A survey for graduate students of major topics in 19th-century American literature seen through the critical lens of the short story. According to the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the short story was "the one fundamental and self-contained genre in American prose fiction," representing a parallel, self-contained, and developing tradition if anything more centrally located in the nation than the novel. The course aims to develop, as far as possible, ways to consider the short story as a distinct genre rather than a warm-up to the novel, and to explore the social and cultural forces that privileged the short story over other forms of prose fiction. We will focus on major short story collections from authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Henry James. Topics germane to the short story include: attention and addiction; strangeness and the gimmick; ephemerality and liminality; scale and minorness; economy and work; networks and paratexts; detection and revelation; theory and metafiction.
5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
A survey for graduate students of major topics in 19th-century American literature seen through the critical lens of the short story. According to the Russian formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, the short story was "the one fundamental and self-contained genre in American prose fiction," representing a parallel, self-contained, and developing tradition if anything more centrally located in the nation than the novel. The course aims to develop, as far as possible, ways to consider the short story as a distinct genre rather than a warm-up to the novel, and to explore the social and cultural forces that privileged the short story over other forms of prose fiction. We will focus on major short story collections from authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Henry James. Topics germane to the short story include: attention and addiction; strangeness and the gimmick; ephemerality and liminality; scale and minorness; economy and work; networks and paratexts; detection and revelation; theory and metafiction.
Offered in Spring 2027 at Stanford University.