The Short Form

While my students were taking an exam, I designed a course on the short form. The trick will be to make it a long enough course! Perhaps it should be a mini-course.


First of all, the genres:

Idiom. This is the shortest form of all (above the level of the word). It is a lexicalized combination of words.

Mottos and slogans.

Proverb. The lexicalized sentence.

Glosas. The proverb explained in a slightly longer poem.

Aphorism. The aphorism is the proverb with an author.

Greguería. A humorous aphorism of the type written by Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

Sofisma. A genre similar to the greguería invented by another Spanish poet, Vicente Nuñez.

Haiku. In the Western tradition, a short poem written in imitation of a Japanese genre, or inspired by it in a general sense, like WCW's Wheelbarrow.

Microcuento. The short, short, short short-story.

Tweets?

Epitaphs. Short texts written to be inscribed on tombstones, or written in imitation of such inscriptions.

Minimalist works of other sorts, like the extremely short poems of Aram Saroyan. ("lighght")

Other genres of short songs: cantares, coplas, etc...

The fragment. A short text, that, while it stands alone, could seem to be a part of a lost whole. Or an actual fragment.


So the idea would be to spend a day or a week on each category, with some requiring two to three weeks (proverbs).

The theoretical approaches would begin with the "poetic function" (RJ) and move to cognitive psychology, cultural history, etc... Not every shortish text or poem is an example of the "short form." In some sense brevity itself must come into play in the text.

"Only incorrectly formulated problems have viable solutions." Vicente N.