ABSTRACT
In Petites formes en prose apres Edison, the French novelist Florence Delay associates short prose forms with the "Nature's short form, lightning", then aligns two striking one-liners spanning some 2600 years. Her preface is itself prefaced by a lightning-quick quip made by Lichtenberg: "A preface could be entitled 'lightning rod'". Delay emphasizes that, when it comes to literary brevity, we can be faced with essential qualities that have nothing to do with word counts. Indeed, something short in literature can be much more than merely shorter than something longer: it can be utterly different on deep rhetorical and stylistic levels engaging the thoughts, feelings, and mental pictures that are provoked in us, as readers, not to mention the sounds that we hear. And the author of short pieces certainly often hopes that his or her words will strike like lightning, though other writers prefer discreet short poetic prose that gently nudges the reader into prolonged musing.
