Philip Holden: Revised Abstract

The short story has been a significant genre in English and in other languages in Singapore, and as a significant genre it has been a place of many overlapping desires, with passageways connected to a variety of sites of memory. Mapping such connections necessitates a widening from close textual analysis informed by literary theory to a larger series of perspectives that draw on networks of as publishers, scenes of writing, and audiences. The short story is perhaps the most significant Singapore literary genre, but it has periods of dominance and recession. These periods of feast and famine, I think, should alert us to the fact that assembling a coherent literary history of the genre is impossible: its social function has changed, and continues to change, over time. Thinking seriously about the short story in Singapore as a site of memory may also encourage us to ask questions about how many of the assumptions behind scholarship in literary studies are being eroded by new communities of distribution, authorship, and readership.

My paper uses Carolyn Miller’s discussion of genre as social action to examine the short story in English at three moments of dominance in Singapore: its importance in comprador communities in the early twentieth century, its use as a means of subjectification for citizens by the developmental state in the 1970s and 1980s, and its sudden return to popularity in the last few years. Its renewed popularity, I argue, is very different from its role in establishing a national reading public thirty years ago. Short stories circulate within circuits of commodification and consumption through bookstores, social media sites, blogs, and online journals, at times exchanged virtually, at others crystallizing into print objects whose paratextual elements exceed in significance those of the stories themselves. Some stories, notably those in Amanda Lee Koe’s recent prize-winning collection Ministry of Moral Panic, mime these circuits in the experiences of reading they offer, confronting readers with troubling questions about our own intimate and quotidian implication in structures of power.

Yet a more common tendency of recent short stories is to turn their back on the global, or rather to rediscover the global and the cosmopolitan in sites of memory in a modern past which a previous generation of writers found oppressive, particularly in the “heartland” of the Housing & Development Board public housing estates that crowd the island. Such investment in the past, I argue, is not simply nostalgic. Rather, it enables the implicit re-imagining of a teleological narrative of progress. Paradise is in the past, not in the future. The social action that many such stories perform is to recast the narrative of the developmental state not in terms of Romance, but in terms of Tragedy. And postcolonial tragedy, as David Scott  and others have argued, is a powerful pedagogical mode: it asks us to pause, and reflect, and finally to think about a commitment to social justice as the shared potential heritage of all who have come to live in Singapore.