Towards a corpus-based genre theory of the short story: and experience with Portuguese short stories

• Autores: Erik Van Achter
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 989-1004
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ever since the E.A.Poe wrote a few lines about the tale, no other genre than the short story has been so haunted by a need to define. Curiously enough, this defining almost always needs the novel and strangely enough this defining is almost never corpus based, the work of the German critic Bonheim being a rare exception. In the first part of this contribution short story criticism is described as a variation on the texts of the founding fathers of the genre in America: Poe and Matthews. The second part aims at offering an escape from the compulsive paradigm described in part one by combining insight in the nature and workings of genre in modern literary theory and Portuguese literary history. By doing so, a selection of a justifiable corpus of short stories is proposed and focalising on the dominant trait viz. the shortness, or, the interplay of narrating and narrated time an analysis method is chosen. Finally some preliminary results, rather trends than clear cut solutions, are described.