Course Definition & Goals


“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


This class in fiction celebrates the shorter rather than the longer narrative—the reading, writing, and interpretive critique of it. Ambrose Bierce will be one of the “unpadded” writers we read with the above quotations in mind; that is, we will read stories as a means of investigating what subjects Ambrose Bierce and assorted other writers cared about and thought they might lose, just as we’ll analyze their narrative styles that often shocked reading publics—both then and now. Primary goals of the course include:

increasing your reading enjoyment of the short story by sophisticating your reading practices and your awareness of how you interpret and assess fiction
exposing you to a variety of fictional authors, genres, styles, and literary movements
enhancing your critical abilities, both orally and in writing, to analyze, interpret and evaluate responses to stories
convincing you that the critical reading of fiction can help in the critical reading of life


Course Texts

Ann Charters, The Story and Its Writer

Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual (available at UW Bookstore)

Course Requirements: weekly class attendance linked with active, vocally thoughtful participation in class discussions, all centered on critical interpretation and analysis of stories; research of secondary criticism; objective quizzes on formal literary elements in short stories, essay exams--final and possible midterm essay exams that you compose out of class, plus objective identification of story quotations and literary terms. Please note that this is not a composition course but rather a course in which you will be expected to articulate oral analyses of stories and write critical, persuasive analyses of stories. Extra credit is not an option for course requirements.