161 Short Fiction in Theory & Practice Volume 4 Number 2 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/fict.4.2.161_1 Neta GordoN Brock University Portability and pedagogy: the bounded shor t stories in Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea abStract Beginning with a discussion of Ian Reid’s concept of the circumtext, as well as Gerard Genette’s idea of the paratext as ‘threshold,’ this article considers the matter of the short story’s potential for portability via an examination of Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea. Marche’s text highlights the tension between reading fiction ‘as fiction’ versus ‘as anthropological data,’ especially as that tension emerges in Canadian postcolonial literary studies about pedagogy. My aim is to examine Marche’s postmodern parody as a paradoxical challenge to the idea of the short-story collection as an ‘open book,’ a challenge that confronts the notion of history as discourse; as I will argue, the multiple histories emerging as sites of exploration in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea includes histories of political violence and struggle, histories of reading and teaching, and histories of genre. The focus of this article is Canadian author Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, published in 2007. Though Marche is primarily known as a regular columnist for Esquire Magazine and The Atlantic, he is also a writer of scholarly non-fiction and fiction. As with his other literary works – including KeywordS Canadian literature paratext parody portability postcolonial pedagogy postmodernity