ABSTRACT
Robert Yeo's seminal 1990 essay in Tenggara is more sophisticated, lamenting the attachment of Singaporean writers of short fiction to realism and a concomitant lack of formal experimentation. Yeo's essay, however, also contains an intriguing hint about the relation of the short story to the social in a footnoted comment that the rise of Singaporean short fiction in the 1980s occurred in parallel with "the English language theatre acquiring its national identity". This chapter argues that thinking of the short story as a form of social action, and thus moving beyond formal analysis to consider networks such as publishers, scenes of writing, and audiences, enables to rethink the social life of a Singaporean genre, and in the process perhaps question some of the doxologies of Singapore literary history. In thinking of the short story as a genre, the chapter draws Carolyn Miller's discussion of genre as social action.
