Serial Fictions: A Collection

This collection of fiction that is not only a compilation of short stories, but a serial collection . That is, the stories are organized into series, and these series placed in a series as well, making up the book. The purpose of this organization is to figure out to what extent the arrangement of stories significantly contributes to the reader\u27s understand of, and engagement with, the particular elements of each story as they are both replicated and modified within and throughout the series. If plot is, as E.M. Forster describes it, the narrative of events with an emphasis on causality, then this arrangement can show how plot can exist in varying forms. Specifically, it can disrupt the cause and effect rationale in favor of a more dynamic associative logic. In this collection, the first series of stories revolves around a set of characters, namely three sisters; the next around a single event, an abduction; and the third around a theme, the individual forging space in the social melee. Traditional story lines can oversimplify the correlative relationship between events--a single story line allows for a single answer--and ignore the complex interactions amongst characters, the stories that contain them, and the consciousness of the reader reading them. In Serial Fictions, aspects of the stories are interchangeable but not identical. The objective, then, is to require a different type of reader interaction than that most often required by the chronological structure; that is, one of participant rather than observer