Skip to main content
Department of English
Search
Log in
Navigation
About
Current Office Hours
Diversity Resources
English Library
Faculty Statement Archives
Internal Dept Resources
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
University Writing Program
Video Guides & Worksheets
Visit us on Facebook
Major/Minor in English
Advising
Creative Writing Application
Honors Program
Internships
Literary Magazines
Major Requirements Guide & FAQ
Minor Requirements
Study Abroad
Why Major in English?
MFA in Creative Writing
Admissions
Events, Prizes, and Resources
MFA Program Faculty
Newly Admitted Grad Students
Resources
Ph.D. in Literature
About
Admissions
Newly Admitted Grad Students
PhD Alumni Directory
Resources
Courses & Schedules
People
News & Events
Off the Syllabus Podcast
Recent News
Contests
Contest Winners
Previous Contest Winners
Newsletters
You are here
Home
»
Courses & Schedules
English 156 - Spring, 2012
The Short Story
Class Information
Instructor:
Corin, Lucy
CRN:
93608
Time:
TR 4:40-6:00
Location:
206 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 thirty examples of exquisitely and diversely crafted short stories by Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Edith Wharton, and about 20 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, scenes, 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
Prewriting Exercise: 10%
Class Participation: 15%
Paper #1 (7-9 pgs): 20%
Midterm (objective): 15%
Paper #2 (7-9 pgs): 25%
Final (objective): 15%
Texts
Course Reader
The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
, Shannon Cain