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CLT 255: Studies in the Nineteenth
Century Short Story This is a new course, and it began with a problem I wanted to work on for myself. I felt pretty confident in my sense of how the modern short story had developed from Chekhov, say, on to our own time. But what had happened before that-how had we gotten to Chekhov in the first place? The short narratives of 19th century fiction, of the early part of the century in particular, are often very different in form and shape and concern from what we think of as the "short story." They are often elaborately framed, with their kernel presented as a kind of oral performance: a tale told by one character to another. They often deal with the fantastic and unlikely, the improbable, the unbelievable. So how, by the end of the century, did the story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary. What happened to all the fantasy-where did it go? And what is the relation of the "short story" to other kinds of short fiction, like the fairy tale of the German Novelle? Those are some of the questions we'll work at, and to help us we'll read classic critical accounts by Frank O'Connor and Walter Benjamin. But the heart of our work will be reading story after wonderful story, a kind of greatest hits of the genre. Gogol's "Overcoat," Kleist's "Marquise of O," Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," Flaubert's "A Simple Heart," Stevenson's "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," Hoffmann, Maupassant, Hawthorne, Turgenev, Kipling…the list goes on, a mix of individual masterpieces and more extended looks at a few writers. We will read some storytellers who aren't well known in English (Adalbert Stifter, Giovanni Verga), look at the source material of more than a few operas, and even read a bit of Sherlock Holmes. We'll start with a cycle of stories by Goethe, his "Conversations of German Refugees," which is modelled on (though much briefer than!) The Decameron. These are already old-fashioned in their day-based in anecdote and unlikely happenings, and with little attention to the characters' psychology. And we'll end with another cycle, Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, a century-and several narrative worlds-away. The particular writing assignments will depend on the size of the class; expect something between 15-20 pages. |
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