The Project Paper

  1. The short story
  1. Define short story

A short story is a form more realistic than the tale and is of modern origin.  The writer usually presents the main events in greater fullness.  Fine writers of  short stories are skilled in rendering a scene (which is a vivid or dramatic moment described in enough detail to create the illusion that the reader is practically there.  The writers try to show rather than simply to tell.  A short story is more than just a sequence of happenings.  A finely wrought short story has the richness and conciseness of an excellent lyric poem.  Spontaneous and natural as the finished story may seem, the writer has written it so artfully that there is meaning in even seemingly casual speeches and apparently trivial details.  Some literary short story tell of an epiphany.  Other short stories tell of a character initiated into experience or maturity. The short story is of more recent origin.

According to the Dictionary Literary Terms written by Dr  Rosli Talif,  a short story is a brief functional NARRATIVE in PROSE that has a more formal structure than the TALE< from which it originates.  Although short stories possess all the attributes of Fiction, such as PLOT, SETTING, CHARACTERIZATION, THEME, TONE, and POINT OF VIEW, what distinguishes it from the other forms of fiction i.e. NOVEL and NOVELLAA is that it is shorter in length and more restricted in scope and complexity.  Short stories generally deal with “people who have some singularity of character.”  As the English short story writer Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) said.  It confines itself  to a

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single major character(although, sometimes it may have more than one major character) at a moment of crisis, either of spirit or of circumstances.  A short story aims to provide a “slice of life story” (sometimes , however, it may also incorporate certain fantastic and fabulous elements), and is generally structured in such a way that it creates a “unified effect.”  Sometimes, as the American short story writer O.Henry (1862-1910) popularized it.  Short stories may have a “surprise ending.”

  1. Define explication and an analysis.

Explication and analysis are two forms of criticism.  An explication is the attempt to analyse a literary work thoroughly by giving full attention to its complexities of form and meaning.  Explication is normally a detailed explanation of the manner in which the language and formal structure of a story  poem., or play work to achieve a unity of form and content.  The term has usually been associated with the kind of analysis practiced in NEW CRITICISM (in America) and PRACTICAL CRITICISM 9in Britain),  which tends to emphasise the ambiguities and complexities in the text and look behind and beyond the denotative meaning of the words.  A good explication brings to the attention of the reader anything meaningful, by examining fully all the symbols, metaphors, and other literary devices used by the author.  

According to the “Introduction to Critical Appreciation”, module from UPM, an explication is a line-by-line or episode-by-episode

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commentary on what is going on in a text (literally, unfolding or spreading out).  It does not deal with the writer’s life or imes, and it is not a paraphrase or rewording.  Rather, it is a commentary revealing your sense of the meaning of the work.

Explication is a method used primarily in the study of fairly short poems or brief extracts from essays, stories, novels, and plays.  It calls attention to the implications of words, the function of rhymes, the shifts in point of view, the development of contrasts, and any other contributions to the meaning.  One will explicate only a paragraph or at  most  a page of the novel, and a speech or two of the play.

What is analyzing?

While explication is used primarily in the study of fairly short poems or brief extracts from essays, stories, novels, and plays, analyzing is a method used in writing about works longer than a page or two.  It is literally, separating into parts in order to better understand the whole.  An analysis of  Hamlet may consider the comic passages, or the reasons for Hamlet’s delay; an analysis of  Death of a Salesman may consider the depiction of  women, or the causes of   Willy Loman’s failure.

An analysis can consider all ir almost all of the story’s parts and therefore the analysis can seem relatively complete.  It is concerned with seeing the relationships between the parts of a work, but also may take note of what is not in the work.  It frequently involves comparing when things are examined for their resemblances to and differences from other things.

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  1. Define a brief biography of 5 major short story writers and their major works.

  1. William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) spent most of his days in Oxford, Mississippi,   where he attended  the University of Mississippi  and where he served as postmaster until angry townspeople ejected him because  they had failed to receive mail.  During  World War I he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force and afterward worked as a feature writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.  Faulkner’s private life was a long struggle to stay solvent:  even after fame came to him, he had to write Hollywood scripts and teach at the University of Virginia to support himself.  The violent comic novel Sanctuary (1931) caused a stir and turned a profit, but critics tend most to admire The Sound and the Fury (1929), a tale partially told through  the eyes of an idiot ; As I Lay Dying (1930); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom (1936); and The Hamlet (1940).  Beginning with Sartoris (1929), Faulkner in his fiction imagines a Mississippi county  named Yoknapatawpha and traces the fortunes of several of its families,  including the aristocratic Compsons and Sartorises and the white-trash, dollar-grabbing Snopeses, from the Civil War to modern times.  His influence on his fellow Southern writers (and others) has been profound.  In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Although we think of Faulkner primarily as a novelist, he wrote nearly a hundred short stories.  Forty-two of the best are available in his Collected Stories(1950).

William Faulkner’s Major works:

  1. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  2. As I Lay Dying (1930)

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  1. Light In August (1932)
  2. Absalom, Absalom (1936)
  3. The Hamlet (1940)
  4.  Beginning with Sartoris (1929)
  5. A  Rose For Emily (1931)
  6. Barn Burning (1939)

  1. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (11898-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, bypassed college to be a cub reporter.  In World War I, as an eighteen-year-old volunteer ambulance driver in Italy, he was wounded in  action.  In 1922 he settled in Paris, then aswarm with writers;  he later recalled that time in  A Moveable Feast (1964).  Hemingway won swift acclaim for his early stories, In Our Time  (1925), and for his first, perhaps finest, novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), portraying a “lost generation” of postwar American drifters in France and  Spain.  For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) depicts life during the Spanish Civil War.  Hemingway  became a celebrity, often photographed as a marlin fisherman or a lion hunter.  A fan of bull-fighting, he wrote two nonfiction books on the subject: Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Dangerous Summer (1985).  After World War II, with his fourth wife, journalist Mary Welsh, he made his home in Cuba , where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea (1952).  The Nobel Prize for literature came to him in 1954.  In 1961, mentally distressed and physically ailing, he shot himself.  Hemingway brought a hard-bitten realism into American fiction.  His heroes live dangerously, by personal codes of honor, courage, and endurance.  Hemingway’s distinctively crisp, unadorned style left American literature permanently changed.

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Ernest Hemingway’s Major Works

  1. A Clean, Well-Light Place  (1933)
  2. A moveable Feast (1964)
  3. In Our Time (1925)
  4. The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  5. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940)
  6. Death in the  Afternoon  (19320
  7. The Dangerous Summer (1985)
  8. The Old Man and The Sea (1952)

(  C )     John Updike

             John Updike , born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932, received his B.A. from Harvard, then went to Oxford to study drawing and fine art.  In the mid- 1950s he worked on the staff of The New Yorker, at times doing errands for the aged James Thurber.  Although  he left the magazine to become a full-time writer, Updike has continued to supply it with memorable stories and searching reviews.  His more than thirty books include essays, art criticism, light verse, and serious poetry.  For  his novel The Centaur (1963) he received a National  Book Award and for Rabbit Is Rich (1982), a Pulitzer prize and an American Book Award.  The Witches if Eastwick (1984) was successfully adapted for a film starring Jack Nicholson.  S. (1988), an interesting later novel, was partly inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  His recent novels include his fourth and final Rabbit Angstorm story, Rabbit at Rest (1990), and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996).  His Collected Poems appeared in 1993.  

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John Updike’s Major Works

  1. A  &  P  (1961)
  2. The Centaur  (1963)
  3. Rabbit  Is Rich  (1982)
  4. The Witches if Eastwick  (1984)
  5. Rabbit at Rest  (1990)
  6. In the Beauty of the Lilies  (1996)

  1. Frank O’Connor

  FrankO’Connor was the pen name that Michael )’Donovan )1903-1966) adopted when he feared that  to be known as a writer would hurt his career in civil service.  He was born in Cork, Ireland’s second city. Desperate poverty forced his parents to take him out of school after he had completed only fourth grade. ...

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