Jay Sankar Basu

Reality, Reader and Short Story: Aesthetics of Ellipsis and Epiphany: Rereading Mansfield and Her Contemporaries Across Science, Psychology and Film Jay Sankar Basu

Accumulation of quantities of upturned paradigms reached a critical point of qualitative transformation at the turn of 19thc. It abrogated linear and causal logic in human existence. New realities of void and fragments redefined text and reading strategy. The short story that descended from Chekhov and formally peaked in Mansfield and her contemporaries hinged on the axis of reality, reader and textuality. The story, in elliptical-snapshot narrative, prods the reader to stake storiness in the artefact. Short story, in taut focus, narrativizes 20th century disjunctions and 19th century overthrow of Newtonian symmetry, Laplacian mappability, Leibnizian compossibility or any other anchor. In this, short story presents an elective affinity with associational film and post-Newtonian science. The range of focus runs across textual story, film, psychology and science with a pivot on Mansfield and a penumbra on her contemporaries eschewing narrative logic. The approach is semiotic and cinematic. The springboard is fiction and film. Its relevance coextends to postmodern drift to void. The book will serve students and academicians, and those in existential spasm of modern living.