Delivered at:: Department of Philology

Course type:: Elective course

When:: 3 year, 1, 2 module

Instructor

Delazari, Ivan

Full Syllabus

Abstract

English Literature: A History of Stories consolidates the students’ awareness of concepts and trends in Western literary history and supplements their notional bank of literary genres through the close reading of, reflecting upon, and discussing Anglophone short stories from the last two centuries.

Learning Objectives

The course is aimed at equipping students with a professional grasp of rhetorical and narratological parameters of the short story genre.
Students observe the changing trends in subject matter selection by English and North-American prose writers from the 19th to the 21st century.
Students accumulate a well-grounded understanding of the dynamic changes in narrative themes and devices from late romanticism to late postmodernism.

Expected Learning Outcomes

Understands and analyzes short-prose fictional narratives in English.
Searches for, finds, selects, and processes primary and secondary texts from various sources for classroom use and research
Conducts efficient and ethically acceptable communication of research procedures and results to academic audiences.
Engages in fluent written and oral professional interaction in English.
Applies the accumulated knowledge of the English short story in individual research and college classroom contexts.
Participates in guided discussions of fiction, criticism, and theory relevantly and valuably.
Organizes and coordinates classwork activities around a responsibly selected text of the student’s own choice.
Learns to present, explain and popularize literary works and relevant interpretations thereof to contemporary audiences.

Course Contents

19th-Century Stories
The Short Story on the Timeline: Literariness in the 19th Century. What Is So Romantic about Romantic Stories? Romanticism and Realism: Clash or No Clash? Stories of Victorian Mores. On Decadent Storytelling. Women Writers at the Turn of the Century. Darkness Falls: The Shifting Foci of Narrative. From Victorian to Edwardian Prose.
20th-Century Narratives
Modern Fiction in Use. A Schooling in Ambiguity. Constructing a World. Writing’s Zero Degrees: Style and Simplicity. Identity Crises. Diversity and Seriousness. Entering the Postmodern: More Traditionalists and Innovators. On Narrative Listening. Late Twentieth-Century Women Writers.
21st-Century Texts
On Retrospective Metafiction. Postcolonial and Global. Stories of Our Time.

Assessment Elements

In-Class Participation
At each seminar, students take part in three discussion sessions per class, which are coordinated by three fellow students. If no one has signed up for coordinating a discussion session, the discussion is run by the course instructor, who also opens and closes each seminars with general remarks.
Online Contribution
Students post messages to the topics of the LMS online forum for initiated and/or follow-up discussions, either before or after classes.
Tests
The tests are run online via LMS. On the day of the test, students receive an LMS announcement and email notification that the test is now available until midnight on the same day. At their convenience, students log in to their LMS accounts and do the test. The maximum time for each test is 20 minutes.
Presentation: Class Discussion Coordination Session
At the beginning of the course, students sign up for 10 seminar sessions in the role of Class Discussion Moderators, 1-4 students per class, depending on the available number of time slots in one seminar. They select one short story from the course Short Story Pool that is recommended for discussion in the corresponding week, inform other students and the course instructor of their choice, and prepare to lead a 20-min discussion of the text at the class from the teacher’s perspective, finding and providing classmates with reading texts in advance. They conduct the discussion leaning on and/or presenting extra materials of their choice and finding, aiming at everybody’s understanding of the story and its place in literary history.
Written Exam
Students write an examination paper consisting of 1-3 tasks in class. The exam lasts for 3 hours. No use of course materials and/or reference sources is allowed.

Interim Assessment

Interim assessment (2 module)
0.25 * In-Class Participation + 0.1 * Online Contribution + 0.25 * Presentation: Class Discussion Coordination Session + 0.1 * Tests + 0.3 * Written Exam

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

Goyet, F. (2015). The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925. France, Europe: Open Book Publishers. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.A577FA0B
Lee, M. A., Rochette-Crawley, S., Kurtzleben, J., Fallon, E., & Feddersen, R. C. (2013). A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=658441
March-Russell, P. (2009). The Short Story : An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=272076

Recommended Additional Bibliography

May, C. E. (2002). The Short Story : The Reality of Artifice (Vol. First Routledge pbk. edition). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=651248
Nagel, J. (2015). The American Short Story Handbook. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=931010

Bachelor’s Programme 'Philology'

Contacts

English literature