14 - Trends and Issues in the Contemporary German-Language Short Story

Summary

THIS VOLUME HAS showcased the breadth and diversity of Germanlanguage short-story writing in the twenty-first century, as well as multiple and varied approaches to reading and analyzing short stories. Individual chapters examine short stories as individual texts, collections, and even cycles, or alternatively through the lens of key themes, theoretical perspectives, or formal considerations. As the chapters show, there are recurring concerns and motifs across the examples of twenty-firstcentury short-story writing considered here: the presentation, but also estrangement, of everydayness; the tension between fragmentation and connection, both within and between individual stories; the productive or suggestive ellipses, loops, and twists that manifest in both plot and narrative; and the depiction of interpersonal encounters as well as the (often uncertain or inconsistent) performance of self and identity; all of these brought to a point by the brevity of the short forms discussed. Despite these commonalities, the underlying principle of the volume is precisely to resist the temptation to propose a “one size fits all,” unifying framework but instead to advocate for diversity, flexibility, and receptiveness in critical readings. There is no such thing as the short story: each short story—each author, each collection, and each form or subgenre—defines its own type and parameters, and as a result critical interpretations must necessarily also define their approach to suit the story in question in a responsive mode that takes its cue from the individual text and its context. The present volume demonstrates a range of such responses, which are offered as examples rather than models, to a selection of contemporary work that is indicative rather than necessarily representative of the current field of short-story writing in German.

The critical endeavor of generating an appropriate theoretical, methodological, or formal approach to a particular story is complicated by the often-decontextualized publishing formats in which short stories appear across a range of outlets, from blogs through magazines to anthologies, offering little foothold for critical frameworks. Researchers also face the wider challenges of approaching any ultracontemporary literary work that has had little or no critical reception to date, let alone material by emerging authors.