Falling short of reading: intention and innovation in the short story
Streszczenie
Julio Cortázar defines the short story as a genre that creates unpredictable effects on
the reader through its poetical dynamics. While this definition foregrounds the unforeseeable
elements of the genre, Cortázar also emphasizes that the short story operates
in fore-seen parameters. He draws our attention to the role of the reader in a particular
form enabled by the brevity of the genre. In Cortázar’s formulation, the spherity of the
short story posits the shortness as the basic fore-seen parameter of the genre in which
the same spherity creates a possibility of the unforeseen by forcing its parameters. In
2004, thirty five years after the publication of Cortázar’s article, The Oxford Literary
Review published a special issue on The Blind Short Story. The issue aimed to open a new
discussion on the notions of enlightenment and epiphany in the short story, questioning
the theoretical discussions that center on the visual images. Since the brevity of the short
story has been conceived as a device to open gaps starting with the first theoretical attempts
to define the genre in the nineteenth century, the reader of the genre has been
expected to reach a totality from its episodic structure. Thus the reader’s success has
often been considered to depend on his/her visual abilities of foreseeing the plot. Departing
from the tendency to look for truth and inspired by Cortázar’s conceptualization of
the unforeseen effects along with the discussions on „the blind short story”, this article
attempts to understand the experience of reading the genre as ignorance and its readers
as short-sighted detectives.
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