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Short Story Collection Syllabus
This semester, I am teaching four different courses, with four different preps. When thinking about these courses, I wanted to make sure that I had a firm grounding in the majority of the material to make it a little easier on myself when it came to class prep. So, for two of these courses I decided to construct the courses around texts and themes that students would find interesting and that would allow me to use my time wisely over the course of the semester. As a result, I chose to frame my Literature and Composition course around short stories and my World Literature from the Renaissance course (which I will discuss next post) around graphic novels. With the short story course, I also wanted to ground it in the region where I teach, Appalachia and Georgia. With that in mind, every text, apart from Ernest Gaines’ collection, is set in Georgia or Appalachia. Below, you will find my syllabus for this course. I am looking forward to this course, especially teaching Yerby’s short stories for the first time.
Overview Overview:
What makes a short story a short story? Is it, as Anton Chekhov argued, merely a “slice of life” without a beginning or an end? Or, does a short follow a specific form, as William Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole argued? As Walpole put it, “A short story should be a story; a record of things happening full of incidents, swift movements…
