The Short Story: A Non-Definition

Abstract

<p>The short story is defined, in this thesis, in terms of what it does rather than what it is. The need to transcend the limitations of brevity determines that the primary quality of the form is the necessity of generating a superior quality of response in the reader. Identifying this primary quality allows the critic a focus which enables him to examine the genre in terms of textual strategies specifically designed to generate reader response. This critical perspective is open-ended and non-deterministic, and thus frees short fiction criticism from its previously prescriptive and proscriptive tendencies, which is why the definition offered here is better termed a "non-definition".</p>