PROBLEMS of UNITY in the SHORT-STORY CYCLE Jennifer J
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUScholarWorks ONE STORY, MANY VOICES: PROBLEMS OF UNITY IN THE SHORT-STORY CYCLE Jennifer J. Smith Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements of for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences Indiana University April 2011 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee ____________________________________ George B. Hutchinson, Ph.D., Chair ____________________________________ Purnima Bose, Ph.D. ____________________________________ Margo Natalie Crawford, Ph.D. ____________________________________ Vivian Nun Halloran, Ph.D. February 25, 2011 ii © 2011 Jennifer J. Smith ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii For JAMES AND MICHELLE SMITH, for everything. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It’s rare to have the opportunity to tell people what you think of them—what you really think of them. I am reminded of a scene from 30 Rock when Kenneth the page is fired; he drunkenly staggers onto the scene of a wedding. He grabs the microphone. Everyone in the room braces for the worst as Kenneth announces, “"You people you are my best friends, and I hope you get everything you want in life. So kiss my face! I'll see you all in heaven!" He flashes a thumbs up, throws the microphone down, and walks away. Reaching the end of something, he realizes how wonderful it’s been. I know how he feels. I have had the best mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. Whatever strengths this project has and insight it offers are owed to my insightful and supportive committee. It has been my great fortune to take classes with each of them and have my worked shaped by them from the very first days of my graduate education. As both a teacher and director, George has been generous and challenging. He kept, always, the whole project in mind as he read. He has an incredible talent for being able to conceptualize the big picture even as he zooms in on a single sentence. Both in his responses and in his writing, he taught me the merits of clear and compelling prose. I now endeavor to practice and refine my own. He offered encouragement when it was most needed; at the same time, he found a way to tell me when a chapter was incoherent or an argument faulty. My project has deeply benefitted from that balance. v It was with Purnima in my very first semester that I first encountered questions about the intersections of nation and literature. This early encounter has been formative to my thinking. I was then— and am now—awed by her intellect and sense of purpose. She has been my most resistant reader, and for that I thank her. The push past the formal impulse is, in large part, due to her. She challenged me to think about not only history and theory in regards to the cycle but also the conditions of its production and reception. I had the great pleasure to not only take a class with Margo but also teach one with her. In both settings, she inspired me with her genuine excitement for ideas and growth. I am indebted to her for many things—for her class on the Black Arts Movement, which asked questions about identity and art that shape this project, her support in both coursework and writing, and showing me how to be both rigorous and encouraging. She left Indiana part of the way through this process; I am indebted to her that she remained on my committee. I met Vivian when I first visited Indiana and was considering attending. She struck me immediately as an engaged scholar and consummate advocate for students and their work. This has been affirmed by the many workshops she has assembled, her clear thinking and professionalism, and her teaching and research. I had the tremendous good fortune to participate in Variations on Blackness, organized by Vivian and Matthew Guterl. In this workshop, Vivian and Matt evinced a model of scholarship and collaboration that inspires me and shapes the kind of faculty member I want to be. The workshop had the very measurable effect of leading to my first publication, which is a credit to Vivian. I am likewise deeply indebted to her on this vi project—she has shaped my framing, choice of texts, argumentation, and countless other elements. All of my readers gave me extensive and thoughtful feedback; there is not a measurement adequate to quantify what this has meant and how it has benefited my work. Even before that, an army of English teachers and professors made this all possible; I thank all of them. My work has been supported by the Booth Tarkington Dissertation Award and by the English Department at Indiana University. Thank you especially to Bev Hankins. She makes the department work, and she does it with unrivaled savvy and ability. My project has also benefitted from those fellow graduate students who read these chapters in draft and enhanced them with their thoughts and questions: I thank especially Erin Pryor Ackerman, John Casey, Brian Mornar, and Laura Passin. I also want to thank my dear and lovely friends for making graduate school fun. I am inspired every day by the collective intellect, wit, and ambition of my Bloomington friends: Erin, Amy Despres, Elin Grimes, Christian Lander, Annika Mann, Tracey Metivier, Andy Oler, Rebecca Peters-Golden, Anita and Amber Schaad, Maura Smyth, Sarah Withers, and Jeff Wuslich. May this be only the beginning. I have also been supported by a large circle of old friends who know who they are. My new colleagues, Michelle Gardner-Morkert, Connie Kammrath, Lila Kurth, Andy Pederson, David Rogner, and Gary Wenzel offered enthusiasm and served as sounding boards in the last stages of this process. vii My largest debt of gratitude goes to my family. To Matt, Katie, Kiersten, Patrick, and Aaron, I thank you for offering unmitigated joy and love. Those last three weren’t even born when I started this journey, and now they are walking, talking people. To my sister and best friend, Julie, I thank you for being a more generous listener than I deserve, a firebrand, and my fiercest supporter. To share Bloomington with you my first year and your last was a pure delight. To share everything with you is my great honor. To my extended Smith and Craig families, I owe you so much in the way of love and enthusiasm. And especially to Edwin and Betty Smith, I am thankful for the years of work, dedication, and humor you put into me and my siblings. You are my inspiration. Andy Craig has transformed my life. He makes me—even when I don’t want to—acknowledge how special it is to be pursuing this project and this dream. He adds to my life immeasurably, and he inspires me every day with his words and actions. He read and gave me his thoughts on every part of this dissertation and listened to me talk interminably about it over these last years. Finally, my most precious thanks go to those two individuals to whom this is dedicated—James and Michelle Smith, my parents. Their unwavering love and support have made this, and every accomplishment I have ever had, possible. I am nothing without you. “You people are my best friends, and I hope you get everything you want in life.” viii Jennifer J. Smith ONE STORY, MANY VOICES: PROBLEMS OF UNITY IN THE SHORT-STORY CYCLE Tracing the genre from its nineteenth-century antecedents to its present-day incarnations, my dissertation argues that the rise of the short-story cycle constitutes one of the most influential and generative developments in US literary history. Although usually divided among disparate genres and periods, short-story cycles by Caroline Matilda Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other so-called regionalists, modernists such as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, postmodernists such as Louise Erdrich and Julia Alvarez, and writers whose works fall outside of these categorizations such as Jhumpa Lahiri in fact constitute a long, expansive history which includes the most influential writers and texts in American literature. The recurrence of stylistic conventions demonstrates a generic compulsion that erodes the ground upon which rigid periodization is built. The consistency of theme, structure, and style among cycles from disparate periods illuminates the extent to which one period’s concerns persist and get reinvented in another: short-story cycles are realist in description, modernist in their fragmentation, and postmodernist in their experimentation with the reader/text relationship. The short-story cycle has been central to US literary production precisely because the form troubles expectations of unity and re-imagines narrative, like human identity itself, as contingent. As such seemingly firm supports of selfhood as place, time, group memory, ethnicity, and family progressively destabilize, they also become the fraught devices through which fictional narrative remakes its engagement with expectations of formal unity. Using these motifs as linking devices that provisionally work but cannot ultimately hold, American authors have repeatedly ix rejuvenated fictional narrative in general. The history exposes the frequency with which writers turn to the form at critical junctures in their careers: as they begin writing, come to a crossroads in their aesthetics, seek a form that liberates them to proliferate points of view, investigate the breadth and depth of a locality, or break free from the shackles of novelistic temporality. ____________________________________ George B. Hutchinson, Ph.D., Chair ____________________________________ Purnima Bose, Ph.D.