The Short Story and Intertextuality: Fictional Discreteness, Textual Self-Sufficiency and the Concept of the Uncanny Resemblance

On 7 January 2018, Francine Prose posted a message in which she urged her Facebook followers to compare what she saw as the alarming similarities between Sadia Shepard's New Yorker fiction "Foreign Returned" (2017) and the earlier New Yorker story "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" (1963) by Mavis Gallant. In doing so, Prose set off a critical controversy over the issues of intertextual borrowing. This paper seeks to create a framework for understanding this controversy. When reading a short story, the reader's interpretive default assumptions are those of fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency. Fictional world discreteness refers to the idea that the reader's default experience of reading implies an unmediated immersion within a single fictional world. Textual self-sufficiency refers to the idea that in order to understand a literary text, it is necessary to read only that text. In this way, uncanny resemblances - surprising reconfigurations in a target text of a meaningful element of the source text - are marked, indicating the suspension of both fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency.