VIII Congreso Internacional de Minificcion

The main objective of the VIII Congreso Internacional de Minificción will be to explore the “short short story” (a minimalist form of fiction also referred to as “micro fiction”, “flash fiction”, “sudden fiction”, or “four minute fiction” in the United States) from a theoretical, critical, and creative perspective. Micro fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category. Theorists, critics, and writers of micro fiction will gather to discuss this interesting and innovative genre, which enjoys enormous prestige in the Spanish-speaking world. In Latin America micro fiction has been practiced by writers of the caliber of Jorge Luis Borges, Virgilio Piñera, Julio Cortázar, Juan José Arreola, Augusto Monterroso, Marcos Ricardo Denevi, and Luisa Valenzuela, among others. In Spain, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ana María Matute, Max Aub, Ignacio Aldecoa, Antonio Fernández Molina, Javier Tomeo, Luis Mateo Díez, José María Merino, Julia Otxoa, are some of the key names associated with the genre. In the last few decades, the genre has in popularity, and has also developed an increasing audience in the United States and Canada. In amazon.com alone there are over 3,700 books with the word “flash fiction” on its cover and 114 that use the word “micro fiction”. There is also a proliferation of anthologies online, blogs, literary contests, and resources for writers and readers of very short fiction. Oprah Winfrey recommended Micr-O Fiction for summer reading: “They're short (and we mean short), intense (imagine a novel crossed with a haiku), and mesmerizing (whether they're illuminating a single moment or a whole life). O challenged eight provocative writers to tell us a story in 300 words or less. The result: eight little beauties that leave a wake of wonder and wondering. So read, and then reread. Bet you can't read just one....” (A.M. Homes, http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Micro-Fiction-Short-Stories-from-Famous-Writers#ixzz2aXtOyMNQ). The genre, originally conceived as a Latin American phenomenon, has permeated other literary markets and expanded it readership world-wide. Recent scholarship suggests that some of the world´s most groundbreaking intellectual, political, philosophical and creative works have circulated as short inventions. Take for instance Karl Marx´s “Communist Manifesto”, Walter Benjamin´s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Ludwig Wittgenstein´s Philosophical Investigations, or Augusto Monterroso´s “El Dinosaurio” (“The Dinosaur”). Often credited with being one of the world’s shortest stories (the entire text reads “Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.” (“When [s]he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”), Monterroso’s micro story has perhaps produced more versions, inversions, variations, and parodies than any other short story. Lauro Zavala has gathered the prolific scholarship and creative writing that “El dinosaurio” has triggered in an homage volume dedicated to the Guatemalan writer. In recent times, literary theorists and critics have generated a vast bibliography that parallels the genre’s boom in fiction and non-fiction forms. Nevertheless, theoretical and terminological issues await clarification, definition, and expansion in light of the new cultural products that fiction writers, essayists, film makers, and dramatists are creating in the 21st century. Thus, the VIII Congreso Internacional de Microficción will focus on the following specific theoretical issues in the humanities: 1. The generic specificity of short-short fiction and its distinctive features. 2. Recent manifestations of micro fiction across different forms, genres, and media: micro short stories, micro theater, cinematic shorts and documentaries, and short form essays, among others. 3. The literary history of the genre, and the points of contact between contemporary forms and medieval proverbios (proverbs) and ejemplos (examples). 4. Analysis of contemporary (20th-21st-Century) works and authors produced in Spanish and in Spanish America. 5. Analysis of micro fictions produced in English. 6. Intertextual practices in micro fiction. 7. Interrelations between literary and visual practices such as visual poetry, and contributions from film, music, the comic strip, and the plastic arts.