English 156 - Spring, 2011

The Short Story

Class Information

Instructor: Corin, Lucy
CRN: 32383
Time: MWF 12:10-1:00
Location: 6 Olson

Description

What separates the short story from other prose forms is its precision and concision: not a word out of place, not a moment that isn’t conspiring to make experience meaningful. In this course we’ll study examples of exquisitely and diversely crafted short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Edith Wharton, Donald Barthelme, and right about 15 or so other authors. In the spirit of a genre that thrives on precision, we’ll dissect these specimens in terms of the relationship between form and content. A story means what it can mean and feels the way it can feel because of the patterning of ideas and the shifting of rhythms of prose that result from the delicate and precise arrangement of characters, settings, narrative perspective, tense, scenemaking, and so on, elements that are usually so roughly defined that they only begin to describe what is actually going on in a story. The essays and exercises in this course will ask you, in various combinations, to extract aspects of a story’s form using both traditional and invented methods of articulation, to use that form in a writing exercise, and then to use what you learned in that exercise to lead you to a fresh and complex analysis of the original text. Ultimately, when we examine stories in this way we’re asking how it is that an experience of reading could have come from a series of words on a page, what it is about these words, arranged in this way, that might have created what we experienced as meaning.

Grading

Two papers, two (objective) exams, class participation including in-class writing and thinking exercises

Texts

Course Reader