Syllabus
Fall 1998

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Week 1: August 24
Week 2: August 31
  • Fiction Vocabulary
  • “Traditional” Narrative: Updike’s “A&P”
  • “Untraditional” Narrative: Cheever’s “The Swimmer”
  • The Freytag Formula
  • Collect
    • Contracts
    • Presentation Choices
  • HOMEWORK: Continue to work on Vocabulary (due 10/12)
  • READING for week 4: Patrick Süskind Perfume
Week 3: September 7
  • Labor Day Holiday: No Class
Week 4: September 14
  • The Novel
  • Suskind
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Ursula LeGuin “The Scapegoat in Omelas” (1449)
    • Mavis Gallant “What is Style?” (1418)
  • HOMEWORK: Continue to work on Vocabulary (due 10/12)
  • READING for week 5:
    • Tadeusz Borowski “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (159)
    • Tim O’Brien “The Things They Carried” (1022)
    • Ursula LeGuin “The One Who Walk Away from Omelas” (827)
    • Jean-Paul Sartre “The Wall” (Packet)
Week 5: September 21
  • The Short Story
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Sherwood Anderson “Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story” (1379)
    • Margaret Atwood “Reading Blind” (1381)
  • HOMEWORK: As Assigned
  • READING for week 6:
    • Anton Chekhov “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (289)
    • Kate Chopin “Desiree’s Baby” (316)
    • F. Scott Fitzgerald “Babylon Revisited” (478)
    • Ernest Hemingway “Hills Like White Elephants” (615)
    • Naguib Mahfouz “Half a Day” (849)
Week 6: September 28
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Anton Chekhov “Technique in Writing the Short Story” (1405)
    • Vladimir Nabokov “A Reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’” (1471)
    • Eudora Welty “Reality in Chekhov’s Stories” (1512)
  • HOMEWORK: As Assigned
  • READING for week 7: Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Illych (1237)
Week 7: October 5
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Italo Calvino “On ‘Quickness’ in Narrative” (1396)
    • Guy De Maupassant “The Writer’s Goal” (1456)
  • HOMEWORK: As Assigned
  • READING for week 8:
    • Toni Cade Bambara “The Lesson” (99)
    • Ralph Ellison “King of the Bingo Game” (441)
    • Zora Neale Hurston “Spunk” (628)
    • Alice Walker “The Abortion” (Packet)
Week 8: October 12
  • Begin Course Project
  • Completed Vocabulary Due
  • Contract Writing Due
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Zora Neale Hurston “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1430)
    • Richard Wright “Reading Fiction” (1516)
  • HOMEWORK: As Assigned
  • READING for week 9:
    • John Barth “Lost in the Funhouse” (105)
    • William Faulkner “A Rose for Emily” (457)
    • Yukio Mishima “Patriotism” (Packet)
    • Flannery O'Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1063)
Week 9: October 19
  • PRESENTATION:
    • William Faulkner “The Meaning of ‘A Rose for Emily’” (1416)
  • READING for week 10: Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Week 10: October 26
  • Discuss Androids
  • Film: Blade Runner
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Joyce Carol Oates “Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film” (1477)
  • READING for week 11:
    • J.G. Ballard “The Enormous Space” (Packet)
    • Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” (531)
    • Nicolai Gogol “The Overcoat” (544)
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne “Young Goodman Brown” (595)
    • H. P. Lovecraft “The Dunwich Horror” (Packet)
    • Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” (1113)
Week 11: November 2
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Gilbert and Gubar “A Femninist Reading of Gilman’s ‘Wallpaper’” (1420)
    • D.H. Lawrence “The Lust of Hate in Poe’s ‘Amontillado’” (1446)
    • Herman Melville “Blackness in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’” (1458)
    • Vladimir Nabokov “Gogol‘s Genius in ‘The Overcoat’” (1469)
    • Edgar Allan Poe “The Importance of Single Effect in a Prose Tale” (1488)
  • HOMEWORK: As Assigned
  • READING for week 13:
    • Woody Allen “The Kugelmass Episode” (32)
    • Margaret Atwood “Happy Endings” (66)
    • Julio Cortazar “Axolotl” (397)
    • Franz Kafka “A Hunger Artist” (727)
    • Jame Joyce “The Dead” (696)
    • Larry Niven “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (Packet)
    • Salman Rushdie “The Harmony of the Spheres” (Packet)
Week 12: November 9
Week 13: November 16
  • PRESENTATION:
    • Richard Ellmann “A Biological Perspective on Joyce’s ‘The Dead’” (1414)
    • Frank O’Connor “Style and Form in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’” (1482)
    • Milan Kundera “Kafka and Modern History” (1444)
  • HOMEWORK: Project Submissions Due 11/23
  • READING for week 14:
    • J.G. Ballard “The Index” (Packet)
    • Jorge Luis Borges “The Garden of the Forking Paths” (150)
    • William Gibson “The Grensback Contiuum” (Packet)
    • Octavio Paz “My Life with the Wave” (1108)
    • Olaf Stapledon “Universal History” (Packet)
Week 14: November 23
  • Project Submissions Due
  • PRESENTATION: Catch up
    • Peter Brooks “A Naratological Analysis of Borges’s “The Garden of the Forking Paths’” (1393)
    • Jorge Luis Borges “The Labyrinth in ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’” (1391)
  • READING for week 15: Michael Joyce Afternoon
Week 15: November 30
  • Hypertext and Fiction
  • Afternoon
  • Review for Final
  • PRESENTATION: Catch up
Exam Week: December 7
  • Final Exam

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 24 August 1998; 2.0