The short story is alive and well in America, and has been for nearly two centuries. We will read short stories by American authors from the 1830s to the present. We'll pay close attention to each story, learning different ways of approaching, engaging with, and communicating our experience of literature. we'll always go beyond "I liked this part," to questions about why, figuring out together how the author's structural choices impact our experience of a story. Class will be heavily discussion-based--and together, we'll figure out how to ask good questions about our reading and clarify for ourselves and others what we're thinking. But this class will go beyond discussions of individual stories to tell a short story of its own. The story of how the short story has shaped and been shaped by America: its literary traditions and cultural history, from the many oral storytelling traditions and belief strucures that came together to create the unique storytelling tradition in the American South, to the rise of magazines in America, to the state of the short story in this modern post-modern age. We'll throw in some more ancient history too, spending some time on where storytelling comes from in the human experience--what deep human urges and needs it has seemed to fill across cultures and centuries, and why people love it so much. Authors read will include: - The earliest published short stories from Ben Franklin and Washington Irving (think Rip Van Winkle, or Sleepy Hollow) - "Romantic" period writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville - "Realistic" writers like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and Henry James, together with the first "Uncle Remus" stories out of the South - Naturalism, where we'll see Twain again and meet Jack London and Willa Cather - Early Modernism, with Southerners like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor - and John Steinbeck, the defining writer of the American West - Moderns and post-moderns like Carson McCullers, Hemingway, Russell Banks, and John Updike - Special attention to the unique traditions of African-American short story writers like Alice Walker and Jewish writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer - And lastly, contemporary authors like Cynthia Ozick, Tobias Wolff, and Ha Jin Along the way, we'll discuss all these things like romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism - what all these isms bring to the table, and how they've interacted to create the American short story tradition.

Like reading fiction, but don't know how you'd write a good story? Tired of the kinds of nonfiction essays you write for school? In this class, we'll read short stories and creative nonfiction essays by various authors, and try our hands at our own writing, both short fiction and creative nonfiction. There will be class time devoted to writing exercises and experiments, and everyone will have the option to workshop and share their work with the class. There will be reading and writing to be done outside of class.