The Art of the Short Story

Catalog description

After reading a story by an older writer, the young James Joyce wrote, “Is this as near as [he] can get to life, I wonder?” One could say that Joyce was describing an aspiration held by many fiction writers: the aspiration to bring one’s unique way of apprehending life to the page rather than relying on formula and convention. Something similar to this striving lay behind Chekhov’s revolt against traditional plot, Woolf’s search for new ways to render the subtleties of consciousness, Stein’s playful forays into poetic abstraction, and Kafka’s experiments with dreamlike narratives. In this course, we will read short stories, old and new, investigating how different writers have tried to take their readers “near to life.” Writers likely to be read include Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, and Virginia Woolf. Though formally a small lecture, this will be a discussion-based course in which every student will be expected to participate in our conversations about the readings. In weekly group conferences, students will share their own writing in a spirit of mutual appreciation and support. Writing and Reading Fiction