15-SU1-OG-22
“This is America”: Contemporary American Short Story in Context
Ernest Hemingway claimed that his best work was a story he wrote in just six words: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' The American literary tradition abounds in the writers who have excelled in the short story form. Washington Irving’s gothic and mythic tales laid the foundations for the development of the genre; Edgar Allan Poe used its unity of effect, conciseness, and precision to study the anxieties and horrors of the 19th century mind; Henry James, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway experimented with and mastered the form to embrace the discontinuities and excitements of modern reality. Contemporary American writers continue to explore the stylistic and discursive capacities of the short form, using it to articulate social, political, psychological as well aesthetic concerns. The goal of this seminar is to introduce students to the most recent reinterpretations and uses of the short story in contemporary American fiction. Our discussions will focus both on the formal aspects and the sociopolitical contexts which inform those narratives. The selected stories will reflect multicultural traditions informing contemporary writing in the US, the role of popular culture and the new media in everyday social and political life, as well as the evolution of literary genres subjected to the pressures of visual and digital culture and social media. Other objectives of the course entail developing skills of critical thinking through literary analysis as well as enhancing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literary and cultural texts.
- Nauczyciel: Paulina Ambroży