Week 1
Girl Reading, by Edward Vuillard
Welcome to the "Short Story" course blog. We begin our study of the short fiction genre with a brief historical overview. Stories are everywhere, obviously, and we can't go a day without rehearsing them in our heads or tuning into them. It's how we make sense of things, and each other. Humans have been telling stories for millennia, around the world and as far back as records exist. Not necessarily as art forms, of course, though the artful storyteller existed, we must surmise, long before writing was invented, just as ancient cave paintings attest to the conceptual capacities and artistry of early humans. The first crafted stories might have been told around the communal fire of prehistoric peoples and for the same reason we attend to good stories today (though not so often fireside). They entertain and teach us, involve us in an experience of sound and rhythm, word play, imagination, and community that may deepen our sense of life.
Stories are everywhere, indeed, old and recent, and the types many: jokes, news, histories, novels, movies . . . . Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey (8th century B.C.) are considered the first works of Western literature and were likely composed and recited orally long before the written compositions materialized. In them we find the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans that tell of Zeus the sky and thunder God and his many progeny–Athena and Apollo and Helen of Troy among them–and their roles in human affairs. Remember Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, the great wooden horse, parapets, towers, palace intrigues and battles–the characters and incidents of the epics have been very influential through the centuries. Another very influential work is The Bible, with perhaps more sales than any other book on the planet. It begins with the Old Testament, which dates to around 1100 B.C., the first book of which is a creation story, Genesis, that describes the garden home, Eden, of Adam and Eve, first man and woman, and the history of their expulsion, their children, brothers Cain and Abel, and the well known story of Noah and his Ark (which reminds me now of the perils of climate change). The Bible's New Testament, composed in the first and second centuries, contains the Gospels–the stories of Christ and his teachings, such as the famous parable of The Prodigal Son. Why mention these books? Just to illustrate a few of the cultural underpinnings and range of influences we've inherited.
Short fiction includes fables, folktales and fairytales–Cinderella and Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, among others. The literary form of the fairytale in the West is in part a construct of writers such as Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, who drew from the oral tradition (in which a story might vary with each teller, it being recited from memory) in composing tales for publication. Others, like Hans Christian Anderson and Oscar Wilde in the 19th century, did not collect their stories from the field but invented them from the pattern. In addition, the stories of modern and contemporary writers reflect the widely read non-fiction genres of biography, essay, journal, and travel writing, and owe their form in part to the 19th century commercial predominance of newspapers and magazines in publishing, particularly here in America, during a time of great transformations and dislocations.
To conclude, fiction stories may employ supernatural and fantastic effects or display extraordinary degrees of realistic detail, be cast as parables, fables or folktales, dramatic monologues, confessions, nightmares, prose poems, even jokes. (See here for a web presentation of some of the many precursors to the modern short story, which dates from the 19th century.) They may be very very short (micro of flash fiction or approach the novel in length–novella). Our collective store of stories is vast and increasing, with film and digital media leading, but old themes and plots provide many a note for modern stories and retellings: the journey out, the homecoming, falling in love, falling out of love, growing up, and growing old, etc. The sketches and tales of Washington Irving were the first in America to ignite the interest of European readers and he the first American to make a living as a writer of short stories. If you will, "Rip Van Winkle," which is probably his best known piece (vying with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which story you might know from the Tim Burton film). In the 19th century, Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Edgar A. Poe, Herman Melville, and other American writers helped develop the art of the form, along with European masters such as Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. In the 21st century, though the genre is no longer the popular form it once was (very few periodicals publishing fiction, low pay, competition from other media, notably films), there are contemporary masters and niche markets for the committed.
The Basic Elements: Character–Setting– Plot/Structure–Narrative Point of View–Theme–Symbol
The aims of the storyteller dovetail with the structure of the story. Each of the elements will be inextricable from the others in terms of the collective expression, but we can look at the separate elements to see how they shape our impressions and convey various ideas. As readers and students of the form that is just what we will be doing in class, in discussions and in writing and other ways of responding, across a variety of story examples that evoke sometimes similar and other times wholly different associations. We will look today at one story, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," with an effective frame device for creating story within story, while drawing upon the past, and read one folktale, time permitting, by Italo Calvino called "The Tale of the Cats," from his Italian Folktales (1956), a collection reviewed here by science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin.
More to come!
Response Assignments of 250-300 words (first one due next week): Your responses should be edited for brevity and focus but come right out of the impressions, thoughts, associations and questions you have in reading one (or several) of the stories assigned. Provide a brief capsule view of the situation presented, what is at stake in the conflict presented, and then specific discussion of scenes, moments, themes that interest or move you. You do not have to explain the whole story in detail; find an angle of development that allows for selective, honest, fully engaged commentary. Use direct quotation to illustrate your points and pull your reader directly into the text. Include titles and authors, properly punctuated, in the opening where you introduce the subject of the composition. Compose an original title for each assigned response. Double-space and type the work.
The following questions may serve as a guide and be useful in thinking and writing about a story:
1. What does the title indicate? How does it frame or shape our understanding of the story whole?
2. What is the situation? What's the conflict or at stake for the central character? What happens in the lead up (the complication) to the crisis and climax?
3. What image(s) do you find most attractive or arresting? Do any–of person, place or thing–appear symbolic? What associations does the imagery call forth in you?
4. Which words, phrases, lines or images present difficulties of interpretation, and why? Make it a point of discussion and analysis, if appropriate.
5. What happens specifically in the climax of the story?
6. With the conclusion taken into consideration, what are some of the story's apparent theme(s)?
Homework Selection to read: "Simon's Papa," by Guy de Maupassant
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