The Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is a general issue which features articles about short-story writings ranging in time from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the very beginning of the twenty-first. The articles are arranged chronologically in this issue, but present some similarities in approach. Michael Tritt, Rim Makni-Béjar and Adrienne Akins, in the articles which open and close the issue, deal with racial identity in short stories by Alice D..

Collinge-Germain, Linda

Vernadakis, Emmanuel

English

OpenEdition

 
Journal of the Short Story in English
Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 
54 | Spring 2010
General issue
Foreword
Linda Collinge-Germain and Emmanuel Vernadakis
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1032
ISSN: 1969-6108
Publisher
Presses universitaires de Rennes
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 June 2010
ISBN: 0294-0442
ISSN: 0294-04442
 
Electronic reference
Linda Collinge-Germain and Emmanuel Vernadakis, « Foreword », Journal of the Short Story in English
[Online], 54 | Spring 2010, Online since 01 December 2010, connection on 03 December 2020. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1032 
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Foreword
Linda Collinge-Germain and Emmanuel Vernadakis
1 The Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is a general issue which
features articles about short-story writings ranging in time from the very beginning of
the  twentieth  century  to  the  very  beginning  of  the  twenty-first.  The  articles  are
arranged  chronologically  in  this issue,  but  present  some  similarities  in  approach.
Michael Tritt,  Rim Makni-Béjar and Adrienne Akins,  in the articles which open and
close  the  issue,  deal  with  racial  identity  in  short  stories  by  Alice  Dunbar-Nelson,
Nadime Gordimer and James Baldwin respectively, a reminder that the question spans
the century.
2 Michael Tritt proposes a detailed study of the “impressive literary technique” engaged
in the composition of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s story about a black Creole entitled “The
Stones of the Village”, written between 1900 and 1910 and set in Louisiana. In the story,
Tritt argues, “the author masterfully foregrounds decisive and, at least to a degree,
deterministic incidents in Victor Grabért’s childhood, orchestrating point of view and
other particulars, in the process of counterpointing the protagonist’s accomplishment
with  his  tormenting  doubt.  Dunbar-Nelson  additionally  employs  notable
characterization, imagery, symbolism and especially allusion, to create an impressive
portrait of the way emotional conflict determines the tragic course of life for a black
Creole in search of a viable identity.”
3 In Rim Makni-Béjar’s article entitled “The Resurgence of Hidden Identities: The Burden
of Ancestry in Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black’”, she also deals
with the identity  quest  of  the  story’s  protagonist.  “Seeking racial  validation in  the
‘New’ South Africa”, says Makni-Béjar, “the protagonist of the story, a white academic
and former anti-apartheid activist, undertakes a futile search to establish his potential
partially black lineage. This identity quest imagined by Gordimer hints at the revival of
racial sensitivities in a country supposed to have come to terms with its racial and
racist past thirteen years after the free elections of 1994.” 
4 Adrienne Akins examines how James Baldwin’s story “This Morning, This Evening, So
Soon” explores the “complex interaction between racial and national identity within an
international context. For the story’s unnamed narrator, an African American living in
Foreword
Journal of the Short Story in English, 54 | Spring 2010
1
Paris, the United States is the oppressive country that he had to leave in order to find
the  freedom to  be  himself.  Despite  the  narrator’s  self-realization  abroad,  however,
Baldwin implies throughout the story that it may be impossible to ever truly escape
American identity.”
5 Stories from mid-century are dealt with by Ben Forkner and Claude Maisonnat as they
investigate religious influences in works by Flannery O’Connor, in the American South,
and  B.S.  Johnson,  in  Ireland,  and  how  these  religious  elements  participate  in  the
dramatic structure of the stories.
6 “Readers of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories will not have failed to notice the many
references  to  the  Holy  Ghost,  in  one  form  or  another,”  says  Ben  Forkner.  “In  my
readings of Flannery O’Connor’s stories”, he continues, “I have come to believe that the
presence of the Holy Ghost plays an essential role in the full meaning of her satire. At
the same time, however, I need to insist that my interest in the function of the Holy
Ghost in the three stories I examine is much more dramatic than doctrinal.”
7 Claude Maisonnat studies B.S. Johnson’s 1964 little-known story “Sheela-Na-Gig” whose
“somewhat enigmatic title with its Gaelic overtones in fact refers to medieval stone
carvings  found  in  churches,  representing  the  Celtic  avatar  of  the  famous  mythical
figure of Baubô. In the course of the story the unidentified first person narrator briefly
discusses the anthropological character of the figure, but”,  argues Maisonnat “what
makes that  figure so central  to the story is  that  its  discovery alters  the life  of  the
protagonist in a radical way.” 
8 Terry Thompson proposes a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s story “The Demon Lover”
which is complementary to its more frequent interpretation as “a traditional English
ghost story in which a middle-aged socialite is abducted by the phantom of her first
love, a handsome soldier who was killed in World War I” or as “a conventional murder
mystery with no supernatural elements.” Thompson argues that “perhaps the woman
is spirited away in the night not by a ghost or a murderer but by her own doppelganger.”
9 Three articles in the issue explicitly situate the authors studied in the context of or in
relation to postmodernism: Momaday in his use of the oral  tradition,  Carter in her
challenges to the reader and Millhauser, though chronologically later than the first
two, paradoxically more a modernist writer than a postmodernist one.
10 Anne-Garrait  Bourrier  argues  that  N.  Scott  Momaday’s  works  “all  insist  on  the
perplexing character of ancestral  oral  tradition”, and that his collection The Way to
Rainy Mountain is Momaday’s “most postmodern creation as it is mainly built on oral
tradition.” Yet, she proposes, “it is also a magnificent demonstration of how Native
American literatures can actually bypass the postmodern substratum when the gaps and
fragments of memory are bridged by imagination.”
11 In her article “Revisiting the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ as a Political Mechanism in Angela
Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’”, Michelle Ryan-Sautour argues that in the story,
Carter “invites the reader to a metatextual reading, that is a reading that positions the
reader at the crossroads of the authorial figure and the illusion of the story.” Indeed,
Ryan-Sautour says, “Carter’s titillating style is revelatory of an underlying agenda that
teases  the  reader  to  seek out  the  intentions,  however  fleeting,  of  the  author.”  She
suggests that “it is through this political pull, this invitation to ascribe reflections to an
authorial, didactic figure that other subtle and impalpable forms of political power are
brought to light in Carter’s stories.” 
Foreword
Journal of the Short Story in English, 54 | Spring 2010
2
12 Earl Ingersoll, in his article entitled “Steven Millhauser, a Very Late Modernist”, argues
that over the past four decades Steven Millhauser “has defied the conventional notion
that once a literary movement such as Modernism has ended, writers have little choice
but to adapt to the dominant style of their time, such as Postmodernism”. Ingersoll
studies the collection of short fiction entitled In the Penny Arcade (1986) and determines
that Millhauser “demonstrates the continuing viability of modernist values established
earlier in the twentieth century by writers as different from each other in their cultural
milieux as James Joyce and Franz Kafka.”
13 Finally, the articles by Ange Pambou and Neta Gordon explore formal aspects of stories
by  Grace  Paley and  Canadian  writer  John  Gould  respectively:  metaphors  in  Paley’s
stories and the characteristics of closure and pre-closure in the short story cycle by
Gould. 
14 In  his  article  on  the  “‘literalizing’  of  the  metaphor  in  Grace  Paley’s  stories”,  Ange
Pambou argues that “a host of formal processes of de-metaphorisation take place in the
stories, right at the core of the space between the author's stated intent not to produce
narratives with meaning beyond meaning and the constraints of a two-level order of
significance proper to any metaphorical utterance, two incompatible demands at the
intersection of which stands the text.” 
15 Neta Gordon looks at John Gould’s recent collection of short short stories entitled Kilter:
55 fictions, examining both the structure of the stories themselves and the structure of
the whole they make up as a short story cycle. Using Susan Lohafer’s theories of closure
and  pre-closure  as  a  framework,  this  article  “considers  the  cognitive  challenge  to
comprehending the shortness of Gould’s stories as related to the unique turn-of-the-
millennium gestalt his collection seeks to interrogate.”
16 It is a pleasure to present this issue, to note once again that the short story is a thriving
genre as is academic research dedicated to it and to thank all of those involoved in the
composition of this issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English. 
AUTHORS
EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS
Organisers of the Conference and Guest-Editors of this issue
Foreword
Journal of the Short Story in English, 54 | Spring 2010
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