This course is open to new students as well as students who have taken the class before.This course is designed to cultivate intellectual curiosity while fostering critical thinking skills through the exploration of short-form literature. Students will read short stories, essays, and poetry, focusing on themes, tone, character, and language. By analyzing various literary forms, students will improve their ability to articulate responses to new material and express their opinions using evidence from the readings. Through guided discussions and reflective writing exercises, students will investigate the perspectives of authors from around the world. The course will provide an opportunity to not only appreciate literature, but also to develop essential skills that are valuable in both academic and real-world contexts.

Everyone has a good stories to tell. How to tell your stories and how to write them will be the focus of this 10 week workshop. Stories are the way we connect to one another, and to the larger world. Together we will explore good stories by reading, writing, and telling them. We will discuss good writing techniques, and examine all the ways that make stories good. At the end of class, all participants will have written at least one good story of her own.

This course examines the development of the American short story across the 19th and 20th centuries, tracing the genre’s formal evolution and its shifting engagement with American cultural life. Beginning with foundational writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, we explore how early practitioners shaped the conventions of short fiction through gothic atmospheres, moral allegory, regional expression, and experiments in narrative voice. Moving into the 20th century, we consider how authors including Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Ernest J. Gaines transformed the genre through modernist innovation, psychological realism, vernacular storytelling, regionalist traditions, and new representations of race, gender, and class. Through close reading, discussion, and analytical writing, students will develop a critical vocabulary for understanding the craft of short fiction and its intersections with historical change—from Reconstruction and urbanization to modernism, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and postwar social transformations. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of how the American short story became a central site for experimenting with narrative form and for articulating the complexities of American life.

We study Lulu Miller’s 2020 novel Why Fish Don’t Exist. The text intertwines various genres and issues within the envelope of an autobiographical account of the author’s personal search for a way to persevere in a fundamentally meaningless world. Beset by a prolonged “crisis of meaning,” Miller explores a variety of issues as she searches for a pathway out of the crisis, somewhat in the manner of earlier texts in the tradition of “existentialist literature,” such as texts by Tugenev, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre, and Camus.