Comparative Literature 255 - WHAT MAKES TALE WORTH TELLING?
Spring
2014
01
4.00
Michael Gorra
MW 01:10-02:30
Smith College
40374-S14
SEELYE 310
mgorra@smith.edu
40407
Same as ENG 255.
How did the modern short story emerge?why, where, when? What is its relation to other forms of short fiction?the Italian novella or the German novella or the fairy tale? Why are they often so elaborately framed, with their kernel presented as a kind of oral performance; a story told by one Character to another? Why do they so often rely on the fantastic and the unlikely?and how, by the End of the century, did the story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary? What, in short, makes a tale worth telling? Readings in Goethe, Hoffman, Hawthorne, Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, Verga, Kipling, Chekhov, Jewett and others.
How did the modern short story emerge?why, where, when? What is its relation to other forms of short fiction?the Italian novella or the German novella or the fairy tale? Why are they often so elaborately framed, with their kernel presented as a kind of oral performance; a story told by one Character to another? Why do they so often rely on the fantastic and the unlikely?and how, by the End of the century, did the story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary? What, in short, makes a tale worth telling? Readings in Goethe, Hoffman, Hawthorne, Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, Verga, Kipling, Chekhov, Jewett and others.