Instr:                  Jane Nardin, Professor
Office:               CRT 494,   229-6402
e-mail:                jbnardin@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                    MWF  8:30   CRT 466
 

Course Description
 
READINGS:
R.V. Cassill, ed:  The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
Diana Hacker, A Writer’s Reference

DESCRIPTION:
The novel and the short story are both classified as forms of “prose fiction,” and most people think that they are differentiated from one another only by their length: novels are “stretched out” short stories; short stories are novels that have been “shrunk in the wash.” But it’s not really that simple.  Unlike the novelist, the writer of short stories cannot build up a complex social world in a leisurely manner or allow the work’s meanings to emerge slowly through a series of elaborate parallels between a main plot and several subplots. The short story writer must convey meanings through the use of techniques which take up relatively little space, such as patterns of imagery or descriptive details that are heavily freighted with symbolic significance. In these respects, short stories may  be closer to lyric poems than to novels. In addition, the plots of short stories differ strikingly from those of novels: because tension must build quickly and be quickly resolved, the plots of short stories often explode in violence. These features of the short story may make it a more suitable vehicle than the novel for representing the experiences of people who are unable to control, or even to understand, the circumstances of their own lives.

In this course, we will read a selection of great short stories written in the United States, in Britain, in the British Empire, and in Britain’s former colonies, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We’ll be asking several questions about them. What sort of people write short stories? What sort of people do they write about?  What sorts of situations and ideas tend to recur in short stories? Why did the short story reach a state of artistic perfection in America many decades before it did so in Britain? And, finally, what artistic techniques characterize the short story as a fictional form? As we answer  these questions, we will be improving our skills as literary critics.