| Detailed Course Description: Honors In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls how concentration camp prisoners would sometimes exchange their food rations for a story. This anecdote speaks powerfully of the sometimes magical ability of a story to sustain and nourish human beings. Beginning with this assumption about stories, we will study the short story as a distinct literary genre that developed, in part, from oral traditions. Course readings will be structured around what writers, as diverse as Anton Chekhov, Chinua Achebe, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Zora Hurston, Kate Chopin, Jorge Luis Borges, Sherwood Anderson, and Leo Tolstoy, have to say about the writing and evolution of the short story. As we consider style, form, characterization, imagery, and narrative technique, we will also study various short story theories. Most importantly, we will revel in the magic of the story.
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