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The seminar closely engages with the short story as a literary form with specific narrative techniques. By turning to works subsumed under the notion of ‘the fantastical’ – such as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and the gothic – it seeks to help students develop an understanding of genres as changing cultural practices and how fantastical genres utilize the short story format.
“In the brief tale,” one of the originators of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe has mused, “the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.” Genres like science fiction and horror seem antithetical to the short story’s specific affordances because they frequently depend on the elaborate creation of unrecognizable narrative scenarios and story worlds. For example, Canadian critic Darko Suvin has famously referred to science fiction as the “literature of cognitive estrangement” to describe such a process of defamiliarizing the familiar. In the science fiction short story then, such a story world has to be communicated to readers with particular efficiency and quickness. To narratologically explore some of the strategies with which short stories may successfully do so is the core interest of this seminar.
Students are expected to read a short story every session and actively analyze it with their peers and the instructor. Beginning in the 19th and 20th century with writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Shirley Jackson, most of the works read in the seminar are decidedly contemporary. We turn to science fiction authors such as James Tiptree Jr., Octavia E. Butler, Ursula Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nnedi Okorafor. Even though most of the short stories will be by US-American authors, thus, seemingly affirming the frequent assumption of the short story as a uniquely American art form, British or Canadian authors such as Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, and Margaret Atwood will also be included. |
