The Recent American Short Story

Abstract

The Recent American Short Story Abstract This dissertation considers key strands in the recent American short story tradition, contextualizing these in terms of the various American and international traditions they emerge from, and exploring how recent work responds constructively and critically with the canon of the short story. Short stories by Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, and Jim Shepard are examined in light of the long tradition of American laconic literature from Benjamin Franklin to David Mamet and David Milch. Short stories by Sadia Shepard, Yiyun Li, and David Foster Wallace are examined in light of their intertextual relationship to well-known canonical stories by Anton Chekhov, William Trevor, and John Barth. Short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nam Le are examined in light of evolving twenty-first century conceptions of citizenship, literary language, and world literature. Throughout, the continuing contemporary importance of the classic phase of the short story, represented by Leskov, Chekhov, Mansfield, Joyce, and Babel is emphasized, as are the sociological conditions under which the contemporary American short story is produced, published, and read.