On Transformation, Imitatio, and the Intertextual Poetics of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern ‘Cover Stories’

In 2021, Terence P. Murphy's contended that the short story is particularly constrained by the readerly expectation for fictional world discreteness and textual self-sufficiency, and thus often presents narrative worlds that readers perceive as semiotically independent. Issue 49 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, poignantly subtitled “Cover Stories”, features thirteen contemporary reinterpretations of canonical tales presented as a “cover” of another. These “cover stories” posit a wide array of creative questions face the claim for the short story's intrinsic self-sufficiency. The present contribution offers a twofold study of these questions: first, it transposes the taxonomy of the musical cover by Magnus et al. (2013) to literary studies, exploring the notion's (in)applicability to the context of narrative fiction; second, it analyses McSweeney's “Cover Stories' as an instance of the challenges and constraints that form can impose on the interpretation of intertextual relationships across media.