The Short Story by Andrew Kahn

Author:Andrew Kahn [Kahn, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191069673
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The plot thickens…and thins

For much of the 19th century, anecdote and incident inspired short fiction written for a mass market. The incident or anecdote-based short story made a virtue of brevity, and the economy of style and consequential arrangement of causes and effects well suited slice-of-life episodes, criminal capers, the sensational, and the supernatural. All these modes are staples of its history. What they all share is a skill in building up suspense that must be relieved and establishing dread that must be left to linger. Yet we shall also see that the genre has been enjoying a long postmodernist reincarnation in which it has adopted almost the opposite approach. Losing the plot has been a source of fictional experimentation and liberation from linearity. What is left is writing in which the making of the story is its own subject. Like serialism in music, repetition with subtle variation has become a key structure, with added effects of reversal, rewriting, and multiplied outcomes. Storytelling as a type of play can revel in relativizing the truth of fiction and the notion of fiction as truth, all of which has consequences for the plot.

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