Department of English

Is this a new golden age for the short story? When it went viral in 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” an edgy story about dating, sex, and consent, became the most read short story in the hundred-year history of the New Yorker, generating countless reviews and opinion pieces, podcasts and memes. For many commentators, it was a wake-up call regarding the resurgence of the short story in our time. Today’s cultural and media systems lend themselves to short-form narratives. We have shorter attention spans, communicate in shorter bursts of language, rely more heavily on images than text. The very trends that threaten the long novel represent an opportunity for the short story. In this class we will survey the scene of contemporary short fiction, reading one or two stories a week, including flash fiction, fan fiction, short-form graphic fiction, AI generated stories, and stories by celebrated authors such as Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Sally Rooney, NK Jemison, Ted Chiang, Ben Lerner, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Colson Whitehead, and Diane Williams. We’ll consider the stories in themselves, and in the ways they circulate and stimulate responses through the wider media ecosystem, its trending hashtags, and the machinery of adaptation. 

Required work for the class will consist of four or five brief quizzes on the assigned reading, a short “timeline” assignment in which you reconstruct the history of the publication and reception of one particular short story, and a longer, researched project for which there will be various options including creative writing, a slideshow, a podcast, or a traditional critical essay. There are no prerequisites and no expectation that you have done previous work in literary studies. Nothing assigned as reading for this class will be longer than 20 pages.

Recitations required.