Engaging Readers Cognitively and Affectively in Flash Fiction

Bartosz Stopel

bartosz.stopel@gmail.com
University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland)

Abstract

This article sets out to explore flash fiction, understood as very short forms of prose narrative and taking it to be a mode of writing that only properly developed in recent decades, although not without prominent antecedents going back through centuries of literary history. It addresses the issues of defining flash fiction, as well as its formal features, outlining their typical structures as well as speculating on how flash fiction may engage readers in its own characteristic ways. I argue that while retaining the basics of narrative requirements, such as representing events and being able to generate mental representations of storyworlds, flash fictions chiefly relies on undernarration and fragmentation, narrating in insufficient detail. This requires readers, despite flash fiction’s brevity, to be constantly cognitively challenged, as well as to experience highly condensed and intense epistemic narrative emotions.


Keywords:

flash fiction, very short narratives, reader response, cognition, emotion, cognitive narratology

References

Arnold, Sandra. Do it in a Flash: an Essay on the History and Definition of Flash Fiction. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://theshortstory.co.uk/do-it-in-a-flash-an-essay-on-the-history-and-definition-of-flash-fiction-by-sandra-arnold. Google Scholar

Baumbach, Sibylle. “The Economy of Attention and the Novel.” In New Ap-proaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, edited by Sibylle Baumbach, and Birgit Neumann, 39–58. London–New York–Shanghai: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_3. Google Scholar

Behm-Steinberg, Hugh. “Taylor Swift.” Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, 28.2 (Summer/Fall 2016). Accessed March 14, 2024. https://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/28.2/2015-barthelme-prize-winner-taylor-swift/. Google Scholar

Botha, Marc. “Microfiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus, 201–220. Cambridge Compan-ions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/ Google Scholar

1017/CCO9781316018866.016 Google Scholar

Flash Fiction America, edited by James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, and John Du-fresne. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2023. Google Scholar

Herman, David. “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking.” In Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Sandra Heinen, and Roy Sommer, 71–87. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2009. https://doi.org/ Google Scholar

1515/9783110222432.71 Google Scholar

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2018. Google Scholar

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Balti-more: Johns Hopkins UP: 1976. Google Scholar

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Computer, vol. 44, no. 3 (2004): 118–130. Google Scholar

Kiosses, Spyros. ”Towards A Poetics of Narrative Brevity: Short Story, Micro-fiction, Flash Fiction.” International Journal on Studies in English Lan-guage and Literature (IJSELL), vol. 9, no. 1 (January 2021): 9–18. https://doi.org/10.20431/2347-3134.0901002. Google Scholar

Labov, William & Joshua Waletzky . “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience.” In Essays on Verbal and Visual Arts, edited by June Helm. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1967. Google Scholar

Lucht, Bente. "Flash Fiction: Literary fast food or a metamodern (sub) genre with potential." In 2nd Human And Social Sciences at the Common Confer-ence, 222–225. 2014. Google Scholar

Porter Abbott, H. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2nd ed.). Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 13–27. Google Scholar

Prince, Gerald. "The Undernarrated and the Overnarrated." Style 57, no. 2 (2023): 131–140. muse.jhu.edu/article/901161. Google Scholar

Rembowska-Płuciennik, Magdalena. “O narracji w drugiej osobie – enak-tywnie.” Teksty drugie, no. 2 (2022): 54–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18318/ Google Scholar

td.2022.2.4. Google Scholar

Roche-Jacques, Shelley. “Flash Fiction as a Distinct Literary Form: Some Thoughts on Time, Space, and Context.” New Writing 21, no. 2 (2024): 171–89. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2023.2293767. Google Scholar

Talmy, Leonard. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge: MIT Press: 2000. Google Scholar

Download


Published
2024-11-30

Cited by

Stopel, B. (2024). Engaging Readers Cognitively and Affectively in Flash Fiction. Transfer. Reception Studies, 9(1), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.16926/trs.2024.09.13

Authors

Bartosz Stopel 
bartosz.stopel@gmail.com
University of Silesia in Katowice Poland

Statistics

Abstract views: 0
PDF downloads: 0


License

Copyright (c) 2024 Transfer. Reception Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


Similar Articles

1 2 3 > >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.