ENGLISH 307: Theory and Practice of the American Short Story

Course Description

According to the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the American short story was not part of a transition to the novel but , the one fundamental and self-contained genre in American prose fiction, a parallel, self-contained, and developing tradition if anything more centrally located in the culture than the novel. Why then has short story theory and criticism fared so poorly in relation to that on the novel? We will face this question by exploring the emergence and development of the short story from the early nineteenth century, in authors ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Jhumpa Lahiri, emphasizing critical/theoretical readings, and with a focus on the relation between the short story and the contexts of its appearance (magazines, anthologies, collections, cycles, Creative Writing programs, the Internet, etc)."