For many years I’ve liked American nonfiction writing in periodicals such as Harpers, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and it’s been interesting (for me at any rate) to learn that I also enjoy American fiction. I believe I am correct in saying that my first formal introduction to American short stories was a course on American gothic, which I reviewed on this website. Therefore, I was delighted when the same tutor (Julian Birkett) announced that he would be running a course on American short stories.
The course book was the one pictured here, and I have to say that at £1.99 the Kindle version is excellent value for money. It features stories spanning nearly 200 years, from Washington Irving to Lydia Davis. This was supplemented by extra readings and other information, all of which served to enrich the experience.
As I’ve written before, I enrol on these courses in order to discover writers or works I had not encountered before, and to sample fine writing I might learn from in order to improve my craft. Also, I find the observations of other course participants very insightful, and often leave me wondering why I hadn’t thought of that myself.
I mention this partly to highlight the fact that Julian encourages and facilitates discussion. Some tutors tend to spend more time lecturing. While this is valuable in terms of covering a huge amount of information in a limited time, it does not leave much breathing space to think about what’s been said.
The group camaraderie on Julian’s courses is always excellent. The really nice thing is that even when we’re all in disagreement with each other, people are respectful of others’ views and we always have a good laugh. (This is just as well, otherwise I’m sure I’d have been cancelled by now!)
The two stand-out aspects of the American Short Story course for me were as follows:
Firstly, Julian asked me to explain how I thought a particular feeling had been conveyed. That really forced me to analyse the passage more deeply than I had done till then.
Secondly, discovering Jhumpa Lahiri. How did I manage to not know about her before now?
Julian will be running a course on Russian literature in January 2021. (You may enjoy my review of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, which we looked at in a previous incarnation of this course.)
Also, Romantic Visions, which looks very interesting, and complements a course called Victorian Visions. In my review of that course I wrote:
“The course reminds me, in fact, of one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve ever done, and the most enjoyable course of my first degree. I was reading Economics, and in my final year I opted for a course entitled The History of Economic Thought. That course made it clear that when people came up with new theories about the way the economy works, those insights did not occur in a vacuum. Once you look at the bigger picture, the answer to the question why did this idea emerge at that particular time? is almost self-evident.”
I do think that knowing the wider context of an event or piece of writing is extremely useful, if not essential. It’s why, when I was teaching in schools, I encouraged my students to read widely as well as deeply.
Getting back to this course, it was definitely good value for money. The nice thing about short stories is that it’s fairly doable to read them between classes, even though some writers’ definition of “short” is open to debate.
From a writer’s point of view, it’s useful to see how an an author conveys character and a particular atmosphere when they don’t have a few hundred pages in which to do so. Sometimes, a single, well-chosen word, can be all that’s needed. As Polonius said (though failed to exemplify), brevity is the soul of wit!
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