American Story Cycles

A survey of US literature told through the history of an important, complex, and neglected genre, the short story cycle, ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne's incomplete The Story Teller to Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (2011). Other authors include Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and Louise Erdrich. An introduction to the patterns of American literary development, its social and cultural contexts, and the major critical/theoretical lenses through which it has been understood. We will consider the unique formal qualities of the story cycle: its liminal status between novel and story collection, its vacillation between unity and multiplicity, connection and disconnection, in relation to broader American questions of identity and community.