Special Short Story Issue of Narrative: Journal for the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Two years ago at the International Short Story Conference in Toronto, four of my valued colleagues and I delivered papers on a story by Alice Munro, “Passion” (from Runaway), for the opening Plenary Session of the Conference.  Due to the good offices of my longtime friend Susan Lohafer, arrangements were made with James Phelan, editor of the scholarly journal Narrative (not to be confused with the online literary journal of the same name) to publish expanded versions of the five papers, along with theoretical discussions of the short story and dialogues about the short story by the five presenters. The issue includes a long Introduction, which presents a theoretical/historical context for the study of short fiction by all five presenters.

A special issue of Narrative, devoted solely to these papers and discussions, has now been published and is available from the Ohio State University Press in Columbus, Ohio.  (www.ohiostatepress.org)  The contents of the issue are also available in PDF format from Project Muse, if you have access to this service.

In case you might be interestested, I am posting the table of contents of the special issue and bios of the participants below.  As a special, sad, note,  I call your attention to the fact that the issue is dedicated to my friend and colleague Per Winther, who died so suddenly and unexpectedly recently from cancer.

Narrative

Volume 20, Number 2, May 2012

Part One

Preface --pp. 133-134--Susan Lohafer

Introduction --pp. 135-170

Per Winther, Michael Trussler, Michael Toolan, Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer

 Summary of Alice Munro’s “Passion” --p. 171--Susan Lohafer

Part Two

The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s “Passion” --pp. 172-182

Charles E. May

Pockets of Nothingness: “Metaphysical Solitude” in Alice Munro’s “Passion” --pp. 183-197

Michael Trussler

Munro’s Handling of Description, Focalization, and Voice in “Passion” --pp. 198-209

Per Winther

 Engagement via Emotional Heightening in “Passion”: On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-Immersive Passages in Short Fiction- pp. 210-225

Michael Toolan

The Stories of “Passion”: An Empirical Study --pp. 226-238

Susan Lohafer

Part Three

Dialogues --pp. 239-253

Per Winther, Michael Trussler, Michael Toolan, Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer

Bios of the Five Participants

Per Winther  

Until his retirement in August 2010, Per Winther was for many years Professor of American and Canadian Literature at the University of Oslo, with the Anglo-American short story as a major critical and theoretical interest. His publications include The Art of John Gardner: Instruction and Exploration and, co-edited with Jakob Lothe and Hans H. Skei, The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis and, with the same co-editors, Less Is More: Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. He is a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, researching leading Canadian short story writers: Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Rohinton Mistry.

Michael Trussler  

Michael Trussler has published literary criticism, poetry and short fiction. Encounters (short fiction) won the City of Regina and Book of the Year Award from the Saskatchewan Book Awards in 2006. Accidental Animals (poetry) was short-listed for the same awards in 2007. A Homemade Life, an experimental Chapbook of text and photographs, was published by JackPine Press in 2009. He teaches English at the University of Regina.

Michael Toolan  

Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he convenes the MA programme in Literary Linguistics and is also editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics. His books include Language in Literature andNarrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction and most recently, Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach.

Charles E. May  

Charles E. May is professor emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction and The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice, and editor of Short Story Theories, New Short Story Theories, Fiction’s Many Words, The Twentieth Century European Short Story, and Flannery O’Connor: Critical Insights. His edited collection, Alice Munro: Critical Insights, will be released in 2012. He has published over 300 articles and reviews, mostly on the short story, in a variety of journals, books, newspapers, and reference works. He maintains a blog entitled Reading the Short Story at may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com

Susan Lohafer  

Susan Lohafer has taught in both the American Literature area and the MFA Program in Nonfiction at The University of Iowa. She is the author of Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story, as well as the co-edited collection Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Her essays on short fiction theory have appeared in various journals and collections, and she has published short stories in The Southern Review,The Antioch Review, and elsewhere.