20th Century American Short Fiction

This program is currently at capacity during the Extended and Rolling deadlines. If you select this course as a first choice on your application, please apply for a second option that fulfills your interests.

*Taught Online*  This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century.  We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerals, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov, on through the next generation, o'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver, and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan and the microfictionists.

Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender and psychology. Writing is also an important concern of the course. There will be two papers and an individual tutorial with each student.