“If it doesn’t work, then I’ll see the world some other way”: Imagined Cityscapes and Imagined Self-narratives in Jennifer Egan’s “Emerald City”

  1. López Sande, Sergio
Revista:
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

ISSN: 1969-6108

ISBN: 979-10-413-0076-1

Ano de publicación: 2024

Páxinas: 21-36

Tipo: Artigo

Outras publicacións en: Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

Resumo

The issue of space is ontologically central to the short story, influencing both its generic individuality and its sense of narrative aesthetics. This contribution approaches Jennifer Egan’s “Emerald City” as a story that exemplifies how the postmodernist tale may treat space, and city spaces in particular, distinctively: on the one hand, owing to its immediate epistemological legacies as late postmodernist writing; and, on the other, owing to its expressive affordances as a short form, conditioning how space can be construed and made to signify within the genre. This twofold response considered, this article argues that Egan’s short story exemplifies the distinctive treatment of space in some late postmodernist short fiction. “Emerald City” does this by constitutively alluding to extratextual narratives and beliefs about space, as does most short fiction with urban or otherwise complex settings, but also by playing with readerly expectation to outline for readers the possibility of narrative closure and finality. Thus, the story contests the double openness of many mid-century short stories—where the genre’s appeal to absence was met with a thematic compromise with disorientation—by turning New York’s cityscapes into an elusive symbol not only of a crumbling American dream, but also of the comforts of a sense of narrative stability that postmodernism had often denied itself.