you developing a theoretical and historically-informed definition of the genre of short story. As with any genre, establishing the bounties between one type of writing and another is an important step to understanding it better. (oral traditions vs. short stories). Develop a definition of short stories and then pull quotes from:

– Charles May “but even when the moralities disappeared supernatural elements, either from religious myth or from folklore- persisted these short fictions even as their focus slowly ” displaced” toward everyday reality by their accommodation to evolving social context”

“motivated by verisimilitude rather than by theme”

– Native American oral tradition

“audiences apprehend the structure of a story through the slightly varied repetitions of incident, respond to the characterizations highlighted by changes in voice volume and pitch or wait in the full silence of a pause”

– Mexican folklore “La Llorana”

-Ernest Hemmingway In Our Time, Indian Camp (explain differences in interpretations)

– Hemingway’s Primitivism and “Indian Camp” by Jeffrey Meyers

“The husband cannot bear this defilement of his wife’s purity, which is far worse than her screams. In an act of elemental nobility, he focuses the evil spirits on himself, associates his wife’s blood with his own death-wound, and punishes himself for the violation of taboo”