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The Short Story Cycle: Circling Around a Genre?
University of Warwick, 6 February 2016
Deadline for submission: 15 September, 2015
Confirmed Key-note speakers: Professor Bill Gray (University of Chichester), Professor Arthur Graesser (Memphis, Oxford)
Conference website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ssc/
The success of recent Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, the movie Wild Tales, the podcast This American Life and the event the Moth shows the wide-ranging popularity of the short story cycle in modern media.
To reflect the ‘open’ nature of the form, our conference will start from a working hypothesis (rather than a strict definition): a short story cycle in whatever form or medium, seems to be constru(ct)ed as a collection of stories, presented as a whole but without an explicit narrative frame.
Traditionally, the short story cycle finds its raison d’être in oral culture. Undoubtedly, the legacy of oral culture proved to be a foundation for other areas of cultural expression, such as cinema, performance art, and modern media.
Since the eighteenth century, the novel has occupied the role of dominant genre in western literary culture. The short story cycle seems to find itself in a grey area, less well defined, but at the same time possibly less constrained. The anthology film is an example of how the same mechanism that is at the basis of the short story cycle can be productive in other media as well. This is also true in the case of radio programs or podcasts. Due to modern technology, new forms of media have made new forms of cultural expression possible, such as Twitter, Facebook, Internet forums and YouTube, all of which can be said to have brought to the surface shorter, more dialogical, more ‘spoken’ forms of (written as well as visual) communication. This begs the question whether the short story cycle, which seems to have gained in popularity in recent years, thrives in a specific social or historical context.
The structural issues inherent in short story cycles also raise questions of a mathematical, hermeneutical and neurological nature. Could we, for instance, come up with mathematical patterns that can help us gain insight into narratological structures and social functions of the genre? Can we find neurological explanations for its appeal to both readers and writers? The short story cycle seems to productively use the tensions between continuity and discontinuity, the structuring impulse and inevitable digression.
We envisage the conference itself as a short story cycle with the open ended circularity of hermeneutics: different disciplines, backgrounds and approaches revolve around one theme, providing a meaningful yet not rigid, premeditated structure.
Please submit by 15 September a paper title, 300-word abstract and a 300-word curriculum vitae to Elio Baldi ([log in to unmask]) and Linde Luijnenburg ([log in to unmask])