Tales in the Time of Novellas

Abstract

While novels seek to deploy and develop details about imagined landscapes that amount to a parallel universe, short stories rely on immediate context, on the unsaid to give meaning to what is said. The need for context in short stories has survived the transition from spoken word to written page and places new demands on the part of writers to fill in the storyteller’s role. In this way, while short stories may indeed appear to be novels without padding, stripped-down to the core, it is more constructive to consider short stories as a distinct literary genre whose hallmark is rapid exposition and frugal expression. For Latin American short stories, in particular, the narratives incorporate folkloric anthropomorphism intertwined with a theory of le mot juste to construct a literature out of an oral tradition.