Mythology, Ideology and the Contemporary American Short Story Cycle

The present study proposes that there is an intrinsic relationship between the contemporary American short story cycle and the myth and ideology of the United States. I argue that the contemporary form of the story cycle has become the genre of choice for certain authors whose work explicitly challenges the dominant ideological discourses of Euroamerica and its underpinning mythologies. The five authors and the texts I discuss are Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried, Julia Alvarez and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Gerald Vizenor and Landfill Meditation, Sherman Alexie and Ten Little Indians, and Thomas King and Green Grass, Running Water. In the thesis I address the interrelationship between ideology and mythology and this is the foundation for my examination of the way that these five disparate writers each uses the story cycle in his or her own distinctive way to challenge a dominant ideology and the mythology that underpins it.