Changing Rooms: how dis/misplacement of domestic articles in short fiction depicts and explores notions of temporality'

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Abstract

Title: Changing Rooms: how dis/misplacement of domestic articles in short fiction depicts and explores notions of temporality

‘In our fully air-conditioned units, your possessions there, forever purified. We are a hive; honeycombed cells holding your collective dust. Each one sings sad lullabies that map your route back…
…Each unit is a harvest and a grave. Wheat and tares together sown. All is safely gathered in, ere the winter sales begin.’ (‘Safely Gathered In’, Schofield 2021)

In my writing practice, I am intrigued by how and why we interact and relate to the domestic objects around us. Presenting familiar articles in unusual and unexpected contexts is a technique often utilised by short fiction writers, where the narrative swings around how the characters and the story’s community may curate these articles, or attempt to fix and define them. These misplaced objects may become either provocations or time capsules, sometimes both, that are open to interpretation. In this presentation I will explore what this interaction might denote in terms of temporality and legacy.
Michael Trussler, in his paper in Contemporary Literature states that ‘short fiction is that form which…grapples with the perplexities of living within the perception of an ongoing temporality.’ (p. 600. 2002) To consider this further, I will also draw on Sam Johnson-Schlee’s elegiac essay Living Rooms (2022), which develops a poetics about belongings functioning as ‘your archive and your legacy,’ (p. 35. 2022) and where a home can become ‘…a storeroom for a dream of a different relationship with the world.’ (p. 28. 2022) My practice-led presentation examines how the short story can be the ideal medium to explore notions of temporality using mis/displacement of domestic articles. I will read an excerpt of my story, ‘Safely Gathered In’, (p. 17. 2021) which explores these ideas via a temporally ambiguous self-storage facility and a museum. In addition, I will take a practitioner’s perspective on how other modernist and contemporary writers have approached this, specifically Carver’s yard sale in 'Why Don't You Dance' (1977), Mansfield's tiny illuminating epiphanies in ‘The Doll's House' (1922) and Onwuemezi’s ‘Dark Neighbourhood’ (2021) which opens with a stocktaking inventory in an existential queue. I will explore how misplaced possessions rupture chronology and create fissures through recontextualization of these items within unfamiliar landscapes and settings.

Conference

ConferenceThe European Network for Short Fiction Research Annual Conference
Abbreviated titleENSFR Annual Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityManchester
Period23/10/2325/10/23
Internet address

Research Groups

  • Fiction Writer's Network

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