The Short Story Cycle (First Year Seminar)
Edgar Allan Poe established the modern short story as a brief narrative designed to thrill its reader with sensational action and a candid view of the human psyche's murky underside. Poe's multiple legacies (gothic fiction, ghost story, whodunit, medical fantasy, adventure tale) were extended and developed in the nineteenth century, then elevated by modernist writers into the basis for a self-consciously artistic form that blends outward adventure with psychological insight, climax with anti-climax -- while keeping the action within a single, compact frame. The first half of the twentieth-century saw some of the greatest short-story writing of the modern period, vivid with new experiences and alive with stylistic experimentation. In this seminar, we will read stories and story-sequences by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, and Jean Rhys. We begin with detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales) and modernist precursors (Poe and Anton Chekhov); we will end with the resurgence of moral realism after 1950, studying a writer concerned with fundamental questions of good and evil (Flannery O'Connor). Along the way, we will ask what makes memorable stories tick, how story-sequences compare to novels, and why the novel (a genre in which many of our writers were accomplished experts) came in the long run to eclipse short stories in the world of fiction. In addition to addressing the historical and literary questions outlined above, the course is designed to introduce the methods and purposes of literary studies as an academic discipline, to hone your critical thinking skills, and to refine the expression of your thought in both persuasive writing and informal discussion.