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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 62 | Spring 2014 Varia Editors: Linda Collinge-Germain and Michelle Ryan-Sautour Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1337 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2014 ISBN: 0294-0442 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 [Online], Online since 01 June 2016, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1337 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain and Michelle Ryan-Sautour Articles Night-Thoughts on Poe and Kant: The Critique of Reason John Dolis Art, Psychology and Morality: The Dionysiac and the Apollonian in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings Brandon Chao Chi Yen New Perspectives on Old Questions: Ella Hepworth Dixon’s One Doubtful Hour Cheryl A. Wilson “I Mean You Didn’t Really Know Walt”: Walt Glass as Salinger’s Way of Keeping His “Oath” About Telling War Stories Julie Ooms Leaving the Bronx: Depicting Urban Spaces in Don DeLillo’s “Baghdad Towers West” and His Early Short Stories Richard Dragan Joyce Carol Oates: Fantastic, New Gothic and Inner Realities Tanya Tromble Unreal, Fantastic, and Improbable “Flashes of Fearful Insight” in Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories Bénédicte Meillon The Silence Between Words: Events of Becoming through Trauma in A.L. Kennedy’s “What Becomes” Laurie Ringer How Short Is Short? Charles Holdefer Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 2 Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain and Michelle Ryan-Sautour 1 The sixty-second issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English attests to the broad range of approaches published in the Journal. 2 The two articles on stories of the nineteenth century confront the stories with the philosophical works of their near contemporaries, most especially those on Reason. In his article entitled “Night-Thoughts on Poe and Kant: The Critique of Reason,” John Dolis looks closely at Poe’s two stories “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” tales whose background is one of “hallucination and insanity in general, as these narratives both stage the scene of Reason and dismantle it,” the narration even, in the end, reciting its fall. Dolis offers a “mosaic of meditative moments that reflect several ghostly points of convergence in Poe and Kant’s reasoning about Reason.” Brandon Chao Chi Yen’s essay “Art, Psychology and Morality: The Dionysiac and the Apollonian in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings” examines Lee’s theoretical formulations on art and the supernatural, Lee’s dissolution of artistic definiteness and rational stability in her collection of ghost stories entitled Hauntings, and finally, the moral issues involved in this double disintegration. 3 The anticipation of the turn of the century brings with it the concept of the “New Woman,” dealt with by Cheryl Wilson in her study of Ella Hepworth Dixon’s collection One Doubtful Hour and Other Side-Lights on the Feminine Temperament, published in 1904. “In the short stories comprising the collection, Dixon uses her art to address such issues of feminine identity, depicting the everyday struggles facing women at the end of the century and engaging topics such as employment and money, courtship and marriage, and the challenges of living in an increasingly global world,” says Wilson. 4 In her article on the rarely studied stories of the Glass family by J.D. Salinger, Julie Ooms draws attention to the telling of war stories, and more precisely how, through one character, Walt Glass, “Salinger’s work rejects war stories that are preoccupied with heroic soldiery and valiant death and even accuses such stories of perpetuating war.” She argues that Walt Glass is not glorified as a soldier but rather as a “beloved brother, friend, and lover.” Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 3 5 In “Leaving the Bronx: Urban Spaces in Don DeLillo’s ‘Baghdad Towers West’ and His Early Short Stories,” Richard Dragan explores the uncollected fiction of the American novelist Don DeLillo and its depiction of realistic urban settings and characters. Dragan argues that “reconsidering these under-appreciated early short stories of DeLillo can deepen our understanding of his extensive output as a novelist; this writer has continually exhibited a tension between realism and postmodernism in portraying urban spaces within his fiction.” 6 In the two articles which follow, Tanya Tromble and Bénédicte Meillon look at stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Proulx, respectively, from the angle of the fantastic, observing that both authors make use of the supernatural or the grotesque in their fiction. Tromble’s paper examines the fantastic apparitions in three of Oates’s short stories–“The Temple,” “Secret Reflections on the Goat-Girl,” and “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time”–in a discussion of the way “the author’s self-styled ‘psychological realism’ is put to work in the context of her new gothic stories to elucidate her characters’ inner realities.” Looking at Annie Proulx’s three collections of Wyoming short stories, Bénédicte Meillon studies the fantastic and magical realistic aspects of those narratives, “which borrow from tall tales, local legends, folktales, fairy tales and myths, and waver between a postmodernist, sardonic kind of irony and a more pathetic, tragic depiction of the harsh and grim reality of rural Wyoming.” 7 The last two articles deal with twenty-first century modes of writing. In her article entitled “The Silence between Words: Events of Becoming through Trauma in A.L. Kennedy’s ‘What Becomes,’” Laurie Ringer observes that Kennedy’s story “reverberates with trauma and embodies pathological silences in a narrative with little dialogue.” She suggests that in spite of this, “a close reading with Deleuzian and Affect theories reveals emergent futurity for Frank, the protagonist. Beyond the congenital silences and pathological positionings of the linguistic turn lies the ongoing promise of the Deleuzian-fueled affective turn. There are becomings alongside lived and living traumas.” 8 Charles Holdefer’s article “How Short is Short?” explores “the trend of increased brevity and how the ‘short-short’ might be recoded as something different from a short story.” It also addresses the affinity of microfiction with prose poetry, as well as considering how changes in technology, notably reading from computer screens and hand-held devices, have affected perceptions of the future of short fiction. AUTHORS LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Editor MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Associate Editor Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 4 Articles Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 5 Night-Thoughts on Poe and Kant: The Critique of Reason John Dolis 1 Poe’s fascination with part/whole configurations plays itself out in several tales against the background of hallucination and insanity. Regarding “Berenice,” for instance, the “phantasma of the teeth” exaggerate the part in its configuration with her facial features as a whole: “from the disordered chamber of my brain, […] the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth,” without a speck or shade on their enamel, or “an indenture in their edges,” would not “be driven away”; for these “I longed with a frenzied desire”; they became “the essence of my mental life […]. I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.”1 In “Eleonora,” both the voice and eyes surpass all understanding—her voice, sweeter than “the harp of Æolus,” and her eyes, brighter than the “River of Silence,” incomprehensible “for reasons which shall be made known” only “in Heaven” (653, italics mine). Here, facial features portray the drama that assails narration’s drive to understand itSelf.2 These features enigmatically emerge as phantasms which indefinably equivocate their sense and thus plague reason’s totalizing need to comprehend the whole of things, entities which, translated to the psychoanalytic arena, characterize the drive itself, and not the object, as partial in its intrinsic constitution.3 These emblematic phantasies of teeth, of voice, of eyes, establish reason’s mise en scène and, in the self-same act, profoundly compromise its reach. 2 “Ligeia” stages this event against the backdrop of aesthetic theory where the eyes, “those large, those shining, those divine orbs,” provide the sole “irregularity,” and serve to dislocate an otherwise perfectly proportionate whole—“far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race […] even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad” (655). The scene, with all its histrionics, fervidly revolves around the “one,” the integer, integrity, the whole—and its relation to the parts. Over and against the Greek ideal, Ligeia’s “features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen” (655). While they approach perfection in the “faultless” forehead, the “purest” skin, the “gentle prominence” above the temples, the “raven-black” tresses, Journal of the Short Story in English, 62 | Spring 2014 6 the “harmoniously curved” nostrils, the “sweet” mouth, the “radiant” smile, the eyes exceed, in their significance, the whole. They virtually transcend the Greek idea(l) in their affect.4 Narration finds itSelf obliged to temper understanding with a certain supplement: “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.” Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity—although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed “exquisite,” and felt that there was much of “strangeness” pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of “the strange.” (655) 3 Put “beauty” in parentheses, as but an afterthought.

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