L381 12349 RECENT WRITING
Samrat Upadhyay

8:55a-10:10a D (30 students) 3 cr.

TOPIC: “Contemporary Short Story”

In this course we will examine contemporary short stories from writers around the world. We will study and discuss the short story as a genre, how it sets up in its trail a number of expectations, and how it either fulfills them or jeopardizes them. Apart from an international anthology, which will give us a solid indication of what's happening with the short story globally, we'll also look at several collections of short stories, and study how individual stories influence one another once they become neighbors. Embracing a diversity of voices/styles and concerns, we will read story collections by Dan Chaon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Edward Jones, Catherine Tudish, and Tobias Wolff, as well as Daniel Halpern’s well- known anthology The Art of the Story. We will not only read for analysis and discussion, but also for pleasure, and to further express our pleasure we will also write a story of our own. There will be in-class writing assignments, two essays, one exam, possibly one presentation, and certainly one brilliant sample of our own short story.