The Pragmatics of Insignificance

What makes a tale worth telling? What makes a text worth reading? When is a detail significant and when extraneous? And how much irrelevant detail can a reader take in his or her stride? This book addresses the question of tellability by looking at texts that raise the question themselves, works by Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Nikolai Gogol. The author examines closely both the works of the three authors and their readers' responses to them, emphasizing the pragmatic predicament of readers confronted with textual material that confounds their sense of import and tempts them to quit reading. She also raises the vexed question of reading for pleasure and profit. The book accounts systematically for why Chekhov's trivia works so well and speculates provocatively about why Gogol's does not. It also aims to fill a major gap in the English-language scholarship on Zoshchenko, most of which concentrates almost exclusively on his stylistic idiosyncrasies. The book locates Zoshchenko's appeal in the iconoclastic structure and content of his miniatures.