Liminality and the Short Story

Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing

Jochen Achilles, Ina Bergmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317812449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This book discusses the relevance of the concept of liminality for the short story genre and for short story cycles, emphasizing theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance and applicability.

Liminality as a concept of demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, and interethnic transnationality. Over the last decade, many symposia, exhibitions, art, and publications have been produced which thematize liminality, covering a wide range of disciplines including literary, geographical, psychological and ethnicity studies.

Liminal structuring is an essential aspect of the aesthetic composition of short stories and the cultural messages they convey. On account of its very brevity and episodic structure, the generic liminality of the short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision. It also addresses the moral transgressions, heterotopic orders, and forms of ambivalent self-reflection negotiated within the short story's confines. This innovative collection focuses on both the liminality of the short story and on liminality in the short story.

Part I
Liminality and the Short Story

1 "Betwixt and Between"

Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Short Fiction

Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann

1 Uses of Liminality for the Short Story

Liminality as a concept of both demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global mobility, digital networking, interethnicity, transnationality, ecological reconsiderations of species boundaries as well as technological redefinitions of the human. Its usability transcends its origins in seminal studies of cultural anthropology, such as Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909) or Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) and The Forest of Symbols (1973). In the wake of van Gennep, Turner eventually came to define the term ‘liminality’ very broadly. In his words, “[l]iminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Ritual Process 95). He developed his understanding of liminality in the pursuit of ethnological studies of African initiation rituals and later discovered the transferability of the concept to Christian pilgrimages, the Hippie movement of the sixties, and, in cooperation with performance theorist and practitioner Richard Schechner, to modern drama. In the last decade or so, a sizeable number of symposia, exhibitions, art works, and publications were produced that thematize liminality in one way or another. These events cover a surprising variety of fields and range from literary, mobility, migration, and ethnicity studies to archeological and geographical, psychological and biomedical studies (Achilles, Borgards, and Burrichter; Aguirre, Quance, and Sutton; Andrews and Roberts; Marcelino; Roy; Soto; Squier; Sutton; Viljoen and van der Merwe).

The conclusion from this abundance of cultural production and scholarly occupation with liminality is also predictably liminal or ambivalent. It warns us that the term can be stretched and twisted in almost any direction—an objection and critical comment sometimes also expressed with regard to the theories of Turner. But the fact that the term is used in such diverse contexts both in the arts and in scholarship also indicates that pivotal situations are indeed not only frequent but decisive in human lives and in social, cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts. In order not to fall into the trap of randomness described, this volume restricts itself to probing into the various dimensions of liminality as they manifest themselves in short-story writing. For reasons of necessary concentration it does not explicitly address short fiction outside the English-speaking world, although the importance of this interdisciplinary dimension is out of the question.

Some literary genres are constitutively close to processes of transition, threshold situations, and questions of liminality. Although certain forms of poetry and drama may also open up liminal perspectives, fiction chiefly comes to mind: children’s and adolescents’ fiction and fiction about ageing, gothic fiction, fantastic and science fiction, as well as travel literature. All of these genres thematize forms of liminality, often by their transgressive plots, ambivalent characters, and transitional settings. Although most of these subgenres of fiction are represented by both the novel and the short story, this book probes into the diverse dimensions of liminality as they specifically manifest themselves in shorter texts. To a higher degree than the novel, the short story can be considered the liminal genre par excellence. The short story occupies a middle ground in many respects as it develops out of, and mediates between, essay and sketch (Garcha; Junker; Stuckey-French), poem and novel (Poe), narration and discourse (Brosch), and elitist and popular culture (March-Russell). The poetics of the short story thus reveals itself as a poetics of liminality.

Some subgenres of the short story particularly further the interconnectedness with liminality. The story of initiation, for example, depicts a liminal stage in human life, the transitory phase between childhood and adulthood, and thereby mediates between anthropology and narratology (Freese, The American Short Story I: Initiation; Bergmann). The short-story cycle or short-story collection (also termed short-story sequence or composite novel) is linked to serialized forms of publication in magazines on the one hand and, on the other, to the cohesion typical of the novel. Gesturing in the direction of both short story and novel, the short-story cycle opens up liminal spaces of continuity and disruption (Nagel).

This study is based on a conference on liminality and the short story held at the University of Würzburg, Germany, from March 7–10, 2013. It is inspired by the dividedness not only of critics but also of contemporary writers about the short story. While Stephen King diagnoses the short story as a kind of English patient, an ailing genre, Michael Chabon suggests a swift recovery and revitalization by a therapy of genre-mixing or genre-hybridity. The host of recent critical studies of the genre (Basseler and Nünning; Bendixen and Nagel; Brosch; Drewery; Hunter; Lohafer, Reading for Storyness; Lohafer and Clarey; March-Russell; Scofield) suggests re- rather than de generation. From a hopefully innovative methodological perspective, this study continues this resuscitation. Several contributions in this volume, including those by Ailsa Cox, Evelyn P. Mayer, and Katherine Orr, address Canadian short fiction; the chapter by Claire Drewery discusses British writing; whereas the other chapters mostly focus on the short story in the United States. Such concentration on American materials in a study that lays claim to wider relevance with regard to short-story writing in English is perhaps justifiable on account of the paradigmatic character of the short story in America where the genre enjoys particular prominence and popularity. The American focus also provides some cohesion to the diversification of functions and aspects of short-story writing displayed by the volume’s contributions. Essential dimensions of short-story writing are addressed by Jochen Achilles, Michael Basseler, Renate Brosch, Drewery, Susan Lohafer, Orr, and Florian Zappe, who focus on functions of narrative structuring. Oliver Scheiding, Alfred Bendixen, and Kasia Boddy are concerned with problematics of arrangement and publication. Historical development is addressed by Ina Bergmann, Carmen Birkle, and also Scheiding. In addition, specific issues in the short story are examined by a number of essays: Drewery, Paul March-Russell, Cox, and Orr chiefly consider gender in their essays; illness and madness are the focus of Susanne Rohr and Birkle; and colonization and ethnicity are scrutinized by Jeff Birkenstein, Glenda R. Carpio, and Mayer. The stories examined may be said to synecdochically represent a wider range of writing. Most of the contributors to this study are well-known experts in the field of short-story research, as exemplified by the impressive number of their relevant and often seminal publications listed in the bibliography at the end of this introduction. Some of the contributors are junior scholars who bring in fresh ideas from their current or recently finished PhD projects on liminality and the short story.

The publication in hand consists, first, of this introduction, which maps out the boundary crossings in American, Canadian, and British writing and provides theoretical groundwork. For the convenience of the interested reader, this introduction is followed by an extensive bibliography. The first section of the bibliography demonstrates that liminality is a well-researched as well as widely applicable concept. The second section of the selected bibliography lists numerous publications on the short story. It becomes apparent that both liminality and the short story are well-researched topics. However, it is also obvious that the concept of liminality has hitherto very rarely been applied to the short story. This study is trying to begin to fill this gap.

The main body of this study consists of eighteen chapters in the subdivisions “Conceptualizations of Liminality,” “Methods of Approach,” “Conditions of Publication,” “Contexts of Writing,” and “Topics of Liminality.” The six chapters compiled in the sections “Conceptualizations of Liminality” and “Methods of Approach” discuss the relevance of liminality and of related concepts from the empirical, cognitive, and neurosciences for the genre of the short story. The three chapters in the section “Conditions of Publication” concentrate on the ideological and economic framework surrounding the publication of short stories in magazines, anthologies, and cycles. Taken together, these nine chapters emphasize theoretical perspectives, methodological relevance, and applicability. They primarily deal with the liminality of the short story. The nine chapters collected under the headings “Contexts of Writing” and “Topics of Liminality” concentrate more on liminality in the short story, the interpretation of groups of stories or individual stories with regard to specific issues.

In its entirety, this study is relevant both for researchers primarily interested in new theoretical perspectives as well as for students of literature interested in the interpretation of major short stories. Both these dimensions take cognizance of the fact that the short story is one of the widest taught genres in English and other literature departments.

2 The Liminality of the Short Story

2.1 Conceptualizations of Liminality

The aesthetic structures that produce the liminality of short fiction provoke specific questions: Is it possible to single out narrative techniques that privilege liminality and indeterminacy? Which strategies produce liminality in the reading experience and reception of short fiction? The first six contributions in this study address such questions. The three chapters of the first section discuss the specific poetics of short-story writing in its interrelations with liminal spheres, as described by Turner, Michel Foucault, Edward Soja, and others, and thus explore conceptualizations of liminality.

Jochen Achilles’s contribution ( chapter two, this volume ), “Modes of Liminality in American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities,” tries to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, Turner’s and Foucault’s both cultural and anthropological concepts of liminality and heterotopology and, on the other, Roman Jakobson’s, Jurij Lotman’s, and Wolfgang Iser’s literature-oriented discussions of the poetic function as a mediation between semantic fields, between the imaginary and the real. Achilles shows that the structural organization of short stories and the normative ambivalences they depict are interconnected. The concept of liminality is capable of mediating between aesthetic form and existential or political content. It also allows for an exploration of both temporal and spatial dimensions. Liminal zones appropriate their own chronological, systematic, or spatial extension and dramatize the contradictory interrelation between heterogeneous systems. Liminality thus ranges far beyond the concept’s original, much more limited use in seminal studies of cultural anthropology by van Gennep and Turner.

Liminal processes take place over time and are also frequently tied to specific environments set off from the surrounding world. Foucault’s discussion of heterotopia highlights functions of liminality, as do related concepts such as Giorgio Agamben’s threshold, Jacques Derrida’s limitrophy, and Soja’s Thirdspace (Agamben; Derrida, The Animal; Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”; Soja, “Thirdspace”). Liminality and heterotopology can thus be considered interrelated chronological and spatial formations, respectively. They structure in- as well as ex clusion, de- as well as re formation, as both Turner and Foucault suggest. The cultural and anthropological concepts of liminality and heterotopia allow for a spatial and temporal interconnectedness, which resembles that of Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetic concept of the chronotope, as defined in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Literary chronotopes fuse temporal as well as spatial dimensions and correspo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Liminality and the Short Story
• Part II The Liminality of the Short Story Conceptualizations of Liminality
• Part II The Liminality of the Short Story Methods of Approach
• Part II The Liminality of the Short Story Conditions of Publication
• Part III Liminality in the Short Story Contexts of Writing
• Part III Liminality in the Short Story Topics of Liminality
• Contributors
• Index