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This essay argues that Glenway Wescott — an American author widely read in the early twentieth century but virtually unknown to literary scholars today — poses a problem for many of the narratives we tell ourselves about both queer identity and modernist literary history. On the one hand, the wandering, nonlinear plots of much of his fiction run counter to the narratives of urban migration, rural stasis, and ex‐urban return that shape most scholarship on sexual geography. On the other, Wescott's tendency to borrow aesthetic practices from a wide range of literary schools and movements makes it difficult to locate him within the narrative of American literary history. Reading Wescott's writings — particularly those in his short story collection Good‐Bye Wisconsin (1928) — as examples of what the essay terms queer drift, the author argues that Wescott's life and corpus destabilize the narratives we often use to make sense of both modern sexual identity and modernist literary aesthetics. In fact, this is why his work warrants more critical attention than it has traditionally received: it provides us with new ways of thinking about the relationship between queerness, geography, and narrative form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Lesley Nneka Arimah's collection of short stories, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, evokes para-worlds that reveal and contend with the world and its norms. Examining the collection's entwinement of magical, mythical, and animist modes with science, technology, and innovation, the essay shows how Arimah's work creates its own metagenre, which functions as a paranormal frame that disrupts the common sense of existing interpretive frameworks of progress and difference. The paranormal in Arimah's work is a space where the illegible significance of Blackness exists. These para-worlds, the essay contends, are paranormal because they function as parallel, ancillary, and barricading structures that reveal the spatial and temporal continuums that order the world. Viewing the norm as the world-constituting structures instantiated in 1492, the essay contends that Arimah's para-world functions as a continuum to reveal the ever-present structures of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the urban fiction of Jeanne Marni's 1898 Fiacres, a collection of twenty-five stories that first appeared in the daily newspaper LeTemps. The stories are presented in the form of dialogues transcribed by an invisible spectator from within the horse drawn carriages for hire, the fiacres, the fin de siècle taxi cabs. Training her eye on and lending her ear to Belle Époque Paris, Marni registers the conversations of Parisians as they move about the city. In these feminocentric, and by turns humorous or ironic texts, Marni hones an "urban comic" that merges two nineteenth-century figures: the "invisible" flâneuse and the "inaudible" rieuse, or funny woman. Focusing on the intersection of the representation of urban experience and the humorous in Fiacres, this article situates Marni's sound bites within a genealogy of women writers and the city that looks back to Delphine Gay de Girardin's witty chronicles of JulyMonarchy Paris, the "Courrier de Paris" (1836-1848), and ahead to Annie Ernaux's ironic journal of urban selfhood in transit, Journal du dehors (1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Kluge's oeuvre features aesthetic commentary as a process of problematization and investigation. With exemplary case studies of Kluge's films, his literary collections of short stories, his television interviews, and his theory volumes composed with Oskar Negt, this article analyzes not only various forms of questions posed in these genres but also the epistemological dimension of questioning. This perspective reveals howaMarxianmodel ofwriting becomes the point of departure for Kluge'swork on artisticmethod. It demonstrates that his questioning concerns the disclosure of subtexts, contexts, and peripheral texts that otherwise remain unseen. As a form of dual documentation--both scientific and artistic, objective and subjective--aesthetic commentary can be read against contemporary claims that the fictionality of a "postfactual age" replaces reality after the end of the "critical age.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on teaching short-story cycle to teach American literature. Topics discussed include the importance of genre studies in undergraduate education, trans-national literary movements and the use of short-story cycle in a survey class. Other topics include short-story cycle used in teaching about race and ethnicity; and narratives complicated by short-story cycle.

By recounting how Lu Xun 鲁迅 went from studying medicine in Japan to writing for the magazine Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), the preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Outcry , 1923), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, not only presents an origin story of an important author but also contains important clues for understanding modern Chinese literature. This article offers a new reading of that canonical text by focusing on the problem of medium. Synthesizing author biography, media history, and textual analysis, it examines three intermedial references in the preface—the famous lantern slide, the modern periodical, and the recurring notion of outcry. As an autobiographical account, the preface contains narrated events that call for more mediacentered analysis, including the "slide incident" (renamed "screen incident") and Lu Xun's failed experiment with the periodical medium. Reading the preface as an act of narration, this article scrutinizes textual choices such as the confusing word dianying 电影 (film) and the outcry metaphor. The emergence of both modern vernacular literature and Lu Xun as a major literary figure, it is argued, should be historicized in a broader transnational media environment, in which diverse media practices intersected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented highlighting fiction work of Professor Jerome Klinkowitz and also mentions leadership change of Professor David Nordloh.