Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story

Abstract

W ho studies the short story?Almost everyone, and almost no one.Is there a student anywhere who hasn't welcomed this genre, thinking "shorter is easier"?Is there a freshman instructor-or, for that matter, a creative writing teacher-who hasn't thought of the short story as the training ground of fiction?There are exceptions, of course, but the bane of the short story is its manageability.You can tuck it into the curriculum, squeeze it into a class period, and use it as a "demo" for the elements of fiction and the issues of the day.So, among English-speaking critics, few have taken the form seriously as a genre.Even fewer have devoted careers to its study.Yet surely all-certainly all Americanists?-haveread an article or consulted a footnote on "Young Goodman Brown" or "Hills Like White Elephants."Many of those who have written about the genre have been storytellers, too, like Edgar Allan Poe, Frank O'Connor, or Elizabeth Bowen.But they are not alone now.There is an emerging field of short fiction studies.If it does not quite yet march, it began making strides in the 1970s.For a time, we were concerned with definitions and taxonomies.What is a short story?What are its markers?Following in Poe's footsteps, we thought the imminence of closure was the signature feature of the short story genre.Papers on "how stories end" are still on the programs of short story conferences.However, for many people now, structural analysis and genre classification no longer matter.Whatever a story is, however it behaves, the im-which one or more readers identify sentences within a short story where the text could end.In doing so, readers tap a deeply ingrained ability to recognize narrative wholeness, which I call storyness. 3 Before the legends and myths, before the hunting stories and the war stories, before the folk tales and the fairy tales, was the neuroscenario.A hand reaches out, touches a flame, starts back in pain, and registers a meaning.Antiquity's child and tomorrow's infant are similarly equipped.Both have this built-in plot-making talent, although it takes several years before humans can recognize or tell a "story."My notion of "storyness" is based on this neuroscenario, which is infinitely rewritten in simple or complex form, with infinite variety, to produce the world's cache of short stories.However, I am making no formal claim for a transgender, transethnic, or transracial Ur-model.All I am asserting is that preclosure study brings assumptions about storyness to light, no matter how relative they may be to their corner of the world.

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