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Prof.

Elizabeth Tallent
214 Margaret Jacks Hall
office hours: Tuesday 3:30-5:30
and by appointment (email me and well find a time)
Email: tallent@stanford.edu

Development of the Short Story: Continuity & Innovation


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 Im aware that students whove never before
taken an English course enter this classroom with the trepidation natural when
facing a new challenge. If this is true of you, Id 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 storys 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 Ive found for illumining the tension
between the short storys gorgeous literary inheritance and the forms 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 literatures place in
culture is rocked by powerful changes.

Mon 3 Apr Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark: An overview of the


courses aims and logistics and an introduction to short stories.

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Wed 5 Apr Just you put a patch on it: Gogols uncertainty principle
Gogol, The Overcoat

Mon 10 Apr An absolute manner of seeing things: Flauberts realism


Flaubert, A Simple Heart

11:00 p.m. deadline for section enrollment. No switching


sections after this time.

Wed 12 Apr The lion in the path: Maupassant


Maupassant, Boule de Suif
Maupassant, The Writers 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, Dsires Baby
Chopin, The Storm

Wed 19 Apr Case #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: Chekhovs 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 Apr Short Writing Exercise 1 due at 11:00 p.m.

Mon 1 May Reading 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

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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: Woolfs realities


Woolf, Kew Gardens
Woolf, Slaters Pins Have No Points
Woolf, An Unwritten Novel

Mon 15 May On then. Dare it. Let there be life: Joyces 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 May Hemingway, In Our Time

Mon 29 May Memorial Dayno class

Wed 31 May Where you came from is gone: Flannery OConnor


OConnor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
OConnor, Parkers Back

Mon 5 June Zora Neale Hurstons 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 Were Left
With
** Take-home final exam handed out in class **

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Mon 12 June Take-home final exams due at 6:30 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
readers deepest engagement with their ambiguities. Such ambiguity, Id argue,
characterizes great literature: each story is open to a multiplicity of interpretations.
How, then, will you know when youve read a story right? Its 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, Im 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: Im persuaded that literature is humanitys great means of self-
transformation.

If Im right about that, or even if Im 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 dont have a specific question, I invite you
to come by to introduce yourself and talk. If you dont get something about a story,
thats a terrific starting point for our conversation.

What You Can Expect: Course Objectives

Im serious when I say that the aim of beautiful and lasting short stories is to change
their readers. Ultimately, your relation with any storywith those stories you find

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beautiful, and those stories you dontis 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 youll do, and
youll receive thoughtful feedback and support for the intelligent risks you take in
interpretation and the originality of your perceptionsand of your own sentences.
Not least, youll 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.

Heres something not to expect: lecture isnt meant as a preface to the stories. Its
not an introduction. A more meaningful take on lecture is that its an experience, one
youll be actively involved in. These are interactive lectures designed to work with
questions youve formulated as you read and to encourage you to articulate your
perceptions.

So its crucial that 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, theres no
equivalent for this strategy of annotating your responses in the act of reading. It can
prove illuminating as 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 its ?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 Im 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 readers
imagination so completely that she or he seems, for the storys duration, to live
within it. This is much less likely to happen if you permit distractions. For that
crucial encounter, I hope youll grant each of these stories your sustained attention.

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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 students total final grade (that is, the final grade for the course as
calculated from the components below).

Heres 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.

Im extremely committed to the quality of your experience in this class, and because
theres 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 users experience but also the
experience of nearby students. The exception, of course, is students 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 writers style and ambitions in general. Since were 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, Ill sometimes post an answer to a selected
question on our Canvas site.

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Youll 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 territorythe 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 thats 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 whats 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, youll 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 TAs incredibly helpful.) Of course, we
welcome the opportunity to address any difficulties youre having at any time
during the quarter.

Section attendance is essential for success in this course, and its 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, youll 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.
Youll 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 prompt will 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 youll have the chance to
strengthen your writing and build confidence in your reading and interpretation
skills. On the discussion forum, youll be able to viewand perhaps be inspired
bythe work of your section-mates.

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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 youve 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: http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/oae).

The Honor Code

The Honor Code is the University's statement on academic integrity written by


students in 1921. It articulates University expectations of students and faculty in
establishing and maintaining the highest standards in academic work:
The Honor Code is an undertaking of the students, individually and collectively:
1. that they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or
receive unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation of reports, or in any other
work that is to be used by the instructor as the basis of grading;

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2. that they will do their share and take an active part in seeing to it that others as
well as themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the Honor Code.
3. The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by
refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable
precautions to prevent the forms of dishonesty mentioned above. The faculty will
also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to
violate the Honor Code.
4. While the faculty alone has the right and obligation to set academic
requirements, the students and faculty will work together to establish optimal
conditions for honorable academic work.

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