Maintaining academic momentum – The case for studying short stories

Minding the gap

Changing schools, changing teachers, changing friends can turn primary school security into secondary school isolation. Students may become, in Ian McEwan’s words, ‘perfect outsiders … constantly baffled and irritated by the changes they are experiencing.’ The young adult can feel, both in academic work and in life, that they are part of what Frank O’Connor called a ‘submerged population’ – lonely, isolated, out of their depth.

Any conversation with teachers or the swiftest of glances at any school inspection report will confirm that the big issue in the early years of adolescence is often dealing with that period of change and how academic momentum takes a knock between the end of primary education and the beginning of the external examination period. The concern for English teachers, and for learners, is how to maintain the pace and direction of the work so that cultural frames of reference continue to be nourished and expand, whilst ensuring at the same time – and at least as importantly – that individuals are provided with ‘a pervasive and irresistible vocabulary of the imagination’ (Clive James).  They need stories that allow them to come up for air, where there is ‘…something at stake, something important working itself out from sentence to sentence’ (Raymond Carver). Just as there is in their own lives, however elusive and difficult what is happening to them might be to express in words.

According to C.S. Lewis, adolescents need to hear, ‘news from another country we have not yet visited’. If young adults’ sensitivity to texts and their relevance is not to atrophy, they need a wide ranging and challenging experience of what seems to them to be engaging literary and even personal forms of writing. They need to know what effective writing looks like when it finds ways to speak directly and personally to the reader.

Which is where the short story comes in.

How writers see the short story

Jane Gardam suggests that the short story works not just because it’s brief, but because it talks to individuals who might feel that they are outsiders: ‘Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical, and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder’. Novels are the big guns whereas, as James Joyce says, the short story ‘can burn up the chaff … harden the steel without comment or embellishment.’ Short stories, however brief, crackle with expectation. 

Barbara Korte’s definition takes us a step closer to the adolescent who might be adrift in terms of reading, thinking, and making sense of the world: The short story, she writes, ‘is a form congenial to the modern condition. Its emphasis on isolated moments and mere fragments of experience, its art of condensation and ambiguous expression …is …ideal for capturing modern life with its hastiness, inconclusiveness, uncertainties and distrust of traditional beliefs.’ Korte might well have been describing the young adult here, as well as pinning down the specific nature of the short story. 

As English teachers we know that when we expose learners to a text the discussion that follows becomes part of that encounter. When the text works well it becomes a real and important part of the learner’s experience and the way the characters in the text think and react become part of the reader’s understanding and personality. This is probably the simplest of all ways to assess the power of a text, or a film or a TV programme. Does the text or the film do all your thinking for you or is there room for doubt, interpretation and, most of all, discussion? Does it allow for that idea of a conspiracy between writer and reader? 

Keeping the reading experience alive

If we believe that the short story can capture the real lives of learners, how can we ensure that the reading experience remains part of those real lives? How can we make sure that books and stories are kept alive and those conversations with texts are not silenced – or atrophied? 

Up to a point, this already happens naturally. We just need to make sure it does not stop happening. Just as dinosaurs, magic and space travel often captivate younger children, so too can ghost and science fiction stories hypnotise adolescents. For a long time both genres have pulled off this ‘keep reading trick’. They do it by haunting or testing the nerves of the reader just as much as the characters in the stories are haunted or tested. Both are a way to hold on to, or engage with, reading and its potential to absorb and challenge.  Sometimes these stories ease the sudden demands of a text-heavy programme of study expected of young adults in the mid to late teens. Ghost stories and SF can re-vitalise or maybe, can simply offer a lifeline.   

Audrey Niffenegger explains the appeal: ‘Ghost stories are a literature of loneliness and longing …(they)…can be violent, grotesque, thrilling, repulsive…but the quieter, more desperate stories resonate more intensely. They are powered by grief and loss, separation, and finality.’

If ghost stories provide a lifeline for some, science fiction is undoubtedly a way through for others. The reader is given alternative versions of society – to question, understand and debate. What key options do the characters in the story face? Are these stories warnings or descriptions of a future to be wished for? SF is, in broad terms, about how the human species deals with change. Of course, there are stories and novels about alien encounters and fantastic worlds, but at the core of the genre for us is that exploration of the ways our present day world contains the seeds of change and what sort of future those changes might bring about. 

Ghost stories and SF aside, a whole swathe of writers still, as William Trevor said, ‘belong in a no man’s land’. Peter Porter spells it out. Writers of short stories are, ‘strangely orphaned in contemporary literature’. Just like many young adults are strangely orphaned in the education system. Both are stranded. They occupy a place or a time that Frank O’Connor describes as a ‘crossing point’ or a ‘frontier’ – between a state that moves from childhood, into adolescence and to whatever they (and we) hope will be on the other side. 

If we do not get right this change from one state to another, then there simply won’t be a story – at least not the story we hope those we meet in classrooms will experience. By the time they reach A level they will have forgotten the story of how to get to where they wanted to be.

What comes next?

Of course, learning is not linear. It ebbs and flows, a fluid process existing at the threshold of knowing and not knowing. Slipping backwards is part of the process and struggle is a sign of progress rather than failure. Ghost stories and science fiction might be just the sort of stories these learners need to hang on to reading, but they can be a signpost or a portal opening up what is to come. Short stories help in that they are a graspable and engaging way to take learners into areas that were hitherto inaccessible. In particular, they offer an opportunity to open up some key concepts that are to do with recognising how writers manipulate language through their uses of complex patterns of imagery, plot and genre. 

Hemingway’s iceberg theory is the clue. He compares an iceberg with the ways a writer leaves out information: ‘The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water’. In so many short stories, the reader is drawn to try and see those hidden seven-eighths – how they are concealed and what they are concealing. 

Finding the language to unravel these questions becomes the ‘hook’ for the reader. Whose voice do we hear when we read the story? Why does that voice think that what it has to say is important? How does understanding the meaning of descriptors like in medias res, or cataphoric reference or ellipsis nudge us towards a new understanding of how stories work? Where once it might have been ghosts, aliens and magical fantasies that kept reading alive, it might now be something else. Young adults can be transported by the magic of language and ideas, as well as by spine-tingling plot lines.

The stories of our childhood and early adolescence will keep us looking and listening and those stories will find new dimensions when used to develop critical literacy – and the process of evolving a critical language is not just about vocabulary. It is about questioning – interrogating – what lies behind the words, the stories and the values being expressed.

Richard Hoggart would have said that our task in the classroom is to develop civic literacy. The stories that matter are the reader’s stories, and those readers are being taught through the short story how to engage with the multiple voices and complex answers, not just of texts, but in life.

 If you are interested in the ideas in this article you can find more detail in Redefining English for the More Able by Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman. Routledge 2018