“Novel, a, short story padded.”

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Each writer's prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend to limit the kinds of characters, actions, and settings he can honestly care about, since by nature of our mortality we care about what we know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on the safety of the people and things we love.

--John Gardner, The Art of Fiction


“In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I’, of imposing oneself upon other people,
of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a
hostile act.”

--Joan Didion, “Why I Write”


“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax
a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

--Flannery O’Connor
“The Fiction Writer and His Country”

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

This class in short fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it. The quotations above provide insights into course goals and methods: we will read and analyze each story as a means of investigating what subjects seemed conventionally unrepresented to certain writers who felt themselves culturally marginalized and, as Eleanor Roosevelt puts it, unable to tell the truth except in fiction. We will analyze stories in a variety of contexts to understand why the writers cared enough about the topics and themes of those stories to present them fictionally in print, often challenging the status quo and shocking the reading publics in the past as well as the present.

Course requirements include active, vocal, and critically thoughtful in-person participation in all class sessions; critical analysis in writing, via various approaches; a midterm and a final exam.

Required texts include Chartres, The Story and It’s Writer plus distributed stories (for you to download and print), and various UW English Studies databases, including Oxford References Online. We may analyze audiovisual adaptations of some of the stories.

The course syllabus will be distributed and discussed in the first class session and no pre-course add codes are available.