The dissertation for my PhD is a composite novel called We Are Everyone You Know. The novel is set in a small town that is neither rural nor suburban, which, like the characters, defies classification. The cast rotates. Main characters become supporting characters in subsequent chapters and vice versa. I employ this strategy so the reader is able to see each character as an individual, that even those who seem to be in the background are living complex lives. The novel explores such themes as poverty, gentrification, the loss of innocence caused by a corrupt world, and the inability of people to realize their identities when the promises of youth turn out to be lies. Each chapter or story is told from either a different point of view or in a different style or genre. While the novel as a whole is grounded around a family and group of friends in a small town, the pieces of the story range in form from simple realism, to modernism, to post-modernism, to surrealism, to meta-fiction. I experiment with genres ranging from crime drama, to disaster survival, to sports comedy, to kung-fu epic, and more. Interspersed between the genre pieces are realist stories of a new lost generation—thirty-somethings who are stuck in permanent adolescence, who work at soul-crushing jobs, and who find neither the shining future that was promised to them in their youth nor the comfortable mediocrity of their parents’ lives. For this project I have been particularly inspired by the works of Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, and Jennifer Egan.

Fourteen short stories, with five interspersed vignettes, describe the lives of gay people in the southwestern United States, centered around a fictional gay country-and-western bar in Dallas and a small town in Oklahoma. Various characters, themes, and trajectories recur in the manner of a short story cycle, as explained in the prefatory Critical Analysis, which focuses on exemplary works of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Yevgeny Kharitonov, and Louise Erdrich.

Ma recherche vise à étudier la nouvelle anglo-américaine par rapport à une forme à laquelle elle est inextricablement liée, le cycle de nouvelles, qui, à mi-chemin entre histoire et roman, est érigé en une série d'histoires interconnectées et qui présente certains éléments récurrents (personnages, lieu, thèmes). La réflexion sur le cycle de nouvelles, considéré comme un genre en tant que tel, donnera la priorité à l’analyse de l’oeuvre d’Alice Munro placée dans une perspective comparative, en relation et en continuité, non seulement avec le travail d’écrivains canadiens "maîtres" du genre, mais aussi avec la tradition du cycle de nouvelles américaine. / My research aims at studying the Nord-American short story in relation to a form to which it is inextricably linked, the short story cycle, which, halfway between history and novel, is set as a series of interconnected stories presenting some recurring elements (characters, place, themes). The reflection on the short story cycle will give priority to the analysis of Alice Munro's work placed in a comparative perspective, in relation and continuity, not only with the work of 'Canadian writers' masters' of the genre, but also with the tradition of the American short story cycle. / Il presente lavoro si propone di analizzare la forma narrativa del ciclo di racconti, mettendone in luce le caratteristiche in relazione all’opera di Alice Munro. Il corpus narrativo di Munro, formato da quattordici raccolte in un arco temporale che copre più di quarant’anni (la prima raccolta, Dance of the Happy Shades esce ne 1968 e l’ultima, Dear Life nel 2012), ben si presta a questo tipo di studio. Nell’ arco della sua prolifica opera Munro ha esplorato le potenzialità della forma breve, rimodulando progressivamente i confini fra i generi, scomponendone le prospettive e gli esiti possibili ora nella direzione della novella modernista (cara a scrittrici come Katherine Mansfield ed Eudora Welty), ora nella creazione di cicli di storie o di serie di racconti interconnessi, destrutturando o risemantizzando la nozione di brevità e di genere letterario. Il lavoro, che si presenta come un case study, si propone un duplice obiettivo: quello di estendere la nozione di ciclo di racconti e di includerla in quella di “politesto” , (ossia quella categoria critica che concepisce l’opera letteraria, la raccolta di racconti ad esempio, come processo aggregativo mettendo in luce tutti quei legami intertestuali e intratestuali che i singoli testi intrattengono fra di loro) e quello di applicare questa categoria all’opera di Alice Munro, ovvero studiare, con gli strumenti della teoria della letteratura e della comparatistica, i rapporti tra i racconti, nella loro natura intra ed intertestuale, e tra le raccolte stesse analizzate sulla base della loro natura politestuale.

The short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre. / text

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

O facto deOs Grão-Capitães: uma sequência de contosde Jorge de Sena pertencerem a um género literário ainda pouco estudado motivou-nos a investigar os elementos que fazem desta coletânea uma sequência de contos. O livro de Sena é, que saibamos, o único em língua portuguesa intitulado como "sequência de contos" pelo seu autor. Com efeito, ambicionamos discutir os pressupostos teóricos do género em questão, como também analisar a matriz estrutural e temática que faz deste volume uma coletânea integrada. O livro de Jorge de Sena utiliza vários elementos estéticos que permitem a sua conceptualização como coletânea de contos integrada. Neste âmbito, estudamos o livro de Sena como paradigma do género sequência de contos e analisamos os elementos de paratextualidade com a imagética carceral e de desolação da sociedade do Estado Novo, que integram os diferentes, contudo interligados, contos num todo orgânico. Deste modo, estudamos como os nove contos que compõem o livro exploram enredos que se complementam e dão à coletânea uma integridade narrativa que só o género "sequência de contos" permite.

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