Welcome!!!

Dear Students,

Welcome to “Contos & Encontros”!!!

This blog will be our virtual classroom for the next 4 months. Here you will find all the information you need to prepare for our classes – from the course syllabus to reading requirements and tests you will eventually have to take.

Your main obligation throughout this term will be, of course, to read all the short stories as well as the theoretical and critical texts assigned in the course syllabus below. You are also required to participate in our virtual discussions and debates – I expect each one of you to post at least one comment whenever an activity is proposed. Of course you are free to carry on chatting…

The official language here is English; however, in the virtual classroom as well as in the real classroom, sometimes we let our mother language slip in. That’s Ok, I myself will use Portuguese whenever it’s necessary…

As most of you know, it is part of my personal beliefs to stimulate you to have fun while you study. You can start enjoying yourselves by consulting WordPress’ list of smilies…

Let’s start working then - our course syllabus is posted here for your reference throughout the term. If I need to make any changes, they will be posted in  a new entry, and then updated here.

All the material is available at the copy center, in folder #123A.

 

COURSE SYLLABUS

 

Title: The short story in the English-speaking world, from Modernism to the present days

 

Unit I – 20^th century short story in Britain & the U.S. – the canon

 

MARCH

03^rd – General orientation;

06^th -  Text for discussion: “The Lonely Voice”, by Frank O’Connor;

10^th -  Virginia Woolf: “The Legacy”;

13^th -  James Joyce: “A Painful Case”;

17^th -  Katherine Mansfield: “Bliss”;

24^th  - F.Scott Fitzgerald: “Bernice bobs her hair”;

27^th -  Ernest Hemingway: “Hills like white elephants”;

31^st -  William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”;

• Assignment #1: Study notes of “The Grotesque: an American Genre” – William van O’Connor
• Suggested reading: “O Velho Sul”  – Edward Ranson & Andrew Hook

 

APRIL

03^rd -  Flannery O’Connor: “Good Country People”;

07^th -  Truman Capote: “Miriam”;

10^th -  Doris Lessing: “To room nineteen”;

14^th -  Angela Carter: “The Bloody Chamber” (Previous reading required: “Blue Beard”, by Charles Perrault);

17^th -  J.D. Salinger: “Pretty mouth and green my eyes”;

24^th -  John Cheever: “The Cure”;

28^th -  Ray Bradbury: “I sing the body electric!”;

 

MAY

05^th -  Kurt Vonnegut: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”;

08^th -  James Thurber: “Nine needles”;

12^th -  Raymond Carver: “A Small, Good Thing”;

• Assignment #2: Study notes of one of the two texts below:

1. “The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of Perpetual Uncertainty” – Jon Powell;
2. “Breaking the Ties That Bind: Inarticulation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver” – Michael WM. Gearhart

• Recommended film: “Short Cuts”, based on Carver’s short stories (dir. Robert  ALTMAN)

15^th -  Ian McEwan: “First love, last rites”;

19^th -  Fay Weldon – “Weekend”;

 

Unit II – 20^th century short story in the English-speaking world – other voices

26^th -  Kazuo Ishiguro: “A Family Supper”;

29^th -  Salman Rushdie: “The Prophet’s Hair”;

 

JUNE

02^nd -  Jamaica Kincaid: “Girl”; Chinua Achebe: “Dead man’s path”;

• Assignment #3: Study notes of “Empire, geography and culture” & “Images of the past”, by Edward Said

05^th -  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: “The English Woman”;

09^th -  Nadine Gordimer: “Which New Era Would that Be?”;           

12^th -  Sherman Alexie: “The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven”;

16^th -  Rudolfo Anaya: “The apple orchard”;

19^th -  Sandra Cisneros: “Bien Pretty”;

23^rd -  Alice Walker: “Everyday Use”

26^th -  Maxine Hong Kingston; “No name woman”;

30^th -  Bernard Malamud: “The Magic Barrel”.

• Final Assignment: Questions for this assignment will be posted in mid-June.