Prof. Elizabeth Tallent
214 Margaret Jacks Hall
office hours: Tuesday 3:30-5:30
and by appointment (email me and we’ll find a time)
Email:
Development of the Short Story: ContinuityInnovation
Spring Quarter 2017
Mon/Wed 1:30 – 2:50 pm
Building 380, Room 380C
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 per cent more awake to the world.
—George Saunders
Course Description
Welcome, all! And a warm welcome to non-English majors considering this class. Former students from a wide range of disciplines tell me that they had the chance to take only a single literature class while at Stanford, and that they found this course accessible and rewarding. As a teacher I’m aware that students who’ve never before taken an English course enter this classroom with the trepidation natural when facing a new challenge. If this is true of you, I’d like to say, first, this syllabus can give you a good sense of what this course will be like, and, second: Take a chance on these stories. They have a lot to say about what matters in our lives.
I find the short story’s capacity for illumining our experience enthralling, and see this class as a chance to explore that capacity through the dual concepts of “continuity” and “innovation” that structure our progression through the quarter. These concepts are the most useful way I’ve found for illumining the tension between the short story’s gorgeous literary inheritance and the form’s genius for addressing absolutely new perceptions about life as we live it. Guided by these paired concepts, we will approach each short story as if it is part of a brilliant, time-transcending conversation. Students in this course are seen not as passive eavesdroppers on this conversation, but as its newest voices, generating the fresh views that keep the short-story form alive and vital even as literature’s place in culture is rocked by powerful changes.
Mon 3 Apr “Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”: An overviewof the course’s aims and logistics and an introduction to short stories.
Wed 5 Apr “Just you put a patch on it”: Gogol’s uncertainty principle
Gogol, “The Overcoat”
Mon 10 Apr“An absolute manner of seeing things”: Flaubert’s realism
Flaubert, “A Simple Heart”
11:00 p.m. deadline for section enrollment.No switching sectionsafter this time.
Wed 12 Apr “The lion in the path”: Maupassant
Maupassant, “Boule de Suif”
Maupassant, “The Writer’s Goal”
Maupassant, “The Little Roque Girl”
Maupassant, “Idyll”
Mon 17 Apr“Here was life, not fiction”: How subversive is Chopin?
Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
Chopin, “How I Stumbled upon Maupassant”
Chopin, “Désirée’s Baby”
Chopin, “The Storm”
Wed 19AprCase #419: Babel, Isaac
Babel, “The Story of my Dovecot”
Babel, “Guy de Maupassant”
Babel, “My First Goose”
Babel, “The Death of Dolgushov”
Mon 24 Apr“The correct posing of the question”: Chekhov’s quiet revolution
Chekhov, “The Darling”
Chekhov, “The Lady with the Little Dog”
Chekhov, “In the Ravine”
** Short Writing Exercise 1 posted on Canvas. **
Wed 26 Apr“A fresh view of the universe”: Tolstoy
Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
Tolstoy, “Master and Man”
Fri 28 AprShort Writing Exercise 1 due at 11:00 p.m.
Mon 1 MayReading and Q & A, Guest author
Wed 3 May “That is why one loves dragonflies”: Kafka
Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”
Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”
Mon 8 May “The inscrutable woman remains inscrutable”: Mansfield
Mansfield, “Bliss”
Mansfield, “Carnation”
Mansfield, “At the Bay”
Wed 10 May “Some real thing behind appearances”: Woolf’s realities
Woolf, “Kew Gardens”
Woolf, “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”
Woolf, “An Unwritten Novel”
Mon 15 May “On then. Dare it. Let there be life”: Joyce’s daring
Joyce, “Araby”
Joyce, “The Dead”
Joyce, “An Encounter”
*Short Writing Exercise 2 Posted on Canvas
Wed 17 May “Flushed, Frenzied, Relentless Me”: D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence, “Odour of Chrysanthemums”
Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer”
Fri 19 May Short Writing Exercise 2 Due at 11:00 p.m.
Mon 22 May Hemingway, In Our Time
Read the entire collection. This lecture will cover the collection as a whole.
Wed 24 MayHemingway, In Our Time
Mon 29 May Memorial Day—no class
Wed 31 May “Where you came from is gone”: Flannery O’Connor
O’Connor, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”
O’Connor, “Parker’s Back”
Mon 5 June Zora Neale Hurston’s Spy-glass
Hurston, “The Eatonville Anthology”
Hurston, “Sweat”
Hurston, “The Gilded Six-Bits”
Wed 7 June “Six per cent more awake to the world”: Questions We’re Left With
** Take-home final exam handed out in class **
Mon 12 June Take-home final exams due at6:30 p.m.
Please submit a copy of your final exam via Canvas. Lateness will definitely affect your grade.
Syllabus
These stories have been chosen not only for their beauty and significance but because each seems to me somehow inexhaustible: these are stories that invite the reader’s deepest engagement with their ambiguities. Such ambiguity, I’d argue, characterizes great literature: each story is open to a multiplicity of interpretations. How, then, will you know when you’ve read a story “right”? It’s the aim of this course to support each student in devising original and compelling questions to ask of each story, and to gain experience in articulating and examining various interpretations of a story. These stories are also, in my view, the essential ones a serious young writer needs to have absorbed before writing stories of her own. They are offered here in roughly chronological order.
Teaching Philosophy
As a reader and writer of short stories, I’m frankly in love with and awed by the form. To be there as a teacher for those moments when a student is startled by some fresh glimpse into the depths of a story counts, to me, as terrific good fortune. To every one of our classes I will bring my sense of being honored and delighted to teach and my conviction that literature not only can change lives but can do so in ten thousand ways during ten weeks we will spend together. Let me just come out of the closet right now: I’m persuaded that literature is humanity’s great means of self-transformation.
If I’m right about that, or even if I’m not, literature needs and desires serious and intimate involvement. For this reason the expectations I have of you as a student in this class are high. I ask for genuine commitment and sustained attention, your willingness to engage with a wide range of views and interpretations, to speak your mind honestly and clearly and courteously, to exercise some serious playfulness in creative exercises designed to illumine from within the problems of craft a writer faced in a story.
A high point of the class, for me, is the discussions about the stories I have with students during office hours. Even if you don’t have a specific question, I invite you to come by to introduce yourself and talk. If you don’t get something about a story, that’s a terrific starting point for our conversation.
What You Can Expect: Course Objectives
I’m serious when I say that the aim of beautiful and lasting short stories is to change their readers. Ultimately, your relation with any story—with those stories you find beautiful, and those stories you don’t—is private, bound up with questions about what matters to you about being alive. Yet this course is a public, shared, communal experience of responding to stories linked by their genre and aesthetic concerns, and as you voice your perceptions and engage with your peers and instructors, you can expect to become a more confident, articulate participant in this communal investigation, capable of identifying aspects of style, assessing the value of different interpretations, and effectively (and courteously) challenging interpretations.As the quarter progresses you will gain a sense of the intricate connections among the texts in the syllabus, and will be able to interpret stylistic continuity and evaluate aesthetic breakthroughs in the genre of the short story. You can expect your increasing prowess as a reader to inform and strengthen the writing you’ll do, and you’ll receive thoughtful feedback and support for the intelligent risks you take in interpretation and the originality of your perceptions—and of your own sentences. Not least, you’ll gain an acute sense of the pleasures of confronting complexity.
Since short stories deal intimately with trauma, violence, illness and death, and just as intimately with love, desire, and sex, you can expect our quarter-long conversation to be direct and realistic, its language clear, frank, and adult.
Here’s something not to expect: lecture isn’t meant as a preface to the stories. It’s not an introduction. A more meaningful take on lecture is that it’s an experience, one you’ll be actively involved in. These are interactive lecturesdesigned to work with questions you’ve formulated as you read and to encourage you to articulate your perceptions.
So it’s crucialthat you read the assigned stories before lecture. Further, I ask that, while reading, you make notes in the margins of the story. Simple as it is, there’s no equivalent for this strategy of annotating your responses in the act of reading. It can prove illuminatingas a record of your experience of the text, and valuable in assessing your gains in confidence and insightfulness as our course progresses.For example, when an interpretation is offered in lecture, you can refer back to your own responses: did you notice the detail, image, or ambiguity lecture addresses? When you came to that moment in the text, did it spark a question? Just about the most valuable note you can make in the margins looks like this: ? Valuable, why? Because it’s ?’s, yours and mine, that can get us deeper into the story.
Students tell me that the balance of the time they devoted to this course was in the hours they spend reading the stories. As a teacher I’m lucky because the same students often tell me they loved doing the reading. Edgar Allan Poe described the short story as a prose narrative brief enough to be read in a single session, and that definition suggests the ideal approach: the story aims to saturate the reader’s imagination so completely that she or he seems, for the story’s duration, to live within it. This is much less likely to happen if you permit distractions. For that crucial encounter, I hope you’ll grant each of these stories your sustained attention.
Grading
Please note: Because attendance at both lecture and section is essential to students’ experience of this course, unexcused absences are taken very seriously. For each unexcused absence, either from section or lecture, 2 points will be deducted from the student’s total final grade (that is, the final grade for the course as calculated from the components below).
Here’s the breakdown for grading:
Section participation = 30%
2 brief writing exercises = 30%
Final exam = 40%
Lecture
First, the practical aspects: Lecture is essential to a valuable experience of this class, and attendance is required. TAs will record attendance at lectures; if you feel your absence should be excused, please speak with your TA. Unexcused absences will affect your grade.
I’m extremely committed to the quality of your experience in this class, and because there’s a great deal of pedagogical research documenting their negative impact on students’ experience of a class and on their grades, I have a no open laptops policy for lecture. Fairness is also an issue here: the research shows that in-class use of a laptop or other device negatively affects not only the user’s experience but also the experience of nearby students. The exception, of course, isstudents who require special accommodation: please talk with me if this is true for you.
Second, the overview: The aim of lecture is not only to build on but also to complicate your reading experience by suggesting fresh perspectives. Because I believe literary texts necessarily reflect (and engage with) their cultural moment, I establish a context for each story both by placing it literarily and culturally and by discussing the writer’s style and ambitions in general. Since we’re approaching each short story as part of a great, far-flung conversation, connections between writers will be described (and to tell you the truth, writers simply interest me a lot). But the essence of each lecture is close reading, addressing the story through language, imagery, detail, and the psychology of the characters. As this is modelled in lecture, even inexperienced students will become increasingly confident practicing close reading.
In my view a strong lecture not only answers questions, but sparks new ones. And in order to answer these new questions, I’ll sometimes post an answer to a selected question on our Canvas site.
You’ll note that our syllabus generally offers more than one story by a writer, with a view to deepening your acquaintance with the writer and illumining her/his project. Often, lecture will delve into one story in detail, leaving the others to be explored in section discussion. The aim here is to offer students fresh territory—the chance to test the views offered in lecture against a new text and to voice the perceptions that an “untouched” text may invite.
Section Participation
Lively intellectual collaboration in section discussion is a vital part of this course, and that’s reflected in the proportion of the grade devoted to it. In section participation, we value contributions that show thoughtful preparation, skillful close reading, and originality of interpretation. We look for comments that respond persuasively to what’s been said before, that return us to specific passages in the text with new questions, or that suggest alternative approaches. Mutual respect is, of course, an absolute requirement.
To help address the uncertainty many students feel about how discussion is evaluated by instructors, you’ll receive a mid-term grade on your section participation. This gives you the chance, well before the assignment of your ultimate grade for section discussion, to consult with the TA and to resolve any problems. (Former students in this class have found our TA’s incredibly helpful.) Of course, we welcome the opportunity to address any difficulties you’re having at any time during the quarter.
Section attendance is essential for success in this course, and it’s mandatory. If you feel your absence should be excused, please speak with your TA. Unexcused absences will affect your grade.
Short Writing Exercises
Twice during the quarter, you’ll be asked to complete a short writing exercise. A prompt will be posted on Canvas, to which you will respond in 300 words or less. You’ll submit your response via Canvas to your TA.Lateness will affect your grade.
Intended to deepen your exploration of the texts, these writing exercises will also prepare you for the final exam. Each promptwill ask you to practice the skills required for the exam: original interpretation, clarity of reasoning, skillful close reading and use of critical concepts, and the ability to suggest connections among the texts on the syllabus. Quality of writing counts. Your TA will provide feedback on your responses, so that over the course of the quarter you’ll have the chance to strengthen your writing and build confidence in your reading and interpretation skills. On the discussion forum, you’ll be able to view—and perhaps be inspired by—the work of your section-mates.
Please note that short writing exercises do not receive letter grades. You receive full credit for each response when (a) you submit it on time, (b) you follow the instructions, and (c) your response demonstrates serious engagement with the prompt.
Short writing exercises are due by 11 p.m. on:
Friday, April 28
Friday, May 19
Final Exam
The comprehensive final exam will consist of essay questions requiring skill in close reading and interpretation as well as the ability to synthesize material covered throughout the course: an ideal final exam will display not only meaningful ideas about what you’ve read, but confident expression of these ideas. Again, quality of writing counts. Final exams are due June 4 at 4 p.m.
Texts
Course Reader: available at Stanford Bookstore and on reserve at the library.
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, available at the Stanford Bookstore and on
reserve at the library.
Handouts with supplementary material will be available at each lecture.
Students with Documented Disabilities
Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). Professional staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the OAE as soon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066, URL: