01 MTH3  CAC  73366  EVANS   CA-A1

This class will explore the history and the development of the short story, from earliest times to the present. We will start with Chaucer, and then move quickly to the nineteenth century as we look to understand what distinguishes the short story from stories that are merely short. Our attention will linger on the genre’s relationship to emergent mass culture—especially to the American periodicals of the late nineteenth-century credited at the time with providing venues for American authors to perfect their craft and enter into the world republic of letters. We will trace competing modes of short story writing, studying the divergent practice of writers like the Frenchman, Guy de Maupassant, and the Russian, Anton Chekhov. We will linger over masterful short story writers of the twentieth century, reading James Joyce’s Dubliner’s in its entirety, as well as stories by J.D. Salinger and Flannery O’Connor. Turning to more contemporary fiction, we will read several stories from Ursula Le Guinn’s recent science fiction collection, The Birthday of the World. Other contemporary short story writers will likely include Edwidge Danticat, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jumpha Lahiri, as we consider the kind of work being done today in short stories that is not being done in other literary forms.

The class will require extensive class participation and three 5-7 page essays, one of which might be an original short story.