Five by Five: The Short Story as Art and Artifact

	Louis Menand Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Professor Menand is widely considered to be the foremost modern scholar of American studies. His most famous work The Metaphysical Club (2001), a detailed history of American intellectual and philosophical life in the 19th and 20th centuries, received a Pulitzer Prize in history in 2002. Menand is currently a staff writer for the New Yorker and also frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Almost everyone who works in literary studies has taught short stories. At the start of a career, when one is teaching "introduction to literature" classes, stories make usefully freshman-accessible texts for discussion. Plus anthologies are filled with them. Someone ignorant of the history of Western literature might conclude, from the table of contents in the Norton anthology, that the short story was a more central genre than the novel.

Later on, there are periods, in American and English literature, in which short stories are part of the canon: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Kipling, James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, and Hemingway. Yet the story is, of course, a distinct genre, only tangentially related to the poem and the novel. It arises at a particular moment, around the time of Poe, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and persists in what we might call its classic form through the work of Hemingway. And, like the classic form of the novel, it has an interesting postmodern afterlife.

There are three ways of approaching a story: as an autotelic verbal construction, a work of art; as a participant in the dialogics of literary history, a commentary on the tradition to which it belongs; and as a window on its time, an artifact. We will study five stories by five writers from these three perspectives. Our focus, in keeping with the mandate for these seminars, will be on particular texts, but we will want to read around them a little in order to make better sense of their historical significance and to get a better handle on their times.

Readings:

Henry James, "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896)
Rudyard Kipling, "Mrs. Bathurst" (1904)
Donald Barthelme, "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" (1968)
John Updike, "Transaction" (1973)
Ann Beattie, "Vermont" (1975)

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