Résumés
Ali Smith’s “The Beholder” and Daisy Johnson’s “Starver” unfold around shapeshifting bodies. Here, a girl on hunger strike turns into an eel; there, a patient witnesses as the growth on their chest blooms into a rose shrub. As these bodies vitally assert cross-species connections, the unspectacular accounts of the transformations confirm their humble quality. In exploring this earthly becoming-fauna-&-flora of the body, both stories can be said to constitute “compost narratives” (Haraway): fictions that deconstruct human exceptionalism by acknowledging kinship across species boundaries. This ecological concern with our condition as creatures of compost also provides a new understanding of “shortness” as a generic feature. By organically integrating their readers’ temporality, stories such as “The Beholder” and “Starver” refuse to play by the rules of “the attention economy,” and compete in the great market for our cognitive availability. Instead, they uphold ecological definitions of time and attention, as that which flourishes when we care for the ecosystems we inhabit.
Dans “The Beholder” d’Ali Smith et “Starver” de Daisy Johnson, le récit se déploie autour d’une métamorphose. Ici, une jeune fille entame une grève de la faim qui la transforme en anguille ; là un.e patient.e constate qu’un rosier a pris racine dans sa poitrine. Des deux côtés, le lien inter-spéciste est aussi vital que sa manifestation est humble, dénuée de tout spectaculaire. L’exploration du corps et de son devenir-faune-et-flore fait des deux nouvelles des « récits de compost » (Haraway) : des fictions qui déconstruisent l’exception humaine en reconnaissant des parentés organiques entre espèces. Ce souci écologique suggère également d’autres façons de penser la brièveté, qualité générique controversée de la nouvelle. En s’intégrant de façon organique au temps vécu de leur lecteur, “The Beholder” et “Starver” refusent d’entrer dans l’économie de l’attention, en capitalisant sur les capacités cognitives de ce dernier. Elles envisagent l’attention selon un paradigme écologique, comme une ressource qui ne s’épuise pas mais s’épanouit lorsque nous prenons soin des écosystèmes que nous partageons.
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Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral en décembre 2023.
Plan
Solving the Short Story’s Word Count Conundrum: From an Economy to an Ecology of Shortness
Humble Transformations
Compostist Narratives, Organic Connections
Humility as Ambition: Towards an Ecology of Shortness
Our Heads Lowered
Aperçu du texte
Solving the Short Story’s Word Count Conundrum: From an Economy to an Ecology of Shortness
To the contemporary scholar joining in critical discussions of the short story, Mary Louise Pratt’s seminal 1981 article “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It” provides a particularly fruitful point of entry—less so, perhaps, in keeping the promise of its programmatic title, than in pointing out the specific quandary that the shortness of short fiction still represents for critics. Describing repeated critical attempts at proving that the short story is “something more than a story which is short,” Pratt explains that shortness is both the one undisputed property of short fiction (“inescapably the crucial fact”), and one that has been deemed insufficiently aesthetic, “altogether too quantitative, too material a feature to be given top billing” (179). And indeed, an exploration of the genre’s recent critical history confirms the persistence of its word count conundrum, through protracte...
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Référence papier
Diane Leblond, « Organic Connections and Creatures of Compost: When Humility Reframes the Ambition of Short Fiction », Journal of the Short Story in English, 77 | 2021, 201-222.
Référence électronique
Diane Leblond, « Organic Connections and Creatures of Compost: When Humility Reframes the Ambition of Short Fiction », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 77 | Autumn 2021, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2023, consulté le 02 juin 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3676
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Auteur
In 2016, Diane Leblond completed a PhD under the supervision of Catherine Bernard (University Paris Diderot), entitled “Optics of Fiction.” In her thesis she analysed the visual dispositives of four contemporary British novels. Since then, she has kept exploring the ethics and politics involved in the distribution of the sensible, in contemporary writing and audio-visual media. She has published articles on Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Rupert Thomson, Ali Smith, John Berger, and Jeanette Winterson. Since September 2018 she has been a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lorraine in Metz.
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