The Short Story Cycle: A Marginalized Genre for Marginalized Stories. A Genre Critique of Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek

Abstract

The short story cycle is an overlooked genre, often dismissed by critics as a short story collection. This lack of attention paid to the interconnectedness between the short stories within a work diminishes the work as a whole by not acknowledging the value added by the relation between the short stories. In the background presented in this thesis, the classification of Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek is investigated with regards to genre, and an introduction to the short story cycle is given. What I have found is that due to its unusual form, most critics have avoided discussing genre when analyzing Woman Hollering Creek, often just analyzing single short stories in isolation. Moreover, I have also shown that Woman Hollering Creek is not just a collection of short stories, but a short story cycle with unifying traits that invites a holistic reading of how all the stories add meaning to each other. And finally, through my thematic analysis of Woman Hollering Creek as a representation of the short story cycle, I have shown that it is uniquely suited to handle fragmented identity markers, and themes of identity that may resist unification. Through its openness the short story cycle allows for the space needed to portray a multiplicity that is not forced to cohere, thus it gives a more nuanced and realistic representation of the struggle for a Chicana/o identity.