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The American short story, a „national art form" according to Frank O'Connor, is over 200 years old. We shall look at the last 60 of those - at realist and surrealist, minimalist and postmodernist, funny and tragic tales written after World War II. Starting with Shirley Jackson's eerie parable "The Lottery", which had attracted the most readers' letters in the history of "The New Yorker", we shall proceed to Nabokov's and Roth's humorous as well as Ozick's deeply disturbing reflections on the war. Then we'll switch to completely different topics: family and psychology, madness and murder, sexuality and AIDS, American gay, black, Asian, Jewish and middle-class identity... Stories ranging from naturalistic to highly experimental offer a wide range of styles and perspectives; we will read Bradbury, Baldwin, Bellow, Cheever, Carver, Cunningham, Le Guin, Malamud, Munro, Oates, O'Brian, O'Connor, Wolff - and some very recent writing (2008-2009) in the final sessions.
Please buy Oates' collection "The Oxford Book of American Short Stories" and collect a reader at the university copy shop Reckhammerweg (the book is inexpensive and the reader thin). Signing up for this seminar makes little sense if you are not looking forward to reading two great stories a week. You can contact me under alexandra.berlina@uni-due.de.
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