In this course, we will consider what makes the best stories so intensely powerful. Beginning with some of the shortest of short stories, we will explore experiments in literary form and stylistic compression by Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Nadine Gordimer and Angela Carter.
We start with Ernest Hemingway’s In our time vignettes from 1924, which invite us to begin by asking key questions about the form: what makes something a short story? What qualities of shortness and narrative scope are implied by the term? Is it useful? Reading Hemingway alongside Virginia Woolf, we will place these experimental pieces in the context of literary modernism.
Our survey of a century of stories continues with more traditional narratives by Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen. Both are interested in characters under different kinds of pressure, and draw attention to what happens when language itself becomes a site of conflict, when what is articulated is scarcely more significant than all that is left un-said.
In the final two seminars of the course we will consider the political potential of the short story. 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. Finally, Angela Carter draws on fairy and folk tales, transforming familiar narratives into strange, beautiful and compelling new shapes, to get us to think again about what our stories tell us about ourselves and the world we live in. Looking at her playful postmodernism in the light of other writers who experiment with form, we will return once again to the key question: what makes a great short story?
