The Contemporary American Short Story

If we are to to believe Edgar Allan Poe's famous theory of what good literature is and does, achieving what he calls a unity of effect, we might find an understanding in the form he mastered best: the short story. Yet while living in a time when even the brevity of the short story appears to be overtaken by flash fiction (and thus pays witness to an ever decreasing attention span among possible audiences), we may wonder about the status of contemporary short story authors and their still existing readers. This course, however, is not looking for the place of the American short story's reading public. Instead it offers an invitation to move us, avid readers, out of our comfort zones and to test the limits of American short stories. As we will soon see, the literary totality of short fiction still results from certain essential elements that an author needs to maintain in constructing a story  and to produce what Poe once called a vivid effect. Hence, to make you a diligent and passionate part of the reading public we will delve into a number of topics and debates as triggered by a synchronic study of both canonical twentieth century American short stories and more contemporary examples. In doing so, we will explore the art of brevity, the manifold themes and possibilities of the contemporary American short story. Seminar für Anglistik Beachten Sie, dass Sie diesen Kurs nach den Prüfungsordnungen ab 2011 nicht besuchen dürfen, wenn Sie die für dieses Modulelement laut Fachspezifischen Bestimmungen und Modulhandbuch notwendigen Voraussetzungen noch nicht erfüllen. Universität Siegen WiSe 2016/17 Dr. Hartwig Marcel