Textual Schema in the Formation of a New Version of “Novel-in-Stories” Using a Cognitive Poetic Approach (Analyzing a Work by Ebrahim Golestan)

Document Type : Research Article

Author

• Leila Sadeghi

10.22067/jls.v46i4.15794

Abstract

Novel-in-stories which came into life around 1914 in western literary tradition has been considered a new genre in which different short stories are connected in a number ways. It has assumed different names and has been classified differently because of the various types of uniting tools used for creating the linked stories. In Iran, although Ebrahim Golestan’s first linked stories took the first step in 1969, his second short story collection went beyond the classification and created a new sub-genre called macrofiction. This paper is going to show what macrofiction is and how it can be formulated. According to this study, macrofiction is a sub-genre of novel-in-stories in which a similar schema in a number of short stories is transferred from the paratext. Consequently, the schema of one space as input 1 projects its features to the elements of another space as input 2. The short stories of a collection have a schematic string for blending and uniting a number of totally different stories. As a final point, macrofiction is made by textual schema refreshment and connects the stories in a coherent way.

Keywords

• Macrofiction
• novel-in-story
• paratext
• schema
• Ebrahim Golestan

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