BASC70231 - The Art and Ends of Reading: Short Fiction: The Art of Brevity

Course Description

The form of the short story is unique and hard to characterize, being at once, as Flannery O’Connor puts it, “one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression,” and, in the modern period, one of the most difficult of literary forms. It has also been called the genre most suitable to the experience of isolated individuals “astray in an unfamiliar society” (Frank O’Connor), and at the same time the most immediately conducive to “an experience of meaning”—which is to say, the genre most distinctively modern. We will read various theories of and reflections on the short story, including those of Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, and Harold Bloom, among others along with representative and classic stories and novellas, including works Melville, Hemingway, O’Connor, Cheever, and Beckett.

BOOK LIST

1. Cheever, John, The Stories of John Cheever (Vintage) 978-0375724428

2. Hemingway, Ernest, The Hemingway Stories: As featured in the film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on PBS, Scribner 978-1982179465

3. Joyce, James, Dubliners, Text and Criticism, Viking 978-0140247749

4. Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, Penguin Classics Edition 978-0143107606

5. O’Connor, Flannery, The Complete Stories, FSG 978-0374515362

6. Winther, Lothe, and Skei eds., The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, U. of South Carolina 978-1611170450

Notes

Online registration closes Friday, March 15 at 5 pm CT.

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