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These pieces were written as an exercise in examining how people, with all their idiosyncracies and differences in perception, can experience a single event in massively different ways. The headline for this story is simple. A young man on break from college comes out as gay to his best friend, and when his erotic feelings are unrequited their summer together falls apart. That is the story, but where is the truth? As I see it, the truth as we think of it is unobtainable. There is no one, perfect version of events that satisfactorily explains the hugely different reactions among the four characters that inhabit these stories. There are as many versions of the truth as there are people who experience it. Would you care to read and add another?

The aesthetics of contemporary short fiction have been shaped by its ability to engage with time as a boundless process of becoming. Historically and philosophically, the emergence of the short story as a specific genre may be related to modernist concepts of time and subjectivity. 'Real' time, as it is experienced by the subject, is a flux, in which past and present co-mingle. In Bergsonian terms, an unquantifiable 'duration' 1S contrasted with Newtonian concepts of absolute time as a succession of discrete units. As Hanson has argued, narrative in the short story 1S structured by a seemingly random association of 1mages rather than linear causality. I contextualize the short story genre, historically and culturally, examining texts by George Egerton and Katherine Mansfield before moving on to the main focus of my thesis, which is texts by Alice Munro and Grace Paley. These also present a dynamic reality, within time as a continuum. However, while utilizing modernist techniques, they also subvert them, problematizing concepts of transcendence. The blurring of the boundaries between autobiographical discourse, orality and fiction is used to destabilize notions of a unified subjectivity and of fixed truth. My analysis applies Bakhtinian theories on language and subject formation to investigate this presentation of time as endless self-renewal. I also draw on Genette's narrative theory and introduce Kristevan theory to investigate the speaking subject from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, with particular reference to the gendered subject. The Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope enables the theorization of the space-time nexus as the foundation of generic specificity; I offer a generic chronotope for the short story, which is grounded in the present moment. An examination of the fiction-making process, through a discussion of my own short stories, concludes this discussion of the short story as a form of contact with undefinable reality.

Thesis (M.A..)--Marshall University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages: contains Includes bibliographical references

"Since the public's general attitudes and ideas concerning a professor are influenced to some extent by what they read in the realm of fiction and because there is a belief that the librarian as a fictional character is not truthfully represented at all times, the writer of this paper believed the subject worthy of investigation and chose to examine a segment of literature featuring librarians as characters, with the thought of determining their treatment"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1954." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-55).

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