PANEL SHORT STORY (Coordinator: Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan)
SESSION 1
Pam Houston's "In My Next Life": Towards a Redefinition of the Self in Female-Authored Indian
Autobiography
José Mª Yebra Pertusa (University of Zaragoza)
Email: jyebra@unizar.es
Writing the Good Fight: The Style of Bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories
Ricardo Marín Ruiz (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
Email: Ricardo.Marin@uclm.es
A Storyteller from the Bayou. Introspection and Self-Redemption in Gautreaux´s “Welding with
Children”
José Ramón Ibáñez (University of Almería)
Email: jibanez@ual.es
SESSION 2
Re-writing the American Naturalist Short Story: Annie Proulx's “Fine Just the Way It Is”
Aitor Ibarrola Armendáriz (University of Deusto)
Email: aitor.ibarrola@deusto.es
“So It Goes In The World”. The Politics Of Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks
José Francisco Fernández (University of Almeria)
Email: jffernan@ual.es
SESSION 3 (ROUND TABLE)
Postmodern Oedipal Conflicts: The Short Fiction of Angela Carter, Michèle Roberts, and A.L.
Kennedy
Laura Lojo Rodríguez (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Email: laura.lojo@usc.es
Participants: Laura Lojo Rodríguez (Chair), Ana Losada Pérez. Jorge Sacido Romero (University of
Santiago de Compostela)
SESSION 4 (ROUND TABLE)
Trauma in Short: Narrative Techniques to Articulate Traumatic Memory in Short Stories
Patricia San José Rico (University of Valladolid)
Email: patriciasanjose@fyl.uva.es
Participants: Patricia San José Rico (University of Valladolid) (Chair), Eva Gil Cuder (University of
Sevilla), Samuel Tascón Olmedo (University of Valladolid))
SESSION 5 (ROUND TABLE)
El relato policiaco. Reflexiones sobre su evolución en el tiempo
Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez (University Camilo José Cela)
Email: ecanadasr@gmail.com
Participants: Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez (University Camilo José Cela) (Chair), Margarita Rigal Aragón and Beatriz González Moreno (University Castilla-La Mancha)

ABSTRACTS
Pam Houston's "In My Next Life": Towards a Redefinition of the Self in Female-Authored Indian
Autobiography
José Mª Yebra Pertusa (University of Zaragoza)
According to the postmodernist de-centering process pointed out by Linda Hutcheon more than two decades ago, some marginalised voices have been rescued and fostered in contemporary literature.
This is the case of Pam Houston’s “In My Next Life”, the (auto)biographical story of two women, an
Anglo-American and a Native American, who fall in love. My main concern consists in analysing the discourses this short story delves into, namely Indian autobiography and lesbianism. How does “In
My Next Life” deal with marginal identity? How does it relate to Western (auto)biography, and link this genre with the heroine’s Native American culture? And, why and how does it use Adrienne
Rich’s lesbian continuum? To put it briefly, Houston’s short story constitutes an attempt to resurface the marginal “other”, and reconcile it with tradition, to meet current political needs.
Writing the Good Fight: The Style of Bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories
Ricardo Marín Ruiz (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
The central subject of this paper is the study of the stylistic treatment of bullfighting in
Hemingway´s short stories, taking as a starting point the assumption that some of the features of the narrative pattern of his fiction are connected to his vision of bullfighting. The treatment of this topic would be incomplete, and almost incomprehensible, without regarding first the forging and evolution of his ideas concerning the fiesta; thus, after having shown an overview of how the
American author understood bullfighting, the paper will focus on a brief analysis of the links between the style of the short! stories “The Undefeated” and “The Capital of the World” and
Hemingway´s perception of bullfighting.
Keywords: Hemingway, Spain, bullfighting, style, short story.
A Storyteller from the Bayou. Introspection and Self-Redemption in Gautreaux´s “Welding with
Children”
José Ramón Ibáñez (University of Almería)
Tim Gautreaux (Morgan City, 1947) is the writer of two collections of short stories, Same Place,
Same Things (1996) and Welding with Children (1999), in which he depicts the land, customs, traditions and deep-rooted religious background of his native Louisiana. His fiction follows in the footsteps of such Southern Catholic writers as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. This paper focuses on the homonymous story that opens his second volume and offers a reading which explores the second chance patterns displayed by the fiction of this author. In this analysis, the initial role of
Bruton, father, grandfather and family’s moral buttress, is questioned by Mr. Fordlyson, whose stinging remarks stir his conscience, forcing him to reconsider whether their grandchildren’s misbehaviour and disobedience is primarily a response to his unwed daughters’ moral laxness, or there is someone else to be blamed.
Re-writing the American Naturalist Short Story: Annie Proulx's “Fine Just the Way It Is”
Aitor Ibarrola Armendáriz (University of Deusto)
Annie Proulx's recent collection of short stories, Fine Just the Way It is (2008), reveals many of the features that characterized the short fiction produced by Garland, Harte or Crane in the late 19th century. Set in Wyoming, these stories show the toughness and unpredictability of lives governed by natural forces and dramatic economic conditions. Proulx proves once again to be one of the major masters of short narratives that capture all the cruelty and brutality of life in rural America.
Keywords: literary naturalism, short-story form, Annie Proulx, Wyoming stories, narrative technique, determinism and human worth
“So It Goes In The World”. The Politics Of Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks
José Francisco Fernández (University of Almeria)
The collection of short stories More Pricks than Kicks (1934) is the only volume of conventional short fiction published by Samuel Beckett. Despite presenting a coherent progression of events and

counting on the unifying force of the same protagonist in all the pieces, the volume was received with incomprehension. After Beckett came to be considered as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, with the production of his famous theatre plays and his dense major prose works, this initial collection of stories was thought of as “minor” writing. Recent developments in Beckett
Studies, however, including research into his early years and on the state of Ireland in the 1920s and
1930s, may shed some light on the enigmatic stories of his first period as a writer.
Keywords: Beckett, short story, modern Ireland, politics
Postmodern Oedipal Conflicts: The Short Fiction of Angela Carter, Michèle Roberts, and A.L.
Kennedy
Laura Lojo Rodríguez (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Participants: Laura Lojo Rodríguez (Chair), Ana Losada Pérez. Jorge Sacido Romero (University of
Santiago de Compostela)
At this round table, we want to explore further how the investments which a culture makes on the idea of childhood carry out relevant ideological functions that transform the child figure into a pattern of meaning that encapsulates a set of cultural ideas, attitudes and practices. The child in literature has often been endowed with shifting, and even opposing, characteristics, which invariably mirror social and ideological transformations. In the postmodern period, fiction writers develop the radical reformulation that the version of infantile experience inherited from Romantics and Victorians underwent in the works of their modernist forebears. By focusing on three particular short stories, we will examine the divergent ways of representing what otherwise is a common, central theme: namely, Oedipal conflict. Thus, Ana Losada Pérez will examine Angela Carter’s “The
Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe”, a short story collected in Black Venus (1985) which foregrounds the writer’s relation with his mother and the impact that her death had on his life and writing. Carter’s narrative re-imagines Poe’s early childhood, a life amidst his parents’ theatrical performances, in which “nothing is what it seems” (Carter 1995: 267), truncated by his mother’s premature death shortly after his father had deserted the family. Laura Lojo Rodríguez will be examining Michèle
Robert’s “Charity”, a short piece compiled in her first collection of stories entitled During Mother’s
Absence (1994). Robert’s short piece dramatises a young woman’s recollection of her childhood in an attempt to recover “the maternal body as paradise” (Newman 2004) which, in discursive terms, is achieved by also recovering her own perspective as a child. Finally, Jorge Sacido Romero will focus on A.L. Kennedy’s remarkable exhibition of stylistic finesse, a cruder, more naturalistic presentation of the Oedipal conflict in her short story “A Bad Son” from the collection Indelible Acts
(2002). In this story the normalising outcome of the standard Oedipal dynamics (boy gives up the mother as the object prohibited by the father with whom he identifies) is frustrated, perpetuating filial rivalry and attachment to the mother.
Keywords: short story, postmodernism, L.A.Kennedy, MIchèle Roberts, Angela Carter
Trauma in Short: Narrative Techniques to Articulate Traumatic Memory in Short Stories
Patricia San José Rico (University of Valladolid)
Participants: Patricia San José Rico (University of Valladolid) (Chair), Eva Gil Cuder (University of
Sevilla), Samuel Tascón Olmedo (University of Valladolid))
Ever since the recent raise in awareness produced by events such as the Vietnam war, or more recently, the attacks to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the term trauma has been commonly introduced in the public’s vocabulary and it has been used, or even abused, in a variety of contexts in order to attract sympathy to various causes. Likewise, the proliferation of the socalled trauma writing during the last few decades is indicative of the increasing importance that the issue of trauma is obtaining. Several authors’ especially from ethnic, and/or previously silenced communities, have revisited in their narratives the past traumas constitutive of their communities’ collective identities. In the same manner, and as a response to this avalanche of trauma novels, much attention is being paid to what is now the field of trauma studies. Although the study of trauma in the victim’s psyche started strictly within the field of psychology and psychoanalysis with figures like Pierre Janet of Sigmund Freud among others, it has now become an object of literary study. Consequently, numerous contemporary scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, Anne Whitehead,
Cathy Caruth, Abraham Nicolas and Maria Torok or Laurie Vickroy among many others have treated the representation of trauma in narratives and its effects on the readers. And yet, although much of these discussions have dealt with this representation of trauma in novels, little, in comparison, has been said about trauma in short stories or tales. That fact is what motivated this round table, in

which, through the analysis of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, Ambrose Bierce’s
“Chickamauga” and a selection of stories from Tim O’Brien’s short story composite The Things they
Carried, we intend to show how not only some short stories evolve clearly around the issue of trauma, collective or individual, but also that some of the narrative resources for short stories, short stories cycles or tales can fit perfectly in order to represent some of the most distinguishable characteristics of psychological trauma.
Keywords: Trauma (representation of), short stories, narrative techniques, North-American fiction
El relato policiaco. Reflexiones sobre su evolución en el tiempo
Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez (University Camilo José Cela)
Participants: Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez (University Camilo José Cela) (Chair), Margarita Rigal Aragón and Beatriz González Moreno (University Castilla-La Mancha)
El relato corto policíaco en lengua inglesa ha sufrido una evidente evolución a través del tiempo.
Desde los tiempos de la Inglaterra victoriana hasta nuestros días, tanto la concepción del relato en sí como la figura del detective protagonista así como la forma de contar la historia han sufrido cambios considerables. Edgar Allan Poe y Sir Arthur Conan Doyle son representantes de un relato policíaco pionero y distintivo que sienta las bases para el futuro. Ellos, autores de historias y detectives que, sin duda forman el canon, ponen las bases para el desarrollo del género hacia el futuro. Un futuro, que llegando a finales del siglo XX se torna modernista en contenido y aparentemente más complejo en forma. Un ejemplo de esa diversificación es el escritor americano
Truman Capote que, en los años 70, pretende introducir con su "non-fiction" nuevos elementos innovadores tales como la aparición de un detective real y la participación del autor en la resolución de la trama. La presente mesa redonda pretende hacer un viaje por el relato corto policíaco desde sus inicios intentando predecir y contestar interrogantes sobre el pasado, presente y futuro del género.