Thursday, November 8, 2012
collection of stories vs novel
When we first started reading Drown, I was a little confused on why the work just cannot be considered a novel but rather a collection of stories. More towards the end, I understood a little more but not entirely. I don't know that I would call the structure much different from that of Love Medicine. In both works, each chapter has a different subject and often a different narrator. In both, the chapters are not chronological but more randomly presented. In both, there is some disjunction from this structure. I was hoping this question might be addressed in class but since it was not I decided to take to the blog. I'm wondering what structurally is so different between these two works that one is deemed a novel while the other is just considered a collection of stories. What defines a novel as opposed to a collection of stories?
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Laura,
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great question and I, too, was hoping we could get to it in class and I'm sorry we ran out of time. First, we can look at the collection "marketed" by the publishers as a collection of short stories. And, as we discussed in class on Tuesday, several of the stories were published independently in literary magazines before the collection saw print. But so were some of Erdrich's stories that later became chapters in Love Medicine.
One other way to begin to answer this question may be to ask ourselves how we define a novel and why this collection of stories may not have the unity (of plot, point of view, character development, etc.) necessary to call it a novel. What makes "House on Mango Street" a novel? And why is "Drown" not a novel?
Are Cisneros and Diaz, in a sense, defying the conventions of genre (as in traditional definitions of short story and novel) as defined by mainstream American literature?
One thing we can connect to previous texts (earlier in the semester) is the move away from autobiography. Remember Undistinguished Americans? Although the autobiographical element is there, these are carefully-crafted stories.
Let's hear it from other people.