In this course we will consider some of the greatest stories in English from all around the world.
We start with one of the longest short stories in the language: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which was described by one reviewer in 1899 as ‘the most hopelessly evil story we have ever read’. James’s powerful tale invites us to consider the short story’s roots in oral narrative and ghost story. It also stretches short out for 115 pages, forcing us to review and perhaps question the limits of the term. Does the shortness of a short story consist in its length, or in some other quality?
Our survey of a century of stories continues with pieces by Kipling and Orwell, who both make use of the compacted power of the form to communicate their complicated ambivalence about the political project of Empire with which they were personally engaged. As a representative of Modernism, Virginia Woolf, too, is closely identified with her time and place, but we will find that her stories aim for a very different effect on the reader. Katherine Mansfield is one of the 20th century’s most accomplished short story writers; we will analyse the moments when characters come most clearly into focus, paying attention to what is left un-said as well as what is explicit. Having started with the longest short story, we end the first week with some of the shortest; while The Turn of the Screw invited us to interrogate shortness, Ernest Hemingway’s in our time vignettes from 1924 force us to analyse what makes a story. We begin week two with two stories that are obsessed with letters, and which therefore invite us to consider the position of the reader. V S Pritchett once said ‘dialogue is my form of poetry’; his virtuoso character studies in the two tales we will read showcase this skill with brilliant comic effect, but also prompt us to ask how well we really can ‘read’ one another. In the final part of the course we turn back to the political potential in short stories. Angela Carter draws on fairy and folk tales, transforming familiar narratives into strange, beautiful and compelling new shapes. Nadine Gordimer writes unforgettably about the experiences of migration, poverty and injustice in South Africa. Like Hemingway half a century earlier, Gordimer forces us to question the boundary between literary fiction and journalism, and sends us away from our reading with a new sense of our place in the world. Our final seminar will consider two stories that draw our attention back again to form, asking questions about where stories begin and end.
We will find that the term ‘short story’ applies to an amazing variety of tales in all kinds of styles, dealing with all sorts of topics in ways that range from the hilarious to the heart-breaking. A selection of this kind is inevitably partial and personal; as well a reading a number of texts that are new to you, students are encouraged to bring along their own favourite short stories. What makes the greatest short stories so great, and which ones speak to you most powerfully?
