Short story | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

A short story, also known as a nouvelle, is a piece of prose fiction that can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story has been recurrently problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). H.G. Wells described the purpose of the short story as "The jolly art, of making something very bright and moving; it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read aloud." According to William Faulkner, a short story is character-driven and a writer's job is to "...trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does." Some authors have argued that a short story must have a strict form. Somerset Maugham thought that the short story "must have a definite design, which includes a point of departure, a climax and a point of test; in other words, it must have a plot". Hugh Walpole had a similar view: "A story should be a story; a record of things happening full of incidents, swift movements, unexpected development, leading through suspense to a climax and a satisfying denouement.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (1)

Related concepts (72)

Related courses (3)

Related lectures (30)

DH-412: History and the digital

The course presents a number of computational approaches & tools that can be used to study history. Drawing on case studies from the history of science & technology, the course also offers students th

AR-365: Theory and architectural culture

Le cours offre un résumé de la théorie et la culture architecturales depuis 1789 dans le monde occidentale. Le but est de comprendre des textes dans lesquels l'architecture est définie comme une disci

AR-366: Theory and architectural culture: exercises

Le cours offre une méthode pour discerner et comprendre les idées, les théories et les valeurs culturelles dans des bâtiments et des projets d'architecture.

Short story

Literature

Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, poetry, and including both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, also known as orature much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck (ˈstaɪnbɛk; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters." During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories.

Deconstruction of Superheroes HUM-345: Science and literature D

Delves into the deconstruction of iconic superheroes in comic books, revealing new layers of meaning and symbolism.

Digital Humanities Workflow DH-412: History and the digital

Explores the workflow in Digital Humanities, emphasizing data collection and visualization.

Chord: Search & Routing CS-438: Decentralized systems engineering

Covers the Chord algorithm for search and routing in distributed hash tables.

Sensitivity To Perceived Mutual Understanding In Human-Robot Collaborations

Pierre Dillenbourg, Alexis David Jacq, Ana Paiva

In order to collaborate with humans, robots are often provided with a Theory of Mind (ToM) architecture. Such architectures can be evaluated by humans perception of the robot's adaptations. However, humans sensitivities to these adaptations are not the one expected. In this paper, we introduce an interaction involving a robot with a human who design, element by element, the content of a short story. A second-order ToM reasoning aims at estimating user's perception of robot's intentions. We describe and compare three behaviors that rule the robot's decisions about the content of the story: the robot makes random decisions, the robot makes predictable decisions, and the robot makes adversarial decisions. The random condition involves no ToM, while the two others are involving 2nd-order ToM. We evaluate the ToM model with the ability to predict human decisions and compare the ability of the human to predict the robot given the different implemented behaviors. We then estimate the appreciation of the robot by the human, the visual attention of the human and his perceived mutual understanding with the robot. We found that our implementation of the adversarial behavior degraded the estimated interaction's quality. We link this observation with the lower perceived mutual understanding caused by the behavior. We also found that in this activity of story co-creation, subjects showed preferences for the random behavior.

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018