English 104 - Cora Agatucci
Introduction to Literature: Fiction

~  II  ~
Emergence of the Short Story Genre 
& Elements of Fiction
Poe, Maupassant, Chekhov, Chopin, Gilman
[Fall 2001 ENG 104 Course Pack ~ p. 16]

“Meaning is what keeps the short story from being short….
[People] think that if you can pick out the theme,
the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack,
you can rip the story open and feed the chickens.
But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.…
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way,
and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.
When anybody asks what a story is about,
the only proper thing to tell him is to read the story.
The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning, but experienced meaning…”
Flannery O’Connor (1961)

"Poe is a great artist, and I would rest my case for him on
his prose allegories of psychic conflict. 
In them, Poe broke entirely new ground, and
they remain the best things of their kind….
Poe’s mind may have been a strange one;
yet . . . he will have something to say to us
as long as there is civil war in the palaces of men’s minds."
Richard Wilbur, The House of Poe

Guy de Maupassant “was a man who escaped from tradition and authority,
who had entered into himself and looked out upon life
through his own being and with his own eyes; and
who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw.”
Kate Chopin (1896)

"All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story
And it is one of the greatest stories ever written."
Vladimir Nabokov (1981) on Chekhov’s "The Lady with the Pet Dog" (1899)

"Maupassant was a "relentless realist"; Chekhov a "persistent moralist."
Sean O’Faolain

“It was only yesterday that she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (1894)

“EPIPHANY A ‘showing forth’ or sudden revelation of the true nature of
a character or situation through a specific event—a word, gesture, or other action—
that causes the reader to see the significance of that character or situation in a new light.
The term was first popularized in modern literature by James Joyce.”
Ann Charters, “Glossary of Literary Terms,” p. 982.

"It was not written to drive people crazy,
but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
on "Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’" (1892)

Fall 2001 ENG 104 Syllabus | Course Plan | Course Pack Table of Contents | Assignments | Site Map
ENG 104 Author Links Table of Contents  | (1)  A - E  | (2)   F - L  | (3)   M - Z
Literature Links | Contexts: Literary History & Movements | Genre Studies: Fiction
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YOU ARE HERE ~ Section II. Emergence of the Short Story Genre
from ENG 104 Course Pack Table of Contents ~ Fall 2001
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http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/coursepack/II_ShortStory.htm 
Last Updated:  11 September 2003   

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