ENGL 4310

While looking up the epiphany stories in one of my old anthologies I stumbled upon a question answer section in the book and found some addressing the short story that I thought were interesting. After I read some of the blogs in response to epiphanies in the stories we just read, I wanted to share them with you all to see what you think.

Question:

Is there anything new to say about the American short story that Edgar Allan Poe
hasn't already said in his famous remarks about Hawthorne's short stories?

Answered by Joyce Carol Oates:

Poe's remarks are inappropriate to our time, and in fact to the marvelous
modern tradition of the story that begins with Chekhov, Joyce,
Conrad, and James. Speculation about short fiction should probably
remain minimal since "speculation" about most works of art is usually a
waste of time. Those of us who love the practice of an art often hate
theorizing because it is always theorizing based upon past models: as
such, it must inevitably incline toward the conservative, the reactinary, the
exhortative, the school of should and should not. Genuine artists create their own modes of art and nothing interest them except the free play of the imagination. . . .It isn't true short stories are necessarily short.

I'm not sure which section of Poe's essay she is responding too, but perhaps
not the excerpt I shared with you on effect. I think some of her argument is relevent, but I have difficulting thinking Poe's remarks inappropriate for our time when we are still reading what was written in his time. I do really like what Poe has to say it that it is helpful to me as a reader. I like this next comment of Faulkner because I seems to reitterate some of the things Poe said and is reminisant of all I'v ever been taught and believed about short stories.

Question:

Mr. Faulkner, you spoke about The Sound and the Fury as starting out to write a
short story and it kept growing. Well now, do you think that it's easier to write a novel than a short story?

Answer from William Faulkner:

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trashin it and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Cheknov worte. That's why I rate that second--it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. In poetry, of course, there's no room at all for trash. It's got to be absoulutely impeccable, absolutely perfect.

Comment by A.L. Bader:

Any teacher who has ever confronted a class with representative modern short
stories will remember the disappointment, the puzzled "so-what" attitude, "They
just end," or "They're not real stories" are frequent criticisms. . . Sometimes the phrase "nothing happens" seems to mean that nothing significant happens, but in a great many cases it means that the modern short story is charged with a lack of narrative structure. Readers and critics accumstomed to an older type of story are baffled by a newer type. They sense the underlying and unifying design of the one, but they find nothing equivalent to it in the other. Hence they maintain that the modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous--frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance--everthing in fact, except a story.

I like this comment because It helps explain the difference in early short stories and more modern ones, and yet I still believe Poe's idea of every word contributing to still be true. Some stories or epiphanies within the story seem to come out of nowhere, but if we were to re-evaluate the story I think we'd see is just seemed more suttle, perhaps more true to life (or realistic). It like our epiphanies come out of everyday experiences to suprise or enlighten us.