First-Year Seminars 110FC - 20thC. American Short Fiction

This course looks closely at short fiction of a number of American writers. These writers portray a changing American society and the complexities of family, race, class, and gender as well as the insidious dynamics of privilege and prejudice, sexism and racism, mental instability and disability, collective violence and self-destruction, and most especially "the human heart in conflict with itself." Tracing historical, cultural, and literary context, we will identify American themes and modernist techniques -- such as unreliable narration, shifting points of view, black humor, grotesqueries, apocalyptic transformations and other elements -- which complicate and enrich our reading of these texts.

First-year students only, by placement.