Courses / Module

Henry James argued that it is useful to think of the short story as a creative transaction between brevity and complexity. Indeed, for many contemporary writers the short story is understood as a form that best responds to the concerns of our age. Fast-paced and fragmentary, the brevity of the short story is particularly adept at communicating the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and national identity that invest the immediacy of our contemporary lives. Some of the module’s central concerns will include a sustained analysis of the aesthetics of brevity and its narratological dimension in relation to other literary forms; and the concept of intersectionality and its importance in forging new forms of subjectivity and resistance in a world marked not only by tremendous complexity but by growing inequalities and fragility. By encouraging a balance between close reading and detailed critical analysis the module aims to provide a means for revisiting the relation of the literary and the contemporary formation of subjectivity in a global context.

The prescribed stories will vary from year to year, and will draw on a selection of global writers, including Arivand Adiga, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Colin Barrett, Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, Anita Desai, Cyprian Ekwensi, Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Hemmingway, James Joyce, Deborah Levy, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, Slawomir Mrozek, Haruki Murakami, R.K. Narayan, Intan Paramaditha, Dorothy Parker, Tao Lin, David Foster Wallace and Jeanette Winterson.