English 156 - Fall, 2015

The Short Story

Class Information

Instructor: Li, Yiyun
CRN: 52423
Time: MWF 1:10-2:00
Location: 126 Wellman

Description

The short story is a form that has been repeatedly announced dead or on the verge of dying in recent years, but the stories of Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor will continue nourishing generations of fiction writers, and Alice Munro and William Trevor, two contemporary short story masters, will continue moving their readers with the beauty of brevity. “We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world,” said Nabokov. The goal of this course to study the format and its development in the past century, and to get as close as we can to the writers’ minds to understand how they choose this format to create a new world within limited space.

Grading

50% reading response and class participation
25% mid-term paper
25% final

Texts

The Story and Its Writer Compact: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Ann Charters