Short story by theory

SHORT STORY BY THEORY

If the novel creates the illusion of reality by presenting a literal authenticity to the material facts of the external world, as Ian Watt suggests, the short story attempts to be authentic to the immaterial reality of the inner world of the self in its relation to eternal rather than temporal reality.
If the novel's quest for extensional reality takes place in the social world and the material of its analyses are manners as the indication of one's soul, as Lionel Trilling says, the field of research for the short story is the primitive, antisocial world of the unconscious, and the material of its analysis are not manners, but dreams.
The results of this distinction are that whereas the novel is primarily a social and public form, the short story is mythic and spiritual.
While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophical framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical.
The novel exists to reaffirm the world of 'everyday' reality; the short story exists to 'defamiliarize' the everyday.
Storytelling does not spring from one's confrontation with the everyday world, but rather from one's encounter with the sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity).
Although the short story has often been called America’s unique contribution to the world’s literature, relatively few critics have taken the form seriously.
May’s collection of essays by popular commentators, academic critics, and short story writers attempts to assess the reasons for this neglect and provides significant theoretical directions for a reevaluation of the form.
The essays range from discussions by Poe to comments by John Cheever. Frank O’Connor describes the short story as depicting “an intense awareness of human loneliness,” and Nadine Gordimer suggests that the story is more suitable than the novel in rendering the fragmentary modern experience. 
Eudora Welty sees the story as something “wrapped in an atmosphere” of its own; Randall Jarrell speaks of the mythic basis of the genre.
Elizabeth Bowen and Alberto Moravia discuss thematic and structural distinctions between the novel and the story.
The collection also includes discussions of various types of stories, as satiric and lyric, critical surveys of the development of the modern short story, and the status of the form at the present time.
An excellent annotated bibliography is also included, which describes 135 books and articles on the short story, evaluating their contribution to a unified theory of the form.
Charles E. May is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach.
There has been a general movement away from conventional social and behavioural codes, the sense of a common grammar of experience, and a new concern with the individual units of language.
Hence the 'difficulty' of much postmodernist writing. The characteristic fragmentation of postmodernist discourse is the direct result of a confrontation with language as itself problematic.
The primary question is that of the ability of language to express. In asking -- or expressing -- this question, postmodernist writers have involved themselves in the kind of paradox we night legitimately expect from a 'literature of exhaustion.' (Hanson 141)