From Kinetic to Resonant Regimes : Geometric Differentiation of Prose Poetry against Flash Fiction

Prose poetry (PP) occupies a paradoxical position in literary studies, presenting itself as poetry while lacking the conventional orthographic markers of verse. Although institutional gatekeeping in South Korea stabilizes the genre within canonical "Poetry Series," the structural properties that differentiate prose poetry from structurally similar short prose remain insufficiently specified. To move beyond static, surface-level descriptions and directly examine how meaning unfolds over the course of reading, we model texts as semantic trajectories in a high-dimensional embedding space. Using a scale-matched corpus of 5,182 canonical prose poems and 2,921 flash fiction (FF) texts as a structurally comparable prose genre, we construct a five-dimensional coordinate system—Displacement, Surprisal Volatility, Global Resonance, Curvature, and Spectral Centroid—to quantify the temporal organization of meaning. We find two systematically distinct dynamical configurations: flash fiction exhibits higher displacement, volatility, and curvature, indicating trajectories with stronger localized fluctuations and angular deviation, whereas prose poetry shows elevated global resonance, reflecting stronger long-range self-similarity across sentences. Notably, these differences are not explained by the frequency of semantic change but by the geometric organization of trajectories. Together, these results provide a quantitative framework for distinguishing configurations of short-form prose beyond surface-level orthographic cues.