Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 66 | Spring 2016 Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle, and Varia Guest Editors of the Special Section: Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1670 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2016 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5056-8 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016, « Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle, and Varia » [Online], Online since 01 March 2018, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1670 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS General Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and Linda Collinge-Germain Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle Foreword to Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle Robert M. Luscher Introduction: On the Stickiness of the Short Story and the Cycle Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam To See the Lives of Others Through the Eyes of God: The Affectivity of Literary Aesthetics in the Short Stories of Edward P. Jones Daniel Davis Wood “Preposterous Adventures”: Affective Encounters in the Short Story Cycle Rachel Lister Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan Rebecca Cross “The Young and Romantic Will Like It”: The Abolitionist Short Stories of Lydia Maria Child Fiona McWilliam Affective Atmospheres in the House of Usher Dennis Meyhoff Brink The Affectivity of Music in Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” Kuo Chia-chen Reading Structures of Feeling in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” Rob Welch Roundtable: Affect, the Short Story, and the Cycle Varia Is There a Doctor in the House? Rudyard Kipling’s Private Message to Arthur Conan Doyle in “The House Surgeon” Donna R. White Liminality and the Epiphanic Spectrum in Joyce’s Dubliners and Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag Daniela Janes The Geography of the Imagination: Benedict Kiely’s Dubliners Thomas O'Grady Immigration, Ethnicity, and Race in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Tony’s Wife” Timothy K. Nixon Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 2 “Betch you’ bootsh!”: Jewish Humour, Jewish Identity, and Yiddish Literary Traditions in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl Brian Jansen Housebreakers and Peeping Toms: Voyeurism in John Cheever’s Early Suburban Stories Yair Solan Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 3 General Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and Linda Collinge-Germain 1 This issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is a double-volume featuring a general section as well as a special section entitled “Affect and the Short Story and Short Story Cycle,” the latter under the guest editorship of Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam. We thank them as well as Robert Luscher, specialist of the short story sequence and guest consultant for this special section, for their active involvement in contributing to research on the short story in English. 2 The general section of this issue begins with a study of Rudyard Kipling’s 1909 story “The House Surgeon.” In “Is There a Doctor in the House? Rudyard Kipling’s Private Message to Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The House Surgeon,’” Donna White looks at the way in which Kipling seems to have not only written a story for the public, but also to have addressed a private message of hope and healing to his friend Arthur Conan Doyle after the death of his first wife, a hypothesis that resonates with this issue’s special section on Affect. 3 The two articles which follow both present comparative studies based on James Joyce’s Dubliners, attesting once again to the collection’s status as a landmark in the field of short story research. Daniela Janes compares Dubliners to the 1987 collection Tales from Firozsha Baag by the Parsi-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry. Reading both works as short story cycles, her aim is to demonstrate that the form of the short story cycle offers a “structural correlative” to the Joycean device of epiphany. Janes argues that the “epiphanic spectrum,” understood as a “gradual accumulation of awareness,” thus a process, has correlations with the structure of the short-story cycle, an accumulative genre. 4 Thomas O’Grady directs his attention to the locus of Joyce’s Dubliners as he compares the collection to Benedict Kiely’s Dublin-based short stories. Engaging with Guy Davenport’s notion of “the geography of imagination,” O’Grady argues that Kiely, as much as Joyce, pays tribute both to Dublin as a place and to Ireland as a literary landscape. 5 Timothy Nixon and Brian Jansen focus in their respective articles on the topos of immigration in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States. Nixon encourages Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 4 critics to read Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s story “Tony’s Wife” recalling the historical context of immigration and ethnic diversity in early twentieth-century New Orleans. In so doing, argues Nixon, they will perceive how the author engages with the ideas of race and racism in a story whose cast of characters is paradoxically only white. 6 “Yekl,” the story written by Abrahm Cahan and studied by Brian Jansen, is set in Yiddish New York during the same period. This paper argues that “‘Yekl’ is a text whose realist impulse and urge to interpret Yiddish-American immigrant culture for a wider audience is complemented and complicated by a knowledge of and engagement with non-realist Yiddish literary traditions: the folk tale, folk figures like the schlemiel, and a history of verbal, self-deprecating, anecdotal Yiddish humour.” 7 Finally, Yair Solan examines the suburban stories for which John Cheever has become so well-known, studying specifically what Cheever called the paradoxical “loss of privacy” in 1950s’ suburbia in comparison to the “liberating anonymity” of cities like New York. Nevertheless, argues Solan, Cheever’s suburban fiction maintains a decidedly urban sensibility. “Peopled by New York City exiles, suburban flâneurs, and exurban commuters, Cheever’s suburbia is hardly disconnected from the city,” concludes Solan. AUTHORS MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 5 Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 6 Foreword to Special Section: Affect and the Short Story and Cycle Robert M. Luscher 1 I am pleased to have been asked by the editors to serve as the Designated Editorial Board Consultant to introduce this Special Section of JSSE on “Affect and the Short Story and Cycle.” Having devoted a significant portion of my career to studying the short story—especially its individual and collective behavior within the short story cycle—it is gratifying to see concerted attention devoted to the intersection of reader and text, particularly as it occurs in relation to the production of affect. The volume contains seven essays—three of which focus on the short story cycle and four of which analyze particular stories—as well as a first-time feature in JSSE: an electronic roundtable on a variety of questions related to the implication of affect in the study of these genres. 2 Guest Editors Paul Ardoin and Fiona McWilliam precede their judicious selection of essays with an incisive introduction that utilizes the concept of “stickiness” to integrate the variety of concerns examined in the contributors’ essays and the concluding roundtable. This adhesive quality, they contend, can be applied to various intersections that occur in the autonomous story as well as within a linked collection: the convergence of reader and text, the relationship between characters and stories within the cycle, the effect of repetition, and the resonance produced by various narrative strategies. As Ardoin and McWilliam review the section’s contents, sketching the particular concerns of each essay, they provide a sense of the rationale behind the section’s arrangement and of its theoretical range and resonances. In doing so, they suggest that the section—like the short story cycle—creates a “stickiness” of its own through the accumulating affective value that binds it and generates an effect greater than the mere sum of its parts. A similar effect occurs as they provide a review of the main roundtable, attending to the comments of individual scholars and the threads that weave their remarks together. 3 The three essays focused on short story cycles take various critical approaches to examining the role affect plays across the wider canvas of the short story collection. Daniel Davis Wood’s essay on two cycles by African American writer Edward P. Jones, Journal of the Short Story in English, 66 | Spring 2016 7 building on Charles Altieri, shifts focus from fiction as representation of affective experience to its role in generating affect aesthetically, especially during conscious moments of attentiveness. Both the modular form of the cycle and the repetition of affective triggers, Wood contends, create a spatio-temporal panorama with disquieting experiential significance built into geographic markers from the characters’ affective experiences. Rachel Lister, in contrast, examines moments of happiness, with Sara Ahmed’s theories of affect as her lens on story cycles by Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, and Alice Munro that focus on the lives of marginalized female characters who move beyond the norms of their affective communities to experience moments of transformation or returns that move them beyond hegemonic notions of happiness. These cycles contain a more positive form of repetition, enabling acts of reclamation and renewed comprehension, most often through affective lyric moments.