| Introduction to the Modern Short Story (w/CLit 596B) | TTh 11:30-1:20 |
This course will trace the rise of the short story as a coherent genre of modern literature. We will begin by looking at genealogies of the short fictional form: in classical works such as Petronius’ Satyricon and Aesop’s Fables; in medieval and early Renaissance story cycles such as The Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and in European folktale traditions, with an eye towards Vladimir Propp’s monumental Morphology of the Folktale and Italo Calvino’s edition of Italian Folk Tales. We will also consider some immediate precursors to the modern short story by such writers as E. T. A. Hoffman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henry James. Some prior knowledge of these works or authors will be assumed.
A large part of the course will involve working through some classic short stories and collections of stories spanning the twentieth century. We will read across national literatures and we will examine some of the ways in which the short story broaches literary, political, social and philosophical issues. Some attention to the consolidation of the genre, and subsequent challenges to it, will center upon individual stories and coherent collections. Major authors include: Edgar Allen Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Italo Calvino, and Raymond Carver. Further readings will be made available in a Course Pack. We will also touch upon aspects of narrative theory and recent developments in composition, such as so-called Computational Story Generating Algorithms.
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