239792 The Short-Story: An Inter-American Perspective (BS) (SoSe 2012)

This course engages with the Americas—Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S.A.—through the vast field of the short story. Questioning the boundaries of the nation, this seminar will challenge presumptions of national literatures by complicating geographical, political, and literary borders that have been drawn within the Americas. Simultaneously, while stressing political and cultural crossings with the aim to encourage students to imagine the Americas as a transnational and transregional space, contextualized literary readings will equally drive students’ attention to the national and/or regional forces that militate against the blurring of the abovementioned boundaries. Students will study and closely analyze short stories by, among others, Clarice Lispector, Edgar Allan Poe, Esteban Echeverría, Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, Horacio Quiroga, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Ann Porter, Margaret Atwood, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rosario Ferré, William Faulkner.

This seminar covers both "Research Paradigms" and "Mediating Cultures".