New Perspectives on the Short Story

Catalog description

What can the short story reveal that longer forms cannot? This introductory course approaches short fiction from multiple historical, cultural, and formal perspectives, examining how writers have used craft techniques (such as compression, omission, point of view, voice, and structure) to represent different ways of seeing the world. While focusing primarily on American and English-language traditions, we will also read influential works in translation and consider how race, gender, class, region, empire, migration, and diaspora reshape both the form and its literary history. Readings will range from oral tales, fables, and nineteenth-century sketches to realism, modernism, postwar experimentation, minimalism, speculative fiction, flash fiction, and contemporary hybrid forms. By placing familiar works alongside stories from underrepresented and transnational traditions, the course invites students to question inherited definitions of the genre and to discover the short story as a continually evolving site of cultural exchange and formal reinvention. Students will practice close reading, comparative analysis, and historically informed interpretation. Assignments will require composing both creative and critical texts.