01 MTH2 CAC 12137 SPELLMEYER MU-115
With the rise of mass-market magazines catering to busy working people, short stories started in the Nineteenth Century as chapters taken from a longer work--a novel or novella. Very quickly, though, they became a genre of their own. And now this accidental genre has become the quintessentially modern form—the literary art of the “turning point”--presenting a world in which a single day or even a single hour can completely change your life. As we’ll see, the short story tells us how to deal with accelerating social change by paying close attention to the moment. And in this introductory course, we’ll pay close attention every week to two of the best stories ever written, starting with classics by Chopin, Gilman, Chekhov, Cather, Joyce, Mansfield, Hemingway, Baldwin, O’Connor, Borges, and Camus, and ending with brilliant contemporary work by Lahiri, Enriquez, Nguyen, Berlin, Rooney, Lispector, and Valdez-Quade.
Requirements include a short paper, a longer paper, a journal, and a final exam.