| مستخلص: |
Existing accounts of the relationship between brevity and the literary have been historically permeated with ambiguity. In contemporary culture, fiction and scholarship, brevity and the semantically interrelated notions around it, such as simplicity, attention, or immediacy, have become a growingly contentious object of discussion. This article aims to contribute to existing accounts on brevity by focusing on how late twentieth century and early twenty-first century literature have problematized narrative’s relationship with length. To do so, it first reviews three existing papers on the matter of brevity in narrative: Norman Friedman’s “What Makes a Short Story Short?” (1958), Paul Zumthor’s “Brevity as Form” (1983), and William Nelles’ “Microfiction: What Makes a Very Short Story Very Short?” (2012). Departing from the analysis of these three texts and the demarcation of the tense visions of brevity and its characteristics that they reveal, this article argues that the simultaneous use of brevity-related (intensity, epiphanic closures, condensation, openness) and length-related (density, ergodicity, complexity, diachronicity) features can be attested to in contemporary prose fiction across genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |