ABSTRACT
In the scholarly discussion around the literary phenomenon for which the editors use the term "short story cycle", two main trends can be identified: on the one hand, there is the formalist school focusing on the textual features, which presumably lend such collections their inherent (and stable) identity, and on the other, a reception-driven strand concerned with how readers construe this impression of stability. The author proposes that one very fundamental, even basic, cognitive ability authors make use of in short story sequences is what Eibl has called the 'induction instinct'. The very existence of short story sequences certainly is evidence that authors expect readers to possess this potential. For it to be activated reliably in ever new and different contexts, however, it must be underpinned by very specific constraining (that is, enabling) cognitive capacities.
