Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T12:14:39.902Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 6 - The Short Story in the Age of the Internet

from Part I - Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

Michael J. Collins
Affiliation:
King's College London
Gavin Jones
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access

Summary

The short story is the product of print culture but is finding new ways to thrive in the internet era. This can be through print stories going viral online or, more experimentally, born-digital stories reconfiguring relationships between author, text, and reader. This chapter considers two main subcategories of born-digital short fiction. Microfictions are self-contained flash fictions predicated on absolute verbal economy. Commonly found on Twitter, they call on longer print histories of microfictional experimentation and the francophone journalistic tradition of faits-divers. The second subcategory, microserializations, drip-feeds a narrative across multiple tweets, as in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” Here too the subgenre recalls earlier traditions of nineteenth-century periodical serialization and Japanese cellphone novels (keitai shosetsu). Microserializations thus reintroduce the concept of temporality into the consumption of fiction, reviving readerly anticipation and creator–audience interactivity. Digital culture thus provides exciting new horizons for the always mobile, innately transmedial short story genre.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Andersen, Tore Rye. 2015. “‘Black Box’ in Flux: Locating the Literary Work between Media.” Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook 13.1: 121136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/nl.13.1.121_1.Google Scholar
Andersen, Tore Rye. 2017. “Staggered Transmissions: Twitter and the Return of Serialized Literature,” Convergence 23.1: 3448.Google Scholar
Barnard, Stephen R. 2018. Citizens at the Gates: Twitter, Networked Publics, and the Transformation of American Journalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1962]. “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” in Critical Essays. Trans. Howard, Richard, 184195. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1975 [1973]. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Miller, Richard. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Burgess, Jean and Baym, Nancy K.. 2020. Twitter: A Biography. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Cole, Teju. 2011. “Small Fates,” Berfrois, 14 July. www.berfrois.com/2011/07/teju-cole-fait-divers/.Google Scholar
Cole, Teju. 2011–2013. Small Fates. https://twitter.com/tejucole.Google Scholar
Cole, Teju. 2013. “The Novel After the Novelist,” Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference. Keynote address to the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, 23 August. www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/the-future-of-the-novel/cole-in-australia-keynote-on-the-future-of-the-novel/.Google Scholar
Crown, Sarah. 2012. “Twitter Is a Clunky Way of Delivering Fiction,” Guardian, 26 May. www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/may/25/twitter-feed-clunky-delivery.Google Scholar
D’hoker, Elke. 2018. “Segmentivity, Narrativity and the Short Form: The Twitter Stories of Moody, Egan and Mitchell,” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 8.1-2: 720.Google Scholar
Egan, Jennifer. 2010. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Egan, Jennifer. 2012. “Black Box,” The New Yorker, 28 May. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/black-box-2.Google Scholar
Egan, Jennifer. 2012. “Black Box,” The New Yorker, 4–11 June: 84–97.Google Scholar
Egan, Jennifer. 2022. The Candy House. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Ensslin, Astrid. 2006. “Hypermedia and the Question of Canonicity,” Dichtung-digital 36. www.dichtung-digital.de/2006/01/Ensslin/index.htm.Google Scholar
Fénéon, Félix. 2007 [1906]. Novels in Three Lines. Trans. Sante, Luc. New York: New York Review Books Classics.Google Scholar
Gaiman, Neil and the Twitterverse. 2010. Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry. Ashland, OR: Blackstone Audio.Google Scholar
Gee, Lisa. 2012. “Black Box, by Jennifer Egan,” Independent 2 September. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/black-box-by-jennifer-egan-8100597.html.Google Scholar
Goggin, Gerard and Hamilton, Caroline. 2014. “Narrative Fiction and Mobile Media after the Text-Message Novel,” in The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Farman, Jason, 223237. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hammond, Adam. 2016. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25.1: 6790.Google Scholar
Hjorth, Larissa. 2014. “Stories of the Mobile: Women, Micro-Narratives, and Mobile Novels in Japan,” in The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Farman, Jason, 238248. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Howard, Christian. 2019. “Studying and Preserving the Global Networks of Twitter Literature,” Post45, 17 September. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/09/global-networks-of-twitter-literature/.Google Scholar
Howitt-Dring, H. 2011. “Making Micro Meanings: Reading and Writing Microfiction,” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 1.1: 4758.Google Scholar
Hui, Andrew. 2019. A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ingleton, Pamela. 2012. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitterature? Reading and Theorizing ‘Print’ Technologies in an Age of Social Media,” Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society 2. https://tcjournal.org/vol2/ingleton.Google Scholar
Kirschenbaum, Matthew and Werner, Sarah. 2014. “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 17: 406458.Google Scholar
Kirtley, David Barr. 2012. “Let’s Hope Jennifer Egan’s Twitter Story Heralds the Return of Serial Fiction,” Wired, 24 May. www.wired.com/2012/05/jennifer-egan-black-box-twitter/.Google Scholar
Murray, Simone. 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Rankin, Seija. 2020. “Jennifer Egan on the 10th Anniversary of A Visit from the Goon Squad and How It Changed Her Life.” Entertainment Weekly, n.d. https://ew.com/books/jennifer-egan-visit-from-the-goon-squad-10th-anniversary/.Google Scholar
Rettberg, Scott. 2018. Electronic Literature. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Rudin, Michael. 2011. “From Hemingway to Twitterature: The Short and Shorter of It,” Journal of Electronic Publishing 14.2. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0014.213/--from-hemingway-to-twitterature-the-short-and-shorter-of-it?rgn=main;view=fulltext.Google Scholar
Segar, Emma. 2018. “Curating Conclusions in ‘Among Us’: Collaborative Twitter Fiction and the Implied Author,” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 8.1-2: 2135.Google Scholar
Shapard, Robert. 2012. “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction,” World Literature Today 86.5: 4649.Google Scholar
Thomas, Bronwen. 2014. “140 Characters in Search of a Story: Twitterfiction As an Emerging Narrative Form,” in Analyzing Digital Fiction. Eds. Bell, Alice, Ensslin, Astrid, and Rustad, Hans Kristian, 94108. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thomas, Bronwen. 2020. Literature and Social Media. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treisman, Deborah. 2012. “This Week in Fiction: Jennifer Egan,” New Yorker, 25 May [interview]. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-jennifer-egan.Google Scholar
Very Short Stories.” 2006. Wired, 1 November. www.wired.com/2006/11/very-short-stories/.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×