This article examines the emergence and consolidation of fragmentary composition as a leading structuring principle in 21st-century Uzbek prose, with special attention to the nontraditional novella (qissa). After the homogenizing aesthetics of late socialist realism and the transitional poetics of the 1990s, Uzbek writers have increasingly embraced mosaic, discontinuous, and hybrid arrangements that challenge linearity and monologic narration. Drawing on narratology (Genette, Bal), chronotope theory (Bakhtin), postmodernist poetics (Hutcheon, McHale), and media-aware approaches to digital textuality (Hayles, Ryan), the study maps how fragmented forms register social change, diasporic mobility, memory work, and the pressures of the platformized public sphere. Methodologically, the article combines close reading with contextual literary history and intermedial analysis, using a corpus of contemporary Uzbek novellas published in print and online venues since 2001. The results show that fragmentariness appears as purposeful architecture rather than mere stylistic ornament: it foregrounds ellipsis and gaps to model the epistemic uncertainty of postsoviet life; deploys multiple, shifting focalizations to represent polyphonic social experience; and integrates paratextual and documentary shards—diary entries, chat logs, news flashes—to negotiate truth claims between fiction and reality. The nontraditional qissa thus operates as a laboratory for re-calibrating narrative time, producing polychronic chronotopes where virtual spaces and embodied places collide, and for re-situating the authorial voice amid citation, retranslation, and intertextual memory. The article concludes by arguing that these compositional experiments have already redefined the Uzbek novella’s genre ecology: they support translation and transnational reception, enrich classroom pedagogy of contemporary literature, and open a durable path for integrating oral tradition and digital culture without forfeiting local specificity.

Uzbek prose, qissa, fragmentary composition, chronotope

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