ENGL 378 - Brief Encounters: The Reading and Writing of Flash Fiction

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

In the short story “Snow” by Ann Beattie, the narrator recalls how her lover once declared of storytelling, “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.” This course centers flash fiction, that is, narrative under 1,000 words–and the concentrated power brevity may afford. We adopt a surgical heuristic, teasing the textures of language, narrative time, the logic of eventhood, shape, and mood as we read stories written by Augusto Monterroso, Kim Chinquee, Yasunari Kawabata, Somerset Maugham, Robert Lopez, Lydia Davis, Luisa Valenzuela, Diane Williams, Robert Olen Butler, Naguib Mahfouz, Ed Park, and Deb Olen Unferth. Students are expected to write one story flash fiction week, which will be workshopped and carefully revised. Finally, we explore flash fiction literary journals such as NOON, Vestal Review, NANO Fiction, and Flash, with an eye toward submitting flash fiction for publication. Tracy O’Neill.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor. Offered to juniors and seniors who have taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT