ENGL 235/A (Fall 2024): SHORT FICTION, Instructor: Greg Polakoff
Descripton for Fall 2024: This course surveys the modern short story and novella through ground-breaking and imaginative short fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beginning with Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the first half of the course explores iconic texts of the modernist era, including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Weird tales by H. P. Lovecraft and W.E.B Du Bois, and experimental fiction by Akutagawa and Virginia Woolf. These provocative texts portray the influence of the social and natural sciences, technology, and global politics on literary modernism. The second half of the course begins in the 1940s. It explores the works of Luis Jorge Borges, Clarice Lispector, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Suzuki Izumi, and Irenosen Okojie, whose narratives explore gender, race, posthumanism, the extraterrestrial, magical, and the surreal. We will also examine some classic film adaptations, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon, and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. Students will have the option to submit creative writing for the final project.
- Teacher: GREGORY POLAKOFF