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Never underestimate a short story. Produced in North America since the 19th 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.
The seminar will be provided as a hybrid course on the Moodle platform combining online synchronous and asynchronous elements (Zoom sessions, multi-media input, text material). Information regarding course requirements and the schedule will be provided for registered students during the first session via Zoom. Please register for this course via AGNES.
For starters, feel free to browse through the following works:
- Basseler, Michael and Ansgar Nünning. Handbook to the American Short Story: Genres –Classics –Model Interpretations (2011).
- Nagel, James. The American Short Story Handbook (2015).
- Poe, Edgar Alan. “The Philosophy of Composition”. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 9th Vol. 1 (2017).
- Scheiding, Oliver. “The American Short Story.” Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies. Ed. Julia Straub. Vol. 3. Handbooks of English and American Studies (2016).
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