English 255 - WHAT MAKES TALE WORTH TELLING?

Same as CLT 255. How did the modern short story emerge—why, where, when? What is its relation to other forms of short fiction, such as the fairy tale of the German Novelle? 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 fantastic and unlikely events---and how, by the end of the century, did the short story come to concentrate instead on the mundane and the ordinary? What, in short, makes a tale worth telling? Readings in Goethe, Hawthorne, Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, Chesnutt, Chekhov, Jewett and others.