Staging Social and Political Spaces: Living Theatre in Joyce’s “The Dead”

In his study of the modernist short story, Dominic Head argues that: “The problem facing short story critics is to find a way of escaping their own reductive formulae” (21). The critical framework that the subject of “theatricality in the short story” sets is one of several means to escape reductive formulae in short story criticism. Above all, such a critical framework enables the envisioning of a more productively malleable definition of the genre of the short story in relation to other genres. The required definition would potentially reflect the need for flexibility which seems to be recurrently emphasized but rarely satisfied in discussions of the genre of the short story. One example of these discussions is an essay entitled “Destabilizing Frames for Story” in which Ian Reid touches upon the adaptation of the story “Monsieur Seguin’s Goat” in Alphonse Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill into a play entitled L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles). Through this discussion, Reid shows that the text of Daudet’s story “signals its status as a meetingplace for various generic tendencies”