Cutting the long story short

D R . S A C H I N K E T K A R

A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R

D E P T. O F E N G L I S H

FA C U LT Y O F A RT S ,

T H E M A H A R A J A S AYA J I R A O U N I V E R S I T Y O F B A R O D A ,

VA D O D A R A

D R . A N I L K A P O O R

A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R

E N G L I S H D E PA RT M E N T

S M T. R . R . H . PAT E L M A H I L A A RT S C O L L E G E

V I J A P U R , M E H S A N A

CUTTING THE LONG STORY SHORT: THE NOVEL AND THE SHORT STORY

AS LITERARY FORMS

THIS PRESENTATION WAS MADE FOR SANDHAN EDUSAT TV

TELECAST,BHASKARACHARYA INSTITUTE OF SPACE APPLICATIONS AND GEO

INFORMATICS, GANDHINAGAR, GUJARATON 24 AUGUST 2011

BISAG SANDHAN PRESENTATION

OBJECTIVES OF THE PRESENTATION

You will be able to better understand the notions of genre, narrative, fiction, the short story and the novel.

You will be able to tell the similarity and the difference between a short story and a novel.

You will also learn about important writers and texts in the course of the discussion.

WHAT ARE ‘GENRES’?

The novel and the short story are two most popular literary ‘genres’.

The word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for 'kind' or 'class'. The term is widely used in rhetoric, literary theory, media theory, and more recently linguistics, to refer to a distinctive TYPE of text.

LITERARY GENRES

In literature the broadest division is between poetry, prose and drama, within which there are further divisions, such as tragedy and comedy within the category of drama.

The novel and the short story are two important types of prose fictional narratives.

NARRATIVE

A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format (as a work of speech, writing, song, film, television, video games, photography or theatre) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events.

FICTION

Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative  work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author.

FICTION VS.NON-FICTION

Fiction also refers to theatrical, cinematic or musical work. Fiction contrast with non-fiction, which deals exclusively with factual (or, at least, assumed factual) events, descriptions, observations, etc. (e.g.: biographies, histories).

THE SHORT STORY

The term ‘ short story’ tells us that it is a narrative ( story) and that it is ‘ short’. So ‘ short story’ means a short piece of narrative

However, ‘short’ is a relative term( e.g. My brother is shorter than me, but I am shorter than my friend) and can only be understood in relation to other forms of prose narratives like ‘the novel’,’ ‘the novella’, ‘the novellette’ or ‘flash fiction’.

THE SHORT STORY

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines short story as , ‘A short piece of prose fiction, having few characters and aiming at unity of effect.’

THE SHORT STORY

Because of the shorter length, a short story usually focuses on one plot, one main character (with a few additional minor characters), and one central theme, whereas a novel can tackle multiple plots and themes, with a variety of prominent characters.

HISTORY OF THE SHORT STORY

William Boyd, in ‘ A Short History of the Short Story’ (2006) notes , “The short story had always existed as an informal oral tradition, but until the mass middle-class literacy of the 19th century arrived in the west, and the magazine and periodical market was invented to service the new reading public’s desires and preferences, there had been no real publishing forum for a piece of short fiction in the five to 50-page range.”

THE EARLY SHORT STORY

Boyd says that Walter Scott’s story “The Two Drovers,” published in Chronicles of the Canongate in 1827 is the first modern short story. Scott influenced George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in Britain, Balzac in France, Pushkin and Turgenev in Russia and Fennimore Cooper and Hawthorne in America. These writers influenced Flaubert and Maupassant in France, Anton Chekhov in Russia , Poe and Melville in America.

ANTON CHEKHOV(1860-1904)

A Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature

POE ON THE SHORT STORY

When Edgar Allan Poe read Hawthorne, he made the first real analysis of the difference between the short story and the novel, defining a short story quite simply as a narrative that “can be read at one sitting.” Boyd takes Poe’s definition further by saying, ‘a true, fully functioning short story should achieve a totality of effect that makes it almost impossible to encapsulate or summarize.’

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)

Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story.

THE SHORT STORY VS THE NOVEL

Boyd notes, ‘ the effect of reading a good short story is quite different from the effect of reading a good novel. The great modern short stories possess a quality of mystery and beguiling resonance about them—a complexity of afterthought— that cannot be pinned down or analyzed..’

Frank O’Connor (1903 –1966)

an Irish author of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs. His The Lonely Voice: (1963) is one of the most important theory of the short story.

THE SHORT STORY AS THE LONELY VOICE

 "There is in the short story at its most characteristic," Frank O Connor proposes, "something we do not often find in the novel - an intense awareness of human loneliness." The story deals especially with "submerged population groups consisting of "outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society".

THE SHORT STORY AS THE LONELY VOICE

One of the most important aspect of the short story as a ‘genre’ , according to Frank O Connor is its focus on the individual and his or her loneliness and social marginality or alienation. Connor also notes that the modern short story ‘began and continues to function as a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary , critical reader.” The novel on the other hand emphasizes the process of identification between the reader and the character.

THE NOVEL

The novel is an extended prose fiction narrative of 50,000 words or more, which arose in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and overtook verse narratives in popularity, eventually replacing them. Its roots go back to the medieval andearly modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century

THE ROMANCE

Romance is a medieval narrative genre and a precursor of the novel. Written at first in verse (as in the works of Chretien de Troyes), and later in prose (Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur). Romances were popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest.

THE NOVEL

The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its closeness to the medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella, meaning "a little new thing." Romances and novelle, short tales in prose, were predecessors of the novel, as were picaresque narratives. 

THE PICARESQUE NOVEL

‘Picaro’ is Spanish for "rogue," and the typical picaresque story is of the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits. The development of the realistic novel owes much to such works, which were written to deflate romantic or idealized fictional forms.

DON QUIXOTE

Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15), the story of an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance, explores the role of illusion and reality in life and was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel.

The novel is often said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722).  The first "novel of character" or psychological novel is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), an epistolary novel (or novel in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters). It is a work characterized by the careful plotting of emotional states. Another such work is Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48).

BAKHTIN ON THE NOVEL

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895,  –1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic,  and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. 

BAKHTIN ON THE NOVEL

In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin points out the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic. He shows that the novel is well-suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world.

BAKHTIN ON THE NOVEL

The novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identity.

HETEROGLOSSIA

Any language, in Bakhtin's view, stratifies into many voices: "social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions.” This heterogeneous nature of language is what Bakhtin calls ‘ heteroglossia’.

BAKHTIN ON THE NOVEL

The linguistic energy of the novel is in its expression of the conflict between voices through their adaptation to different elements in the novel's discourse. This diversity of voice is the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre.

THE NOVEL VS. THE SHORT STORY

As both the forms are ‘prose narratives’, the basic elements of the narrative like characterization, plot, point of view and setting are common. However, comparing Bakhtin’s views on the novel and Frank O’Connor and William Boyd’s views on the short story, we realize that the difference between the two is not simply of length of the story.

THE NOVEL VS. THE SHORT STORY

The overall emphasis and focus of the short story seems to towards the individual and his or her isolation , on the ‘The Lonely Voice’ -as Connor points out and the overall emphasis and the focus of the novel seems to be on the plurality and social diversity of conflicting voices as Bakhtin observes.

Boyd’s Distinction Between the Novel and the Short Story

As William Boyd (Brief Encounters, 2004) notes , “Something occurs in the writing - and reading - of a short story that is on another level from the writing and reading of a novel. The basic issue, it seems to me, is one of compression versus expansion….we see that the ideas, the inspiration, that will drive a novel, however succinctly expressed, have to be capable of endless augmentation and elaboration….

William Boyd, CBE (born 7 March 1952)

William Boyd is a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. Boyd's novels include: A Good Man in Africa and Any Human Heart.

Boyd on The Novel vs. The Short Story

The essence of almost every short story, by contrast, is one of distillation, of reduction. It's not a simple question of length, either: there are 20-page short stories that are far more charged and gravid with meaning than 400-page novels.

Boyd on The Novel vs. The Short Story

“We are talking about a different category of prose fiction altogether… to pin down the essence of the two forms - is poetry: to compare the epic with the lyric. Let us say that the short story is prose fiction's lyric poem, contrasted with the novel as its epic.”

REFERENCES:

M. M. Bakhtin, [1930s]  Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emers The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. on and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. 1981

Frank O'Connor. The Lonely Voice (1963)

William Boyd ,”The Short History of the Short Story ”.2006

William Boyd , “Brief encounters”, 2004