This qualitative research method describes the kind of cohesive devices employed in 20^th Century American Short Stories and discusses its implication for developing teaching material for reading skill in Senior High School. The result of the study shows that cohesive devices mostly appeared in the short stories are lexical cohesion followed by references, conjunction, ellipsis and then substitution. The contribution of this research to English education is the cohesive devices can be used as a lesson material for teaching reading both as the example of language use in order to familiarize about the use of pronouns, conjunctions and dictions, also it can be used to show the way to substitute or omit a word meaningfully and as the task students need to accomplish.</p><p> </p>

Travel and “Homing In” in Contemporary Ethnic American Short Stories

In American ethnic literature of the last three decades of the 20th century, recurrent themes of mobility, travel, and “homing in” are emblematic of the search for identity. In this essay, which discusses three short stories, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Louise Erdrich’s “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” and Daniel Chacon’s “The Biggest City in the World,” I attempt to demonstrate that as a consequence of technological development, with travel becoming increasingly accessible to ethnic Americans, their search for identity assumes wider range, transcending national and cultural boundaries.

Listening to the mute voices of prose in recent American short stories

This article aims at investigating the indeterminate voices in the short prose of Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Eakins and Barry Hannah. Thus, it focuses on the ‘acousmatic voice’ of O’Connor’s prose: all the hidden sounds, noises and silences that reveal more than the overt narrative voice and trigger a hermeneutic response from the reader. In relation to Patricia Eakins’s short stories, the article analyses how the voice of her prose compensates for the indeterminacy of her surrealist universe. It investigates, in this respect, the musical quality of her prose as well as the poetic rhythms which help to sustain the reader’s interest and generate meaning. The voices in Barry Hannah’s post-modern prose, finally, are shown to compensate for the renowned complexity of his writing style. By analysing the specificity of each writer’s voice, this article aims to recover the unheard lost ‘voices of prose’, the mythic space of vocality which gives a vocal but mute joy to the reader.