“Polished Gem or Literary Fast Food”? Mastering the Minimum: North American Short Stories from Poe to the Present

Produced in North America since the 19^th century, this genre has been characterized as condensed, concise, and thematically coherent prose narrative created by various authors from diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds. This course offers students an introduction to this distinct multilayered and extremely popular genre: It will examine the development from its beginnings as short prose narrative in the eighteenth century via the “classic” short story to the digital age, featuring narrative trends such as Twitterature, and inviting students to create their own writing. Students will analyze classic short stories in terms of their narrative economy, heterogeneous historical-cultural contexts, and how these stories perform cultural concepts such as race/ethnicity, class, gender/sexual orientation, age, species, and related discourses of power, resistance, and liberation.