Microfiction through anthologies: a critical balance

Abstract

During the last decades, microfiction (or sudden fiction, or flash stories, or short short stories) has become very popular in Hispanic literature. The academic criticism focused on the intrinsic unclassifiability of this peculiar short form, that blends aphorisma, fragment, anecdote, joke, among others. The proliferation of anthologies provides inspiring materials for pondering on the structure of these very short texts The curator, besides choosing the authors and fiction to include in the collection, also has to organize the selected texts into homogeneous sections, therefore establishing groups underlying a theoretical postulation on t he nature of microfiction itself. So every anthology not only provides reading itineraries but also suggests processes of canonization and reveals different critical approaches. In this paper we will analyze a selection of the anthologies of Hispanic microfiction published in the last decades in order to point out if and how microfiction has been more rigidly defined and to what extent it is possible to talk about an Hispanic contemporary “micro-canon”.