We will read short fiction for every meeting and discuss the readings in class.   Attendance and participation are required. You must read the story of the day before coming to class, and be ready to answer questions about it. (Part of your grade will be based on your readiness to respond in class and to participate in group conversation.)  I will call on people by name in class. There will be three papers to write and two exams (midterm and final). The exams will require recognition of passages from the stories we will have read, the ability not only to match the passage with the title and author, but also to identify the characters, settings, and situations in the quotations. 

This is not a course in the history of the short story, and will not follow a chronological development of the genre, though that will come up in the course of talking about any (and potentially every) story we read. (We are always peripherally interested in the historical context of our stories, in what writers might have intended and readers expected of a story in a particular time and place.)  We will take an eclectic approach to the stories that will include formal ways of analyzing fiction: what are plot, character, point of view, focalization, pacing, free indirect discourse, unreliable narrators, third and first person narration, irony, and such. We will also look at stories as reading experience: what makes us interested, what confuses us, what do we suspect is going to happen, does the story have a payoff, which stories do we like more or less, are we engaged philosophically, or emotionally, does a story feel true in some way?  We will debate meaning: is there a villain, what does the ending signify, is there a moral to the story? 

The range of writers will be wide. Usually the stories will have been originally written in English, some will be in translation. We will try to be inclusive demographically, stylistically, geographically, and chronologically, but the emphasis will certainly be on stories written since the Nineteenth Century (and more on the Twentieth than the Nineteenth). 

We will try to read a story per class, but it will happen (it always does) that discussion or a story will spill over from one class session into the next. We will adjust the reading schedule accordingly. 

There is no textbook for this course. I will post the readings and secondary material on Moodle in the form or URL links, Word files, and PDFs, When there are changes to the schedule, I will announce them in class and send messages to you by way of Moodle. In order to be up to date about changes in the assignments, you need to know what we said in class and to have checked your email.