Courses

In this course, we will examine short stories as a particularly American form. The short story has been notoriously difficult to define, but one key characteristic of the genre is its presumed compact form alongside its compelling expansiveness. Short stories constantly toggle back and forth between the compressed and the broad. In the United States, the genre of short story has a long history of articulating and imagining an individual or community’s changing and fraught relationship to transnational, national, and local dynamics (represented, for example, nineteenth and early twentieth-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sui Sin Far, Washington Irving, Charles Chestnutt, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Tillie Olsen, José García Villa, and Carlos Bulosan). Today, this catalog of writers can be matched with another list of contemporary North American short story authors featured on our syllabus: Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, Mohsin Hamid, George Saunders, Ted Chiang, Mona Award, Lydia Davis, Vanessa Hua, R. Zamora Linmark, Otesha Moshfegh, and Leanne Simpson. Some of the writers on this list are veterans of the short story form. Others are authors who recently published debut collections. As we work through our reading list, we will attempt to analyze not only individual short stories, but also what marks these books as collections. What might hold these texts together? What disrupts the unifying principles of a collection? And most importantly, what do short stories offer—in terms of representations of American life and culture and its complexity—that other forms do not?