American Short Story (NEW)

This course introduces students to the history and development of the American short story since the beginning of the 19th century. Students will learn about the literary movements, such as Romanticism/ Transcendentalism, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, and how to contextualize the assigned readings within their specific historical, cultural, socio-economic, and political contexts. American short stories examine a diverse and complex society, and the writers who produced them explored and recorded salient ideas, conflicts, struggles, tragedies, and ecstasy that humankind experienced. In addition to the stories by major American fiction writers, such as Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Flannery OConnor, Faulkner, etc. students will read short fiction by writers of underrepresented groups, such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Abraham Rodriguez, to appreciate the diversity of emotional and intellectual experiences as well as to understand racial politics and cultural histories in the United States.