Toward a pragmatic analysis of short short stories: An investigation based on five Taiwanese readers’ interpretations of six-word stories

• Main Authors: Huei-Ting Jhan, 詹惠婷
• Other Authors: Ming-Yu Tseng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y6j3mu

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 105 === ABSTRACT Short short stories in English have become prevalent since the 1980s; there have been some anthologies of short short stories. More and more attention has been paid to this relatively new form of narratives. However, there remain some issues such as its definition and settled word count. Besides, whether short short stories qualify as novels sparks split opinions among scholars. As such, the existing literature primarily focuses on whether they can be deemed to be an official literary form. Most related scholarship is addressed from the perspective of either scholars or writers. Yet, how readers construe them has been rarely discussed. Adopting a pragmatic approach, this present thesis aims to probe into readers’ interpretations when they read English six-word stories and intends to propose a hypothesis that when readers construe six-word stories, they deploy a mechanism which can be explained by two key pragmatic theories, Pragmatic Act Theory and Relevance Theory, be they conscious of that or not. Based on five participants’ feedback collected through a qualitative online questionnaire, this thesis investigates how the readers constructed their story worlds when reading five six-word story entries going viral on the Internet. Based on Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory (2001) and Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory (2004), this study focuses on three main aspects: (a) how readers construe the six-word stories, (b) whether readers play the role of characters and (c) in what ways readers play the given role of directors, suggested by the researcher. The study presents how readers’ old information in the encyclopedia interact with the new information coming from the texts, and how they cooperate with the authors to construct the fictional worlds in their mind. Besides, the study proposes that Pragmatic Act Theory and Relevance Theory complement each other in explaining the cognitive mechanism readers employ when reading. This not only complements the notion of reading as a pragmatic act but sheds light on how old information stored in readers’ memory pools can be evoked and enriched. We expand the role of readers as actors, arguing that in our research, actors can be characters and directors as well. The present thesis provides a preliminary analysis of six-word stories and elaborate on the possible interaction between readers and authors.