short fiction research paper

Studies in the American Short Story

James nagel, editor.

Biannual Publication ISSN 2688-1926 E-ISSN 2688-1942 Recommend to Library Code of Ethics Scholarly Publishing Collective

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Access current issues through Scholarly Publishing Collective . Studies in the American Short Story (SASS) is the journal of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story. It publishes articles, notes, reviews, interviews, memoirs, and other materials related to short fiction in America. It is aimed at literary scholars, students of literature, libraries, and general serious readers. It covers all forms of American short fiction in English from its origin in the eighteenth century to the present. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, nationality, ethnicity, or any other reason.

The mission of the journal is to present the most important scholarship on the short fiction published in America. The journal includes discussion of all forms of “stories,” from early anecdotes and sketches, to the development of more formal “stories” with narrative, dialogue, and structure, to realistic masterpieces, to contemporary variations of the form in flash fiction and micro tales. The journal is open to research essays of all kinds with a special emphasis on new biographical, historical, or manuscript information that changes the established interpretation of a story and the way it is taught.

SASS is sponsored by the Society for the Study of the American Short Story, affiliated with the American Literature Association. Membership is open to scholars, students, and independent readers and writers. Please visit the society website at http://americanshortstory.org/ .

Editor James Nagel, University of Georgia, US

Associate Editor Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery, US

Editorial Board Jochen Achilles, University of Wuerzburg, DE Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, US Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge, GB Olivia Edenfield, Georgia Southern University, US Gudrun M. Grabher, University of Innsbruck, AT Tara Penry, Boise State University, US Leslie Petty, Rhodes College, US Oliver Scheiding, Johannes Gutenberg University, DE James Thomas, Pepperdine University, US

Essays should be in Word and documented in accord with current Chicago Manual of Style parenthetical text citations with a Works Cited section at the end. Separate endnotes are permitted. Notes should be 8-12 pp. and formal articles 18-25 pp. including documentation. Other kinds of material, including interviews, manuscripts, photographs, and letters are also encouraged.

Articles and notes should be written in third person; reviews, memoirs, interviews, and personal reflections should be in first person.

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About the Journal

Studies in the American Short Story ( SASS ) is the journal of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story. It publishes articles, notes, reviews, interviews, memoirs, and other materials related to short fiction in America. It is aimed at literary scholars, students of literature, libraries, and general serious readers. It covers all forms of American short fiction in English from its origin in the eighteenth century to the present. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, nationality, ethnicity, or any other reason. The mission of the journal is to present the most important scholarship on the short fiction published in America. The journal includes discussion of all forms of “stories,” from early anecdotes and sketches, to the development of more formal “stories” with narrative, dialogue, and structure, to realistic masterpieces, to contemporary variations of the form in flash fiction and micro tales. The journal is open to research essays of all kinds with a special emphasis on new biographical, historical, or manuscript information that changes the established interpretation of a story and the way it is taught.

Join the Society for the Study of the American Short Story

The mission of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story is to support and facilitate teaching and research related to short fiction in America and other countries. Nearly everyone who teaches literature knows that students have read scores of stories for every novel they have studied, and yet the materials available for examining short fiction are not nearly as advanced as they are for the novel. There are hundreds of scholarly treatments of the American novel, including volumes of reprinted criticism on a single book. The major writers, William Faulkner among them, have multiple studies of their individual novels among nearly a thousand scholarly discussions of his fiction. Only a handful of those are devoted to his short stories. This limited scholarly record is true despite the fact that many of the most important writers in American literature are primarily significant for their stories, among them, to list only a few, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Sui Sin Far. In contemporary fiction, Louise Erdrich is essentially a writer of stories, even though some of her volumes (Love Medicine is an example) carry the term “novel” on the cover. Susan Minot, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Olen Butler, Julia Alvarez, Amy Tan, and Tim O’Brien are accomplished writers of short fiction and need to be studied in terms of the history of that genre. SSASS is the only organization devoted entirely to encouraging such investigation and providing a venue for presenting papers on the subject and discussing the genre in various forums. The Society for the Study of the American Short Story is devoted to the exploration of all aspects of the genre from its origins to the present. Writers from all genders, nationality groups, and ethnic backgrounds are included in the wide interest of members of the Society, as are newly discovered authors throughout the history of the national literature. Some members are also focusing on the definition of a “story” and on the parameters of its design, ranging from episodes and vignettes to story cycles and novelles.

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EH -- Researching Short Stories: Home

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This page provides general library information and an overview of short fiction, as well as information on the components of a short story and terms commonly found in the study of  fiction.  Suggestions are also provided for how to read a short story analytically and critically.

Special thanks to Houston Cole Library intern Alanna R. Cole for assistance in the preparation of this LibGuide.

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• Short story literature From the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Useful Links

• Short Story Elements From Judith A. Engram of the Halifax Regional School Board staff: a brief discussion of the principal elements which comprise a short story.
• Short Story and Novel Terms 11 From the Heritage Woods school: an elaborated and extended discussion of the material introduced in the two preceding links; originally intended for a study guide for grades grades 9-11.

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Journal of the Short Story in English

Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

Accueil Numéros 71 Special Section: The Short Story ... Introduction to Special Section: ...

Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context

Texte intégral.

The editor would like to thank the readers involved in the peer-review process for their perceptive and constructive comments. In addition to the members of the reading committee of the Journal of the Short Story in English , these are Inge Arteel, Gert Buelens, Raphaël Ingelbien, Claudia Nelson, Hedwig Schwall, Pieter Vermeulen and Tom Vandevelde.

1 Since the emergence of the modern short story as a distinct literary form in the second half of the nineteenth century, many critics and writers have sought to decide what it is exactly that distinguishes the short story from longer fiction, such as the novella or the novel. Is it a matter of “unity of impression,” as Edgar Allan Poe famously argued, or does a specific “poetics of brevity” characterize the form (Poe 60; Zumthor)? Does the short story address unique thematic concerns or existential questions, as critics from Frank O’Connor to Charles May have argued, or is it necessarily “a form of the margins,” offering itself “to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks” (Hanson 2)? Are there stylistic features such as the epiphany, the ellipsis or the allusion that are essential to the form, and is “literary impressionism” its dominant aesthetic mode (Ferguson, March-Russell)? The matter is far from decided. All critics seem to agree upon is that “[i]n order to belong to the class of short stories, a text must be short” (Prince 325). Indeed, for Pascoe, a short story is “a short literary prose fiction” and Valerie Shaw defines it as a fictional text which achieves “a narrative purpose in a comparatively short space (Pascoe 411; Shaw 21).

2 If the stylistic, narrative or thematic corollaries of this shortness have often been debated, its material or textual consequences have received far less attention. Still, a feature shared by many short stories is that they are usually published together with other texts. Indeed, the short story, because of its brevity, rarely stands alone. It appears as one text among others, whether in a newspaper or magazine, an anthology or collection, a short story cycle or short story sequence, on a website or in a twitter feed. This “polytextual” publication context (Monfort 158) characterizes the short story as a genre and has important consequences for the reception, production, development and contemporaneity of the form.

3 The effect of the publication context on the reception of short fiction is readily discernible. Reading a story in a magazine is a very different experience from reading the same story in a collection or themed anthology. The magazine reader is likely to find the story set in columns, accompanied by illustrations that guide the reading process, and interrupted by advertisements. Moreover, the magazine story’s co-texts are typically journalistic pieces or non-fiction essays, which may provide the short story with unanticipated resonances. The context of an author’s collection, on the author hand, primes the reader to look out for recurring preoccupations, formal characteristics or thematic concerns. This interpretative activity is encouraged even more actively in the case of the short story cycle or short story sequence, in which individual stories may be interlinked in a variety of ways (Smith). The reading experience is different again in the case of an anthology, which brings together different stories on the basis of common characteristics, whether of the stories (e.g. setting, theme, topic, or time frame) or of their authors (e.g. class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or nationality). These characteristics, which are usually identified in the title and further highlighted in the preface, serve to steer the interpretation in a determined direction (D’hoker).

4 As some of these examples already suggest, the publication context may also have an impact on the writing and, hence, on the form and content, of the short story. For the short story cycle, Forest Ingram has convincingly shown how authors write—or rewrite—stories to fit the overall structure, unity or narrative emplotment of the collection as a whole and also writers invited to contribute to certain themed anthologies are likely to tailor their contribution to the book’s overall aim or focus. With regard to periodical publication too, several studies have shown that that authors keep the magazine’s profile, ideology and readership in mind when writing short stories for magazine publication (Baldwin 67-94; Eggermont).

5 Viewed from a historical perspective too, the presence and modalities of certain publication contexts have had a considerable impact on the development of the short story as a genre. As several critics have argued (Baldwin, Chan), the rise of the modern short story in the 1880s was made possible by the exponential growth of the magazine market. Following the famous example of The Strand , more and more magazines made it their policy to publish only self-contained works of short fiction rather than the serialized novels that had been popular for much of the nineteenth century. As a result, the number of stories published rose dramatically and so did the diversity of the short fiction output: different magazines preferred different genres, topics and styles; and writers and agents became adept at pitching their story to the most appropriate—and best-paying—magazine. The end of this “golden age of storytellers” is similarly bound up with the publication context: as TV took over as the most popular form of entertainment, the number of magazines that published short fiction declined dramatically around 1950 and this had a major impact on the overall popularity, production and publication of short fiction (Ashley 1-16). Conversely, the more recent increase of literary magazines, in both digital and paper format, has been instrumental in reviving the popularity of the short form.

6 Finally, the very shortness of the short story and its proximity to other texts in a variety of publication contexts also contribute to the genre’s openness to contemporary debates. The short story’s limited scope enables it to respond more quickly to current events, societal changes, new theories or trends and this propensity is of course further strengthened by the short story’s historical connection to the newspaper and magazine market. Next to the publication context, therefore, this discursive context is also important to take into account when analysing short fiction as recent studies such as Emma Young’s, Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories , Bettina Jansen’s Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story and Anne-Marie Einhaus’s The Short Story and the First Word War amply demonstrate.

7 Although both the material, textual and discursive contexts of the short story have received more attention in recent years, additional research is required to fully map the interactions between the short story and its contexts, both from a theoretical perspective and through individual case studies. To invite and promote such investigation was the aim of the third conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research, held at the University of Leuven in May 2017. Over the course of three days, short story scholars and writers from all over Europe discussed the variegated aspects of the short story’s interface with its co-texts and contexts. Dean Baldwin and Yvon Houssais gave inspiring plenary lectures, while the invited writers and editors—Annelies Verbeke, Luca Ricci, Alison McLeod and Thomas Morris—read from their work and discussed the vicissitudes of contemporary short fiction publishing in a panel debate. Different papers addressed research questions concerning the impact of the changing publication contexts for short fiction on the status and development of the form; the textual resonances between individual stories in such polytextual contexts as the short story cycle, the anthology, or the collection; the interaction between short fiction and other media in magazines as well as digital contexts; the close ties between short fiction and its contemporaneous socio-political or cultural context; and the position of short stories within the larger context of an author’s oeuvre.

8 Based on papers held at the conference, the articles in this special section offer a good cross-section of this ongoing research, as they all address different aspects of the short story’s contextual frames. In the first article, Alessandra Boller reads William Carleton’s “The Death of a Devotee” in its original context of publication, namely the Irish nineteenth-century periodical, The Christian Examiner, and Church of Ireland Magazine . Read in isolation, she argues, the religious, moral and political messages of this short story are (and have been) easily missed. Yet, when read next to other texts in this Protestant, and staunchly anti-Catholic, magazine, the story’s allusions to current religious and political debates become readily apparent. Boller concludes that Carleton clearly shaped his story so as to “ contribute to the overall message The Christian Examiner sought to imprint on its readers.”

9 The original periodical context also forms the starting point of Zoé Hardy’s reading of H.G. Wells’s “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” which was published in The Pall Mall Gazette in March 1894. Hardy argues, firstly, that the particular narrative set-up of the story creates the impression of a journalistic piece on taxidermy which, in the midst of the other non-fiction texts of The Pall Mall Gazette , could easily have confused contemporary readers. She then considers the story within the larger discursive context of the 1890s debate about the New Woman, and its attendant interrogation of the roles of men and women with regard to creation and procreation, art and nature. Finally, Hardy also places “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” in its authorial context as she argues that the story’s concern with the tension between art and commerce meta-fictionally reflects Wells’s own anxieties at the start of his career as a best-selling writer.

10 The authorial context also forms the starting point for Amândio Reis’s discussion of Henry James’s supernatural short stories. Yet, since James never published these stories in one volume, Reis leaves the authorial context behind for an investigation of three posthumous collections of James’s so-called ghost stories. Through preface, title, and structure, these collections clearly seek to frame and define these stories as a specific group, in order to delineate James’s take on the genre. Reis shows how small differences in contents between these collections create different polytextual contexts that have an impact on the reception of these stories and the definition of the Jamesian ghost story. Returning to James in the concluding part of his article, Reis argues that “the author’s exploration and renewal of the ghost story genre often materializes in his fiction in the narrative trope of the ghost text, a piece of writing always elusive and in most occasions hidden or destroyed, construed as the veritable haunting presence.”

11 In “Ec-centric Women: Angela Carter and the Short Story Anthology,” Aleix Tura Vecino discusses a publication format that has mostly been ignored in short fiction studies, namely the short story anthology. Like Reis, he shows how the anthology creates meanings and resonances beyond those of the individual short stories through editorial processes of selection, juxtaposition and introduction. Focusing on Angela Carter’s 1986 anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women , Vecino argues that this anthology is ec-centric both because it cleverly subverts readerly associations conjured up by the title and because it refuses to pin down short fiction to a particular generic norm. Instead, the anthology celebrates heterogeneity both on a thematic and a formal level. Opening up his investigation to other women-only anthologies published in the 1980s and 1990s, Vecino further claims that these heterogeneous texts played an important role in highlighting women’s contributions to the short form, but also participated in the dissemination of post-structuralist conceptions of gender at the time.

12 The two final articles, then, focus on contemporary short fiction. In his contribution, “The Short Story as Ecotext—Rick Bass’s ‘Fiber,’” Thomas Gurke reads Rick Bass’s short fiction within the discursive context of contemporary eco-critical theories and the authorial context of Bass’s own ecological activism. He argues that Bass’s short story collection The Lives of Rocks (2006) resonates with Tim Ingold’s concept of the meshwork on different levels. On a thematic level, the stories focus on the entanglements of human and non-human actors with their environment, while on a formal level the stories in the collection create a meshwork of intratextual links and echoes. Zooming in on the experimental story “Fiber,” Gurke further demonstrates how these entanglements are also realised within this particular story, which thus “creates something similar to the natural environment itself: not a set of fixed relations but the intransitive lines of a meshwork.”

13 In the final contribution, Fanny Geuzaine discusses Neil Gaiman’s active and self-conscious engagement with the contemporary expansion of publication contexts for short fiction through various digital media. She argues that Gaiman’s dissemination of stories into an ever-expanding and multimedial storyworld invites readers to look beyond the boundaries of the individual stories and to consider them within this larger co-textual and contextual whole. Geuzaine demonstrates the workings of this transmedial form of storytelling through a reading of two short stories, “Feeders and Eaters” (1990) and “Troll Bridge” (1993). She argues that both stories desacralize human immortality only to re-sacralise it through the immortal act of storytelling. Moreover, Geuzaine also shows how the overt meta-fictional dimension of these stories serves to question traditional binaries of authenticity and repetition, copy and original, while celebrating the variegated nature of storytelling as a universal human act.

14 A consideration of the act of storytelling—specifically in the form of the short story—is of course the common denominator of all the contributions to this special section. Each in its own way, the articles show how the act of storytelling does not happen in isolation, but is always part of a variety of contexts—material and discursive, authorial and generic, socio-political and literary—that shape an individual short story even while being shaped by it in turn. Though not exclusive to the short form, this contextual embeddedness may well be heightened by the short story’s close proximity to other texts in most of its publication contexts. While further research is still needed to gauge the impact of these polytextual publication contexts on the development and specificity of the short story as a genre, the articles collected here offer interesting and convincing case studies of co- and contextual embeddedness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present which would usefully underpin such a more general enquiry.

Bibliographie

Ashley, Mike. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880-1950. London: British Library, 2006. Print.

Baldwin, Dean. Art and Commerce in the British Short Story: 1880-1950. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Print.

Chan, Winnie. The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

D’hoker, Elke. “The Short Story Anthology.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Eds. Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 108-24 Print.

Eggermont, Stephanie, and Elke D’hoker. “The Short Fiction of New Woman Writers in Avant-Garde, Mainstream and Popular Periodicals of the Fin de Siècle.” Middlebrow and Gender. 1880-1930. Eds. Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. 21-38. Print.

Einhaus, Anne-Marie. The Short Story and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.

Ferguson Suzanne C. “Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form.” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 13-24. Print.

Hanson, Clare, “Introduction.” Re-reading the Short Story. Ed. Clare Hanson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. 1-9. Print.

Ingram, Forest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. New Orleans: Loyola UP, 1971. Print.

Jansen, Bettina. Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Print.

March-Russell, Paul. “Impressionism and the Short Story.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Eds Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 40-55. Print.

May, Charles. “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 327-38. Print.

Monfort, Bruno. “La nouvelle et son mode de publication: Le cas américain.” Poétique 90 (1992):153-171. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. A Study of the Short Story. Hoboken: Melville House, 1963. Print.

Pasco, Allan H. “On Defining Short Stories.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 407-22. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Review of Twice-Told Tales.” 1842. Rpt. in The New Short Story Theories. E d. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994. 59-64. Print.

Prince, Gerald. “The Long and the Short of It.” Style 27.3 (1993): 327-31. Print.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983. Print.

Smith, Jennifer J. “Collections, Cycles and Sequences.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Eds. Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 93-107. Print.

Young, Emma. Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. Print.

Zumthor, Paul. “Brevity as form.” Trans. L. T. Moscato and W. Nelles. Narrative 24.1 (2016): 73-81. Print.

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier.

Elke D'hoker , «  Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context  » ,  Journal of the Short Story in English , 71 | 2018, 19-26.

Référence électronique

Elke D'hoker , «  Introduction to Special Section: The Short Story in Context  » ,  Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 71 | Autumn 2018, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2020 , consulté le 22 avril 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2138

Elke D'hoker

KU Leuven Faculty of Arts

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• Rewriting the Irish Short Story: Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits [Texte intégral] Paru dans Journal of the Short Story in English , 63 | Autumn 2014

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Making Research More Exciting Through Fiction Writing

Narrative writing that incorporates research can be a more engaging alternative to a classic research paper. 

For many students, writing a research paper can be a dull task. A more exciting option is for students to write fictional narratives about their topics and to embed facts from their research. With this approach, students learn both the elements of fiction and the research process simultaneously.

Set Expectations

When planning the course, find or create a place in the curriculum where students could research specific topics. Either make a list of topics that you know will have enough age-appropriate information or require students to create a list of self-generated topics that are then approved by the teacher. Either way, student choice is crucial. 

Set clear expectations about the dual purposes of this project: Students need to find lots of facts about their topic and then incorporate those facts into a short work of fiction. Students are often inspired by story-writing because so many ideas will come to them during the research process. 

Set a low word limit for the short story, and require students to include a set number of facts within it. For example, for my middle school students, I set a maximum word count of 750 words, and I require a minimum of 20 interesting facts from their research. 

Essentially, students have ongoing, built-in writing prompts. For example, if a student is researching orcas and comes across the fact that orcas can jump out of the water to snatch penguins or seals, they might be inspired to write an exciting—and true-to-life—penguin-snatching scene in their story. 

The Research and Writing Process

Once students know the specific expectations, begin the research process. A few mini-lessons about research can help students set the parameters of their work. Talk with students about how to find good sources, why it’s important to use a variety of sources, and how to use keywords. Even if these lessons are just reminders, students will have a clearer sense of how to be efficient.

If your class doesn’t already have a note-taking system in place, set one up. For younger students, a mini-lesson on paraphrasing is probably in order. Ask students to paraphrase the relevant information they find during the research process in bulleted form, with each bit of information they find functioning as a “fact” they can use in their story. After each fact, have them include their source in parentheses—hyperlinked, if possible. 

About halfway through the research process, students should begin drafting their stories. Make the transition from mini-lessons on researching to mini-lessons on writing short fiction. Students can alternate days of research and writing, or they can split the period and do research for half and writing for half. 

The first fiction mini-lesson could be sharing and discussing an age-appropriate example of flash fiction in which the author manages to tell a compelling story with a satisfying ending in very few words. I tend to prioritize mini-lessons on creating and sustaining conflict, applying various methods of characterization, and using their authentic voice. 

I discourage students from writing non-endings like “To be continued” or “It was all a dream!” because these are easy-outs from the difficult work of crafting a complete story. Ask them to imagine they are the reader and not the writer of their story: Would they find the ending satisfying or not? 

Most important, throughout the drafting process, students should find creative ways to embed facts into their story. As they write, they underline or highlight the facts they’ve included. Help them find ways to sneak the facts into the story. For example, if a student is researching the geography of a state, he or she could use specific geographic features to describe the setting in the narrative.  

Share Successes

To assess the projects, ask students to submit both their research notes and their stories. Create a simple rubric that includes all the skills from the mini-lessons, such as paraphrasing, source citing, and characterization. When the projects are complete, organize a listening party. Encourage students to listen on two levels: to enjoy the stories as stories and to identify the facts within them. 

Whenever we successfully tap into students’ creativity, they naturally become more curious and see that they really do have interesting stories to tell. 

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Perspectives on Psychological Science

Keith Oatley

Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.

Cambridge Scholars

Michelangelo Paganopoulos

This volume invites the reader to join in with the recent focus on subjectivity and self-reflection, as the means of understanding and engaging with the social and historical changes in the world through storytelling. It examines the symbiosis between anthropology and fiction, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and, on the other, by re-examining their political, aesthetic, and social relevance to world history. Following the intellectual crisis of the 1970s, anthropology has been criticized for losing its ethnographic authority and vocation. However, as a consequence of this, ethnographic scope has opened towards more subjective and self-reflexive forms of knowledge and representations, such as the crossing of the boundaries between autobiography and ethnography. The collection of essays re-introduces the importance of authorship in relationship to readership, making a ground-breaking move towards the study of fictional texts and images as cultural, sociological, and political reflections of the time and place in which they were produced. In this way, the contributors here contribute to the widening of the ethnographic scope of contemporary anthropology. A number of the chapters were presented as papers in two conferences organised by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, entitled “Arts and aesthetics in a globalising world” (2012), and at the University of Exeter, entitled “Symbiotic Anthropologies” (2015). Each chapter offers a unique method of working in the grey area between and beyond the categories of fiction and non-fiction, while creatively reflecting upon current methodological, ethical, and theoretical issues, in anthropology and cultural studies. This is an important book for undergraduate and post-graduate students of anthropology, cultural and media studies, art theory, and creative writing, as well as academic researchers in these fields.

Carl Leggo , Pauline Sameshima

Fiction (with its etymological connections to the Latin fingere, to make) is a significant way for researching and representing lived and living experiences. As fiction writers, poets, and education researchers, we promote connections between fictional knowing and inquiry in educational research. We need to compose and tell our stories as creative ways of growing in humanness. We need to question our understanding of who we are in the world. We need opportunities to consider other versions of identity. This is ultimately a pedagogic work, the work of growing in wisdom through education, learning, research, and writing. The real purpose of telling our stories is to tell them in ways that open up new possibilities for understanding and wisdom and transformation. So, our stories need to be told in creative ways that hold our attention, that call out to us, that startle us.

British Journal of Aesthetics

Karen Simecek

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On the Fine Art of Researching For Fiction  

Jake wolff: how to write beyond the borders of your experience.

The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop—my first—while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid’s story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to “take cover” and then performing several combat rolls to do so.

“You’re college students,” the professor said. “Write about college students.”

Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that’s always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word “research” in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: “This desperately needs more research,” we’d all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We’d all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.

I knew research was important, and I knew how to research. My questions all had to do with craft. How do I incorporate research into fiction? How do I provide authenticity and detail without turning the story into a lecture? How much research is too much? Too little?

How do I allow research to support the story without feeling obligated to remain in the realm of fact—when I am, after all, trying to write fiction?

I heavily researched my debut novel, in which nearly every chapter is science-oriented, historical, or both. I’d like to share a method I used throughout the research and writing process to help deal with some of my questions. This method is not intended to become a constant fixture in your writing practice. But if you’re looking for ways to balance or check the balance of the amount of research in a given chapter, story, or scene, you might consider these steps: identify, lie, apply.

I recently had a conversation with a former student, now a friend, about a short story he was writing. He told me he was worried he’d packed it too full of historical research.

“Well,” I said, “how much research is in there?”

“Uhhh,” he answered. “I’m not sure?”

That’s what we might call a visualization problem. It’s hard to judge the quantity of something you can’t see.

I’ve faced similar problems in my own work. I once received a note from my editor saying that a certain chapter of my novel read too much like a chemistry textbook. At first, I was baffled—I didn’t think of the chapter as being overly research-forward. But upon reading it again, I realized I had missed the problem. After learning so much about chemistry, I could no longer “see” the amount of research I had crammed into twenty pages.

Literature scholars don’t have this problem because they cite their sources; endnotes, footnotes, and the like don’t merely provide a tool for readers to verify claims, but also provide a visual reminder that research exists within the text. Thankfully, creative writers generally don’t have to worry about proper MLA formatting (though you should absolutely keep track of your sources). Still, finding a quick way to visually mark the research in your fiction is the least exciting but also the most important step in recognizing its role in your work.

Personally, I map my research in blue. So when my editor flagged that chapter for me, I went back to the text and began marking the research. By the end of the process, the chapter was filled with paragraphs that looked like this one:

Progesterone is a steroid hormone that plays an especially important role in pregnancy. Only a few months before Sammy arrived in Littlefield, a group of scientists found the first example of progesterone in plants. They’d used equipment I would never be able to access, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy, to search for the hormone in the leaves of the English Walnut trees. In humans, aging was associated with a drop in progesterone and an increase in tumor formation—perhaps a result of its neurosteroidal function.

My editor was spot-on: this barely qualified as fiction. But I truly hadn’t seen it. As both a writer and teacher, I’m constantly amazed by how blind we can become to our own manuscripts. Of course, this works the other way, too: if you’re writing a story set in medieval England but haven’t supported that setting with any research, you’ll see it during this step. It’s such an easy, obvious exercise, but I know so few writers who do this.

Before moving on, I’ll pause to recommend also highlighting research in other people’s work. If there’s a story or novel you admire that is fairly research-forward, go through a few sections and mark anything that you would have needed research to write. This will help you see the spacing and balance of research in the fiction you’re hoping to emulate.

(Two Truths and a) Lie

You’ve probably heard of the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie: you tell two truths and one lie about yourself, and then the other players have to guess which is the lie. I’d rather die than play this game in real life, but it works beautifully when adapted as a solo research exercise.

It’s very simple. When I’m trying to (re)balance the research in my fiction, I list two facts I’ve learned from my research and then invent one “fact” that sounds true but isn’t. The idea is to acquaint yourself with the sound of the truth when it comes to a given subject and then to recreate that sound in a fictive sentence. It’s a way to provide balance and productivity, ensuring that you’re continuing to imagine and invent —to be a fiction writer— even as you’re researching.

I still have my notes from the first time I used this exercise. I was researching the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang for a work of historical fiction I would later publish in One Story. I was drowning in research, and the story was nearing fifty pages (!) with no end in sight. My story focused on the final years of the emperor’s life, so I made a list of facts related to that period, including these:

1. The emperor was obsessed with finding the elixir of life and executed Confucian scholars who failed to support this obsession.

2. If the emperor coughed, everyone in his presence had to cough in order to mask him as the source.

3. The emperor believed evil spirits were trying to kill him and built secret tunnels to travel in safety from them.

Now, the second of those statements is a lie. My facts were showing me that the emperor was afraid of dying and made other people the victims of that fear—my lie, in turn, creates a usable narrative detail supporting these facts. I ended up using this lie as the opening of the story. I was a graduate student at the time, and when I workshopped the piece, my professor said something about how the opening worked because “It’s the kind of thing you just can’t make up.” I haven’t stopped using this exercise since.

We have some facts; we have some lies. The final step is to integrate these details into the story. We’ll do this by considering their relationship to the beating heart of fiction: conflict. You can use this step with both facts and lies. My problem tends to be an overload of research rather than the opposite, so I’ll show you an example of a lie I used to help provide balance.

In a late chapter in my book, three important characters—Sammy and his current lover Sadiq and his ex- lover Catherine—travel to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They’ve come to investigate a drug with potential anti-aging properties that originates in the soil there (that’s a fact; the drug is called rapamycin). As I researched travel to Easter Island, my Two Truths and a Lie exercise produced the following lie:

There are only two airports flying into Easter Island; these airports constantly fight with each other.

In reality, while there are two airports serving Easter Island (one in Tahiti; the other in Chile), nearly everyone flies from Chile, and it’s the same airline either way. On its surface, this is the kind of lie I would expect to leave on the cutting room floor—it’s a dry, irrelevant detail.

But when I’m using the ILA method, I try not to pre-judge. Instead, I make a list of the central conflicts in the story or chapter and a list of the facts and lies. Then I look for applications—i.e., for ways in which each detail may feel relevant to the conflicts. To my surprise, I found that the airport lie fit the conflicts of the chapter perfectly:

Ultimately, the airport lie spoke to the characters, all of whom were feeling the painful effects of life’s capriciousness, the way the choices we make can seem under our control but also outside it, arbitrary but also fateful. I used this lie to introduce these opposing forces and to divide the characters: Sammy and Sadiq fly from Tahiti; Catherine flies from Chile.

Two airports in the world offered flights to Rapa Nui—one in Tahiti, to the west, and one in Chile, to the east. Most of the scientists stayed in one of those two countries. There was no real meaning to it. But still, it was hard, in a juvenile way, not to think of the two groups as opposing teams in a faction. There was the Tahiti side, and there was the Chile side, and only one could win.

This sort of schematic—complete with a table and headers—may seem overly rigid to you, to which I’d respond, Gee, you sound like one of my students. What can I say? I’m a rigid guy. But when you’re tackling a research-intensive story, a little rigidity isn’t the worst thing. Narrative structure does not supply itself. It results from the interplay between the conflicts, the characters, and the details used to evoke them. I’m presenting one way, of many, to visualize those relationships whenever you’re feeling lost.

Zora Neal Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Maybe that’s why I’m thinking of structure and rigidity—research, for me, is bolstering in this way. It provides form. But it’s also heavy and hard to work with. It doesn’t bend. If you’re struggling with the burden of it, give ILA a shot and see if unsticks whatever is holding you back. If you do try this approach, let me know if it works for you—and if it doesn’t, feel free to lie.

__________________________________

Jake Wolff’s  The History of Living Forever is out now from FSG.

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Literature Research

• Literary Analysis
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• Literature and Writing Books
• Journals, Articles, & Databases
• Audiovisual Materials

Short Stories

• Plays (Drama)
• Cite Your Work

Critical Analysis

• Writing a Critical Analysis of a Short Story Guide to writing a critical analysis of a short story and a sample essay.
• American Short Story Study Guides Study guides for select short stories plot summary, character analysis, genres & themes, historical context, quotes and more.

Short Stories at LibriVox

Follow the links below for just a couple of the short story offerings from LibriVox  audiobooks. Search the site for much much more!

• Selected Short Stories from P.G. Wodehouse Listen to a collection of amusing and entertaining short stories mostly concerning love and romance.
• Shoes and Stockings: A Collection of Short Stories Listen to tales of love and war, modesty and frivolity, laughter and tears.
• Short Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky Listen to short stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist and short story writer.

Short Stories by Individual Authors

Here you will find resources specifically related to short stories. They are meant to be consulted in addition to the sources found in other pages of this guide.

This is a list of links to the full text of selected short stories.  You can also visit the library's Literature Resource Center  database to find overviews, critical reviews and analysis of short stories. If you are off campus, you will need your RamCard activated at the library to be able to use your STCC Library bar code and password to log on. For more information, consult the Journals, Articles, and Databases page of this guide.

• Classic Reader Read classic short stories from a wide range of authors spanning several centuries. You'll find authors such as Honore de Balzac, Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, and many others.
• Classic Short Stories Search short stories by author or title. Also includes related links to other sites with collected short stories or to individual short story writers.
• Project Gutenberg Short Stories Bookshelf A collection of short stories from around the world with a focus on older works for which copyright has expired.
• Short Stories at East of the Web You can browse the library by genre or search it for a title, author or keyword. Clicking on an author's name lists all their stories along with further information and links. Stories can be read online, printed or downloaded for reading offline or on handheld devices.
• Short Stories Collections Short story collections with full-text in numerous categories such as 100 Great Short Stories, Short Short Stories, Great American, Christmas Stories and more.
• Short Story Guide Stories are categorized by author, place subject / topic and theme.

Short Stories in the STCC Library

In addition to these collected sources, search the catalog for other collections of short stories.

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• Last Updated: Aug 17, 2023 12:18 PM
• URL: https://libguides.stcc.edu/english200

• Spartanburg Community College Library
• SCC Research Guides

ENG 102 - Short Story Fiction with Historical Research

• 6. Write Your Annotated Bib

• Annotated Bibliography?
• Evaluating Sources
• Sample Annotated Bibliography

What is an Annotated Bibliography?

A bibliography is a list of citations for your sources (books, journals, websites, periodicals, etc.). It's like a Works Cited page at the end of a paper -- listing your source's author, title, publisher, etc. (usually in MLA format).

An annotation is a paragraph that goes underneath each citation. It usually includes a short summary of the source, an evaluation of the source's credibility, and an assessment of how you're going to use the source (or not) in your research paper (see below for more information).

What is the Purpose of an Annotated Bibliography?

To evaluate sources : Ask yourself what it is and whether it's a good source. This will help you become a better researcher.

To learn about your topic : Writing an annotated bibliography is excellent preparation for a research project. Collecting sources for a bibliography is useful, but when you have to write annotations for each source, you're forced to read each source more carefully. You begin to read more critically instead of just collecting information.

To help you formulate a thesis : Every good research paper is an argument. The purpose of research is to state and support a thesis. So a very important part of research is developing a thesis that is debatable, interesting, and current. Writing an annotated bibliography can help you gain a good perspective on what is being said about your topic. By reading and responding to a variety of sources on a topic, you'll start to see what the issues are, what people are arguing about, and you'll then be able to develop your own point of view.

Evaluating Your Sources

Look for the following information about your source. You may not always find everything, but these are key points to consider.  If you cannot find this information about your source, then it may not be a good source to use.

Author's Qualifications

Who is this author? What do you know about their credentials? Why are they a reliable source of information on this topic? Are they an expert in this subject? Do they have an advanced degree from a university? Do they have lots of experience in this subject?  To learn more about your author, Google their name.  You might find their LinkedIn page, resume, university profile or personal webpage. Ask a librarian if you need help researching an author.

Publisher or Sponsor

Examine the publisher of the book, periodicals or website. What do you know about them? Have you heard of them? Are they reputable? Well-known in this field? Biased on the topic? ( Hint : you can ask a librarian or your instructor about the publisher's reputation if you're not sure.)

How biased is this source?  Look at the author and the publisher - are they associated with a company, organization, institution, agency, etc. that would make them biased on this topic? Are they only telling you one side of the argument? Are they giving objective facts or opinion? Where are they getting their information from (what are their sources)?  Are their sources biased?  ( Hint : pretty much everything is biased, and it's possible you can still use a biased source as long as it isn't too biased, and you can take the bias into account when using the information in your paper.  Maybe look for other sources that present a different viewpoint to counteract the bias).

Evidence/Sources

Where is the author of this article getting their information? Do they cite sources at the end? Or do they refer to sources they used throughout the text? Do their sources look reliable/official or biased or not authoritative? If the author cites no sources, are they relying on their own expertise or first-hand experience (refer back to author's qualifications)?

Look at the date of the source.  How current is it? And how much does currency matter? Some subjects need to be more current than others (i.e. current events and technology go out of date very quickly, health information is only good for five years or so usually, but something historical would be useful much longer).

Who is the audience this source is geared to?  Is it children, students, the general public, experts in a field, scholars and academics?  Obviously, something geared for children is not appropriate for you to use, and something geared towards the general public may be okay depending on your purposes, but a scholarly source might be more detailed.

For more information about evaluating sources, see our research guide on for E valuating Sources  and check out the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy . Or Contact Us or Ask-A-Librarian .

Formatting Your Annotated Bibliography

The format of an annotated bibliography can vary, so if you're doing one for a different class, ask your instructor for specific guidelines.

MLA Header : Include a standard MLA header in the top-right corner of every page with your last name and page number

Standard MLA Format : Double space the entire annotated bibliography, and use a standard 12 point font such as Times New Roman.  Use 1 inch margins.

Standard MLA Heading : Begin with a normal MLA heading (your name, instructor's name, course section, and date (in the top-left corner)

Title : On the next line, title your paper Annotated Bibliography and center it in the middle of the page

Working Thesis : Then include your working thesis statement that you're going to use in your research paper (and your annotated bibliography).

Bibliography : List MLA citations for your 5 sources, arrange them in alphabetical order.

Annotations : Under each citation, write a paragraph about each source that includes:

• Several sentences summarizing what the source said (yes, you should actually read the source to do this). (Hint: Ask yourself what the main point of this source was and what conclusions the author came to)
• Then several sentences evaluating the credibility of the source (see below).
• Finally a sentence or two about how you are going to use this source to support your thesis when you write your research paper (Hint: Ask yourself how this work is useful or relevant to your topic? What did you take away from the source that you could use in your argument?

NOTE: The format and content of an annotated bibliography can vary; be sure to ask your instructor for specific guidelines. This example shows the standard Annotated Bibliography format for English 102 at Spartanburg Community College.

• ENG 102 Annotated Bibliography Instruction Module After completing this module, you should be able to evaluate a source of literary criticism for credibility and complete an Annotated Bibliography.
• Sample Annotated Bibliography English 102 Sample Annotated Bibliography English 102
• Annotated Bibliography Worksheet ENG 102 Downloadable worksheet to help you create your Annotated Bibliography.
• Completed Annotated Bibliography Worksheet (ENG 102) This sample worksheet will show you how to properly complete the annotated bibliography worksheet.
• How to Create an Annotated Bibliography - Extra Help Video This video from the SCC Library will walk you through how to create an Annotated Bibliography in MLA format.
• << Previous: 5. Cite Your Sources
• Next: 7. Write Your Paper >>
• 1. Getting Started
• 2. Explore Your Story
• 3. Find Historical Sources
• 4. Find Literature Criticism
• 5. Cite Your Sources
• 7. Write Your Paper

Questions? Ask a Librarian

• Last Updated: Mar 5, 2024 5:58 PM
• URL: https://libguides.sccsc.edu/eng102-shortfiction-grigg

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12.14: Sample Student Literary Analysis Essays

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

The following examples are essays where student writers focused on close-reading a literary work.

While reading these examples, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the essay's thesis statement, and how do you know it is the thesis statement?
• What is the main idea or topic sentence of each body paragraph, and how does it relate back to the thesis statement?
• Where and how does each essay use evidence (quotes or paraphrase from the literature)?
• What are some of the literary devices or structures the essays analyze or discuss?
• How does each author structure their conclusion, and how does their conclusion differ from their introduction?

Example 1: Poetry

Victoria Morillo

Instructor Heather Ringo

3 August 2022

How Nguyen’s Structure Solidifies the Impact of Sexual Violence in “The Study”

Stripped of innocence, your body taken from you. No matter how much you try to block out the instance in which these two things occurred, memories surface and come back to haunt you. How does a person, a young boy , cope with an event that forever changes his life? Hieu Minh Nguyen deconstructs this very way in which an act of sexual violence affects a survivor. In his poem, “The Study,” the poem's speaker recounts the year in which his molestation took place, describing how his memory filters in and out. Throughout the poem, Nguyen writes in free verse, permitting a structural liberation to become the foundation for his message to shine through. While he moves the readers with this poignant narrative, Nguyen effectively conveys the resulting internal struggles of feeling alone and unseen.

The speaker recalls his experience with such painful memory through the use of specific punctuation choices. Just by looking at the poem, we see that the first period doesn’t appear until line 14. It finally comes after the speaker reveals to his readers the possible, central purpose for writing this poem: the speaker's molestation. In the first half, the poem makes use of commas, em dashes, and colons, which lends itself to the idea of the speaker stringing along all of these details to make sense of this time in his life. If reading the poem following the conventions of punctuation, a sense of urgency is present here, as well. This is exemplified by the lack of periods to finalize a thought; and instead, Nguyen uses other punctuation marks to connect them. Serving as another connector of thoughts, the two em dashes give emphasis to the role memory plays when the speaker discusses how “no one [had] a face” during that time (Nguyen 9-11). He speaks in this urgent manner until the 14th line, and when he finally gets it off his chest, the pace of the poem changes, as does the more frequent use of the period. This stream-of-consciousness-like section when juxtaposed with the latter half of the poem, causes readers to slow down and pay attention to the details. It also splits the poem in two: a section that talks of the fogginess of memory then transitions into one that remembers it all.

In tandem with the fluctuating nature of memory, the utilization of line breaks and word choice help reflect the damage the molestation has had. Within the first couple of lines of the poem, the poem demands the readers’ attention when the line breaks from “floating” to “dead” as the speaker describes his memory of Little Billy (Nguyen 1-4). This line break averts the readers’ expectation of the direction of the narrative and immediately shifts the tone of the poem. The break also speaks to the effect his trauma has ingrained in him and how “[f]or the longest time,” his only memory of that year revolves around an image of a boy’s death. In a way, the speaker sees himself in Little Billy; or perhaps, he’s representative of the tragic death of his boyhood, how the speaker felt so “dead” after enduring such a traumatic experience, even referring to himself as a “ghost” that he tries to evict from his conscience (Nguyen 24). The feeling that a part of him has died is solidified at the very end of the poem when the speaker describes himself as a nine-year-old boy who’s been “fossilized,” forever changed by this act (Nguyen 29). By choosing words associated with permanence and death, the speaker tries to recreate the atmosphere (for which he felt trapped in) in order for readers to understand the loneliness that came as a result of his trauma. With the assistance of line breaks, more attention is drawn to the speaker's words, intensifying their importance, and demanding to be felt by the readers.

Most importantly, the speaker expresses eloquently, and so heartbreakingly, about the effect sexual violence has on a person. Perhaps what seems to be the most frustrating are the people who fail to believe survivors of these types of crimes. This is evident when he describes “how angry” the tenants were when they filled the pool with cement (Nguyen 4). They seem to represent how people in the speaker's life were dismissive of his assault and who viewed his tragedy as a nuisance of some sorts. This sentiment is bookended when he says, “They say, give us details , so I give them my body. / They say, give us proof , so I give them my body,” (Nguyen 25-26). The repetition of these two lines reinforces the feeling many feel in these scenarios, as they’re often left to deal with trying to make people believe them, or to even see them.

It’s important to recognize how the structure of this poem gives the speaker space to express the pain he’s had to carry for so long. As a characteristic of free verse, the poem doesn’t follow any structured rhyme scheme or meter; which in turn, allows him to not have any constraints in telling his story the way he wants to. The speaker has the freedom to display his experience in a way that evades predictability and engenders authenticity of a story very personal to him. As readers, we abandon anticipating the next rhyme, and instead focus our attention to the other ways, like his punctuation or word choice, in which he effectively tells his story. The speaker recognizes that some part of him no longer belongs to himself, but by writing “The Study,” he shows other survivors that they’re not alone and encourages hope that eventually, they will be freed from the shackles of sexual violence.

Works Cited

Nguyen, Hieu Minh. “The Study” Poets.Org. Academy of American Poets, Coffee House Press, 2018, https://poets.org/poem/study-0 .

Example 2: Fiction

Todd Goodwin

Professor Stan Matyshak

Advanced Expository Writing

Sept. 17, 20—

Poe’s “Usher”: A Mirror of the Fall of the House of Humanity

Right from the outset of the grim story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe enmeshes us in a dark, gloomy, hopeless world, alienating his characters and the reader from any sort of physical or psychological norm where such values as hope and happiness could possibly exist. He fatalistically tells the story of how a man (the narrator) comes from the outside world of hope, religion, and everyday society and tries to bring some kind of redeeming happiness to his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, who not only has physically and psychologically wasted away but is entrapped in a dilapidated house of ever-looming terror with an emaciated and deranged twin sister. Roderick Usher embodies the wasting away of what once was vibrant and alive, and his house of “insufferable gloom” (273), which contains his morbid sister, seems to mirror or reflect this fear of death and annihilation that he most horribly endures. A close reading of the story reveals that Poe uses mirror images, or reflections, to contribute to the fatalistic theme of “Usher”: each reflection serves to intensify an already prevalent tone of hopelessness, darkness, and fatalism.

It could be argued that the house of Roderick Usher is a “house of mirrors,” whose unpleasant and grim reflections create a dark and hopeless setting. For example, the narrator first approaches “the melancholy house of Usher on a dark and soundless day,” and finds a building which causes him a “sense of insufferable gloom,” which “pervades his spirit and causes an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an undiscerned dreariness of thought” (273). The narrator then optimistically states: “I reflected that a mere different arrangement of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (274). But the narrator then sees the reflection of the house in the tarn and experiences a “shudder even more thrilling than before” (274). Thus the reader begins to realize that the narrator cannot change or stop the impending doom that will befall the house of Usher, and maybe humanity. The story cleverly plays with the word reflection : the narrator sees a physical reflection that leads him to a mental reflection about Usher’s surroundings.

The narrator’s disillusionment by such grim reflection continues in the story. For example, he describes Roderick Usher’s face as distinct with signs of old strength but lost vigor: the remains of what used to be. He describes the house as a once happy and vibrant place, which, like Roderick, lost its vitality. Also, the narrator describes Usher’s hair as growing wild on his rather obtrusive head, which directly mirrors the eerie moss and straw covering the outside of the house. The narrator continually longs to see these bleak reflections as a dream, for he states: “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building” (276). He does not want to face the reality that Usher and his home are doomed to fall, regardless of what he does.

Although there are almost countless examples of these mirror images, two others stand out as important. First, Roderick and his sister, Madeline, are twins. The narrator aptly states just as he and Roderick are entombing Madeline that there is “a striking similitude between brother and sister” (288). Indeed, they are mirror images of each other. Madeline is fading away psychologically and physically, and Roderick is not too far behind! The reflection of “doom” that these two share helps intensify and symbolize the hopelessness of the entire situation; thus, they further develop the fatalistic theme. Second, in the climactic scene where Madeline has been mistakenly entombed alive, there is a pairing of images and sounds as the narrator tries to calm Roderick by reading him a romance story. Events in the story simultaneously unfold with events of the sister escaping her tomb. In the story, the hero breaks out of the coffin. Then, in the story, the dragon’s shriek as he is slain parallels Madeline’s shriek. Finally, the story tells of the clangor of a shield, matched by the sister’s clanging along a metal passageway. As the suspense reaches its climax, Roderick shrieks his last words to his “friend,” the narrator: “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door” (296).

Roderick, who slowly falls into insanity, ironically calls the narrator the “Madman.” We are left to reflect on what Poe means by this ironic twist. Poe’s bleak and dark imagery, and his use of mirror reflections, seem only to intensify the hopelessness of “Usher.” We can plausibly conclude that, indeed, the narrator is the “Madman,” for he comes from everyday society, which is a place where hope and faith exist. Poe would probably argue that such a place is opposite to the world of Usher because a world where death is inevitable could not possibly hold such positive values. Therefore, just as Roderick mirrors his sister, the reflection in the tarn mirrors the dilapidation of the house, and the story mirrors the final actions before the death of Usher. “The Fall of the House of Usher” reflects Poe’s view that humanity is hopelessly doomed.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library . 1995. Web. 1 July 2012. < http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PoeFall.html >.

Example 3: Poetry

Amy Chisnell

Professor Laura Neary

Writing and Literature

April 17, 20—

Don’t Listen to the Egg!: A Close Reading of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” (Carroll 164)

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass , Humpty Dumpty confidently translates (to a not so confident Alice) the complicated language of the poem “Jabberwocky.” The words of the poem, though nonsense, aptly tell the story of the slaying of the Jabberwock. Upon finding “Jabberwocky” on a table in the looking-glass room, Alice is confused by the strange words. She is quite certain that “ somebody killed something ,” but she does not understand much more than that. When later she encounters Humpty Dumpty, she seizes the opportunity at having the knowledgeable egg interpret—or translate—the poem. Since Humpty Dumpty professes to be able to “make a word work” for him, he is quick to agree. Thus he acts like a New Critic who interprets the poem by performing a close reading of it. Through Humpty’s interpretation of the first stanza, however, we see the poem’s deeper comment concerning the practice of interpreting poetry and literature in general—that strict analytical translation destroys the beauty of a poem. In fact, Humpty Dumpty commits the “heresy of paraphrase,” for he fails to understand that meaning cannot be separated from the form or structure of the literary work.

Of the 71 words found in “Jabberwocky,” 43 have no known meaning. They are simply nonsense. Yet through this nonsensical language, the poem manages not only to tell a story but also gives the reader a sense of setting and characterization. One feels, rather than concretely knows, that the setting is dark, wooded, and frightening. The characters, such as the Jubjub bird, the Bandersnatch, and the doomed Jabberwock, also appear in the reader’s head, even though they will not be found in the local zoo. Even though most of the words are not real, the reader is able to understand what goes on because he or she is given free license to imagine what the words denote and connote. Simply, the poem’s nonsense words are the meaning.

Therefore, when Humpty interprets “Jabberwocky” for Alice, he is not doing her any favors, for he actually misreads the poem. Although the poem in its original is constructed from nonsense words, by the time Humpty is done interpreting it, it truly does not make any sense. The first stanza of the original poem is as follows:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves,

An the mome raths outgrabe. (Carroll 164)

If we replace, however, the nonsense words of “Jabberwocky” with Humpty’s translated words, the effect would be something like this:

’Twas four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy badger-lizard-corkscrew creatures

Did go round and round and make holes in the grass-plot round the sun-dial:

All flimsy and miserable were the shabby-looking birds

with mop feathers,

And the lost green pigs bellowed-sneezed-whistled.

By translating the poem in such a way, Humpty removes the charm or essence—and the beauty, grace, and rhythm—from the poem. The poetry is sacrificed for meaning. Humpty Dumpty commits the heresy of paraphrase. As Cleanth Brooks argues, “The structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations” (203). When the poem is left as nonsense, the reader can easily imagine what a “slithy tove” might be, but when Humpty tells us what it is, he takes that imaginative license away from the reader. The beauty (if that is the proper word) of “Jabberwocky” is in not knowing what the words mean, and yet understanding. By translating the poem, Humpty takes that privilege from the reader. In addition, Humpty fails to recognize that meaning cannot be separated from the structure itself: the nonsense poem reflects this literally—it means “nothing” and achieves this meaning by using “nonsense” words.

Furthermore, the nonsense words Carroll chooses to use in “Jabberwocky” have a magical effect upon the reader; the shadowy sound of the words create the atmosphere, which may be described as a trance-like mood. When Alice first reads the poem, she says it seems to fill her head “with ideas.” The strange-sounding words in the original poem do give one ideas. Why is this? Even though the reader has never heard these words before, he or she is instantly aware of the murky, mysterious mood they set. In other words, diction operates not on the denotative level (the dictionary meaning) but on the connotative level (the emotion(s) they evoke). Thus “Jabberwocky” creates a shadowy mood, and the nonsense words are instrumental in creating this mood. Carroll could not have simply used any nonsense words.

For example, let us change the “dark,” “ominous” words of the first stanza to “lighter,” more “comic” words:

’Twas mearly, and the churly pells

Did bimble and ringle in the tink;

All timpy were the brimbledimps,

And the bip plips outlink.

Shifting the sounds of the words from dark to light merely takes a shift in thought. To create a specific mood using nonsense words, one must create new words from old words that convey the desired mood. In “Jabberwocky,” Carroll mixes “slimy,” a grim idea, “lithe,” a pliable image, to get a new adjective: “slithy” (a portmanteau word). In this translation, brighter words were used to get a lighter effect. “Mearly” is a combination of “morning” and “early,” and “ringle” is a blend of “ring” and "dingle.” The point is that “Jabberwocky’s” nonsense words are created specifically to convey this shadowy or mysterious mood and are integral to the “meaning.”

Consequently, Humpty’s rendering of the poem leaves the reader with a completely different feeling than does the original poem, which provided us with a sense of ethereal mystery, of a dark and foreign land with exotic creatures and fantastic settings. The mysteriousness is destroyed by Humpty’s literal paraphrase of the creatures and the setting; by doing so, he has taken the beauty away from the poem in his attempt to understand it. He has committed the heresy of paraphrase: “If we allow ourselves to be misled by it [this heresy], we distort the relation of the poem to its ‘truth’… we split the poem between its ‘form’ and its ‘content’” (Brooks 201). Humpty Dumpty’s ultimate demise might be seen to symbolize the heretical split between form and content: as a literary creation, Humpty Dumpty is an egg, a well-wrought urn of nonsense. His fall from the wall cracks him and separates the contents from the container, and not even all the King’s men can put the scrambled egg back together again!

Through the odd characters of a little girl and a foolish egg, “Jabberwocky” suggests a bit of sage advice about reading poetry, advice that the New Critics built their theories on. The importance lies not solely within strict analytical translation or interpretation, but in the overall effect of the imagery and word choice that evokes a meaning inseparable from those literary devices. As Archibald MacLeish so aptly writes: “A poem should not mean / But be.” Sometimes it takes a little nonsense to show us the sense in something.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry . 1942. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1956. Print.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. Alice in Wonderland . 2nd ed. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars Poetica.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry . Ed. David Lehman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 385–86. Print.

Attribution

• Sample Essay 1 received permission from Victoria Morillo to publish, licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International ( CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 )
• Sample Essays 2 and 3 adapted from Cordell, Ryan and John Pennington. "2.5: Student Sample Papers" from Creating Literary Analysis. 2012. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported ( CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 )

Short on time? 10 books you can finish quickly.

The book world staff rounds up some of their favorite books that come in under 200 pages.

Sometimes, even those of us who read for a living are happy to pick up a book that we can finish in just a few days — or maybe even in a lazy afternoon at the park. We’re pretty sure that’s true for everyone else, too, so the Book World staff rounded up some of our favorite titles — new and old, fiction and nonfiction — that come and go as quickly as Washington’s brief spring. Here you’ll find memoirs and novels alike. Our only rule is that everything had to come in under 200 pages — sometimes a lot shorter.

‘Look at Me,’ by Anita Brookner

A surprising number of my favorite books hover around the 200-page mark, and some of these are indisputable classics (“Mrs. Dalloway,” “Notes From Underground,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Good Soldier”). What’s most remarkable is how much these books can get done in a relatively small space, constraint seeming to paradoxically increase breadth and ambition. In “ Look at Me ” (1983), Anita Brookner’s third novel, a research librarian named Frances Hinton narrates the story of how she entered the social orbit of a shiny, charming married couple and their friend. Like many of Brookner’s characters, Frances lives a stringent, lonely life that seems a combination of consciously, even proudly, chosen and temperamentally inevitable. Not much happens in the book by way of plot, and not much has to. This is one of the most beautifully written and psychologically penetrating novels you’ll find. (192 pages) — John Williams

‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ by J.M. Coetzee

In “ Waiting for the Barbarians ” (1980), Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J.M. Coetzee pulls off an eventful trick, writing about his home country’s political sins (and political sins more generally) through an allegory about an unspecified “Empire.” Narrated by a magistrate in the hinterlands, the plot revolves around the capture and treatment of “barbarians” who oppose the Empire. Often disturbing, the book is a condensed epic, vividly written and philosophically provocative on nearly all its relatively few pages. (152 pages) — John Williams

‘The Dry Heart,’ by Natalia Ginzburg (96 pages)

“ The Dry Heart ” (1947), a sleek and startling novella by postwar Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, is a sort of feminist answer to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.” His book begins, famously, “Mother died today.” Ginzburg’s even more arresting opening is at once flatly matter-of-fact and feverishly wrathful. “I shot him between the eyes,” she writes on the book’s very first page. “He” is the narrator’s decidedly underwhelming husband, a philandering loafer who marries her out of boredom and refuses to terminate a years-long affair with another woman.

Ginzburg is a crisp stylist, and her unsentimental and disciplined prose is curiously at odds with her novella’s guiding sentiment: fury that simmers until, all at once, it boils over. “The Dry Heart” is as taut and methodical a record of rage and revenge as you are apt to find. (96 pages) — Becca Rothfeld

‘Spurious,’ by Lars Iyer

People are often drawn to short novels because of some unspoken promise of elegance and perfectionism. Such books are marketed to readers as marvels of precision, darling little objects. (Yes, there’s something mildly orthorexic about what Esquire called the rise of the “slim volume.” ) Lars Iyer’s “ Spurious ” (2011), though, is foul-mouthed, high-spirited, rough around the edges. Nothing much happens in it: Two best frenemies tool around England and, in the words of the author , “take the mickey” out of each other. I’m told it’s a “philosophical novel” — Lars and his friend W, like the author, work in academia and bemoan their intellectual limitations — but don’t blanch! It’s also way more entertaining than it has any right to be. Iyer makes you believe in insult comedy as an Olympic sport, even a form of love. And if you like this one, it’s a gateway to five more in a similar vein. The perfect tonic for anyone haunted by the thought that they ought to be reading something better, more rigorous, more wholesome. (190 pages) — Sophia Nguyen

‘Where Reasons End,’ by Yiyun Li

Written after the suicide of Yiyun Li’s son, this novel from 2019 is largely composed of conversations between a bereaved mother and her dead child, Nikolai. They muse over various intellectual matters — the nature of time, the proper usage of language — and needle each other. (At one point, he tells her, “If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary,” to which she retorts, “Dying is highly unnecessary too.”) It’s a tough book to widely recommend, purely because of the heaviness of its subject matter. But “ Where Reasons End ” is also unforgettable, the kind of book that feels like a miracle of physics: You’re amazed by how lightly the prose moves, despite the density of its emotional core. (192 pages) — Sophia Nguyen

‘The Minotaur at Calle Lanza,’ by Zito Madu

Throughout the first year of the covid pandemic, my girlfriend and I mainlined season after season of the genial PBS travel program “Rick Steves’ Europe,” seeking a habitable elsewhere in its images of crowded market squares and ornate palazzos. Nigerian American writer Zito Madu’s experience of the era was altogether different, thanks to an artist’s residency that brought him to Venice in the fall of 2020, a time when the city had been largely emptied out, especially of the tourists who normally drift along its canals.

In this memoir published earlier this year, that evacuated milieu becomes an occasion for Madu’s elegant meditations on alienation, especially from his own family, but also from the overwhelmingly White world he moves through. His prose has the smooth and constant warmth of blood in a vein, a fluidity so steady it sometimes seems no different from stillness. Though Madu’s narrative culminates in a shockingly surreal sequence that is unlike anything I have read in a memoir, I will remember “ The Minotaur at Calle Lanza ” for its calmer moments: an African priest’s service in an otherwise Italian Catholic church or the quiet labor of a glass blower, a man content to carry on his business in silence “as if you weren’t there.” (184 pages) — Jacob Brogan

‘The Spinning Heart,’ by Donal Ryan

A portrait of a rural Irish town decimated by economic collapse, Donal Ryan’s debut novel made a splash when it was published in 2012, winning the Irish Book Award for both newcomer of the year and book of the year. Each of the 21 short chapters in “ The Spinning Heart ” is told from the perspective of a different inhabitant, their lives woven together by economic uncertainty and marred by tragedy. Bobby Mahon, a construction company foreman, blames himself after owner Pokey Burke skipped town, putting the livelihoods of his workers at risk. And Pokey’s father, Joseph Burke, is ashamed of his son, who appears to have fleeced the laborers to save himself. As the residents’ stories unfold, their public personas shield inner monologues that expose the truth about what they think of each other and of themselves. (156 pages) — Becky Meloan

‘About Alice,’ by Calvin Trillin

The author photo on the back of Calvin Trillin’s 2006 memoir about his wife, Alice, may be the happiest I’ve ever seen. It’s from their wedding day in 1965. Neither seems dressed for the occasion, but they are beaming. That joy radiates through “ About Alice ,” adapted from a New Yorker article, which should be sad because it is essentially about Alice’s death, on Sept. 11, 2001 (not in the terrorist attacks but in a hospital a few miles away, of heart failure stemming from lung cancer treatment).

Here the longtime New Yorker writer who for years had turned his wife into a favorite character in his books and articles aims to set the record straight about her. She was wise, yes, but not a stern “dietician in sensible shoes.”Rather, “she had something close to a child’s sense of wonderment. She was the only adult I ever knew who might respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, ‘Wowsers!’” By the end of this brief, witty and loving portrait, you’ll wish you’d met Alice, too, if only to hear that exclamation. (78 pages) — Nora Krug

‘The Island of Dr. Moreau,’ by H.G. Wells

There are several late 19th-century novellas — among them, Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Wells’s “The Time Machine,” James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” — that strikingly anticipate the anxieties and obsessions of our modern world. All four are rightly celebrated, but I now find a fifth, H.G. Wells’s “ The Island of Dr. Moreau ” (1896), the most disturbing and prophetic of all.

Why? Because it probes real-life issues that haunt us more than ever: What makes us human? Are we really that different from other animals? What is the relationship between science and morality? In particular, Wells asks us to think hard about the ethics and consequences of experimentation and what we now call genetic engineering.

Not least, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” embeds all these questions in a perfectly orchestrated crescendo of mystery, terror, violence, sacrifice and spiritual desolation. You will never forget it. “Are we not men?” (160 pages) — Michael Dirda

‘Another Brooklyn,’ by Jacqueline Woodson

With the economy of a poet, Jacqueline Woodson packs so much life and pain into her National Book Award-winning novel, “ Another Brooklyn .” When it was published in 2016, it was a return of sorts; Woodson had been focusing her creative efforts on books for young readers, to critical acclaim, and this was her first novel for adults in nearly two decades. The story, though, revolves around a child: August is 8 years old when she moves from Tennessee to New York with her brother and father after her mother’s death. Her fragmented recollections of 1970s Brooklyn — related years later after she becomes an anthropologist — work on multiple frequencies, capturing a child’s partial understanding of the dangers around her and the electric thrill of new friendships while also conveying nostalgia for the relationships that couldn’t withstand time and the innocence that was lost too soon. (192 pages) — Stephanie Merry

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Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

Still need more reading inspiration? Super readers share their tips on how to finish more books . Or let poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib explain why he stays in Ohio . You can also check out reviews of the latest in fiction and nonfiction .