Narrative and Cultural Archipielagos

A Literary Cartography of Short Story Cycles

Abstract

This paper is focused on the important role that space fills in what we call integrated collections of short stories, a narrative form between the miscellaneous short story book and the novel. Space can be found in two different levels: the theme and the narrative form (Sánchez Carbó, 2012), since this narrative form is related to the so called spatial form in literature (Frank, 1991). Space, as an explicit tool of integration in an integrated collection, can be interpreted as a point of view of identity, this is, as an intersection of social, cultural, political, biographical and/or aesthetic interests of the authors. In Hispanic America we find space as a recurrent element of integration. This recurrence allows the proposal of a literary cartography (Tally, 2012) formed by five different areas (“Imaginary places”, “Internal and external spaces”, “Counties”, “Countries and capital cities”, and “Borders and exiles”). Furthermore, this archipelago can be proposed as a model of spatiality that can show, on the one hand, the tensions and relations between the parts, and on the other, to make visible the cultural diversity of the Hispanic American culture in Literature.