ENG 271: Intro to Lit: Genre — Contemporary American Short Story
Fall 2024
Instructor: Micah Lau
In-Person Instruction
This course introduces students to significant works of short fiction by US-based authors, with an emphasis on stories published in the last thirty years. Through close reading of these works and academic scholarship about the short story genre, we will discuss topics such as narrative structure and perspective, literary style, and the diversity of American experience. Students will engage in both creative exercises and research-based academic writing, producing at least 4000 words of revised prose by the end of the semester.
All required texts will be free, provided as PDFs on Laulima. Here is a tentative list of authors we might read: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Cisneros, Stuart Dybek, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Amy Hempel, Kristiana Kahakauwila, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Raven Leilani, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, Bryan Washington, Weike Wang.