Soham's Story-Cycle Literature Final Project

Overview

Throughout this past quarter, a significant portion of the class texts that we have read in Literatures of the World have been told from multiple points of view. For example, take Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, or Tommy Orange’s There There. Both of these novels are told from the perspectives of the characters that are involved in the storyline. These two novels were, coincidentally, my two favorite readings so far in the class, and as a result, prompted me to further research other story cycle novels as well as really understand their inner workings, and how they stack up against one another.

Before looking at story cycle novels, it is important to understand what a short story cycle really is. The first critical study of this story type was done by Forrest Ingram in 1971, who stated that a short story cycle is a “book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader's successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (Ingram 11). Although this is a somewhat vague definition, it was used as a blueprint for later definitions of the story cycle novel as well, which were further refined. A prime example of this is James Nagel’s guide to the contemporary American short story cycle, in which he mentions devices that recur repeatedly throughout short story cycles, such as specific symbols, objects, places, people (Nagel 15). Others such as Robert Luscher emphasize “the sequential unfolding of meaning” that is developed as the story progresses (Gill, Kläger 20). All of these definitions with varying specificity and foci, when considered together, present a “paradoxical status of the component stories [of short story cycles] as both complete and discrete stories and as parts in a larger whole”, showing that the genre is centered on a “combination of openness and closure, of diversity and unity” (Gill, Kläger 21). These conflicting characteristics make the short story cycle a very interesting style of writing and develop an underlying web of connections between texts that follow this cycle across space and time.

Bibliography

Constructing Coherence In The British Short Story Cycle, edited by Patrick Gill, and Florian Kläger, Taylor and Francis Group, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.scu.edu/lib/santaclara/detail.action?docID=5442654.

Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. Anchor Canada, 2017.

Hemingway, Ernest. IN OUR TIME. VINTAGE, 2021.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in Literary Genre. 1971.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. Vintage, 2015.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: the Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2004.

Orange, Tommy. There There. Emblem Editions, 2020.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Penguin Books, 2019.