Spring 1996
The first goal of this course is to encourage you to see the complexity of prose fiction, to recognize that a single story can provoke many kinds of interpretations. For example, since all of the stories are by Americans, we can look for some degree of cultural similarity among them; alternatively, the artistic value of each story has much to do with the premium we put on authors' individuality and the diversity of American culture.
A second goal is to see what inferences can be made about changing and unchanging aspects of American culture, power relations, and economic circumstances by reading fiction. The earlier stories will be read in chronological sequence, and by treating each one as presenting a microcosm of the author's world, we can examine the possibilities of reconstructing past eras. For later stories we will try to tease out some themes and changes in twentieth-century life.
Texts:
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Last revised 15 November 1999
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