CMLIT/ENGL 184: The Short Story
CMLIT 184 vs. ENGL 184
One of the biggest challenges I faced with this course was departmental expectation. Penn State's Comparative Literature Department has a requirement for its instructors that no more than 20% of a course's texts be from a single literary/linguistic tradition. The English Department, of course, favors literature written in English. I had to find a way to strike an acceptable balance between these two departments when creating my syllabus. I ended up with a fun, varied syllabus that clung to one of my original course goals: short stories that do not exceed 20 pages. This course was taught during a six-week summer session, and I wanted to emphasize the notion of "shortness" into our texts and our time together. The result:
"In this class we will read short stories from a variety of countries, cultures, and traditions. The course proceeds by units based on formal elements (tone, perspective, etc.) to help us consider the short story as a literary form, to help get us thinking about each work of fiction, to prompt consideration of what short story authors must do to tell their tales, and for the practical purpose of organizing the reading. One of the main foci of this course will be the fact that these stories are short: only one of the stories that we will read is longer than 20 pages. What may the authors have wanted to convey in intentionally presenting us with such brief texts? How does the compact nature of a short story affect the tone, mood, and effectiveness of the writers’ statements? Can expansiveness and/or grand scope be achieved in a text of 4 pages? We will wrestle with these and other questions throughout the course of the term. This course meets the General Education—Humanities (GH) requirement"
This is a screen shot of the course syllabus I posted to the course website, which I designed using HTML.
This screen shot shows one of the .online readings I posted to the course website. This reading was also used in overhead form on the first day of the class to begin our discussion of the short story form.
This screen shot is one of the short paper assignments that I posted to the course website. I made an effort in this class to use the website I created as much as possible, for this cut down on my paper use, and it made the course material available to the students at all times.
TWT in CMLIT/ENGL 184
I taught this course before Penn State had adopted its Course Management System, ANGEL. This meant that using online resources, digitizing the syllabus, and posting assignments online, required me to build web pages the old fashioned way. I used my personal web space as a portal for many aspects of this class, including the reading schedule, which had links to some of our readings, course policies and procedures, and sample quiz questions.
During the course, I often used music, short film clips, and visual aids, to prompt discussion of various themes and ideas in the course. For example, one day I played a song that, strange as it may sound, can only be described as "mauve." I asked students to respond to the mood of the song before we discussed the readings they had prepared, and it was interesting how well they transitioned from discussing tone and mood in the song to these same elements in the language of the short stories.
I also used Penn State's Electronic Reserve service extensively in this class. This was a wonderful help, as it permitted me to include a huge variety of texts and keep costs down for the students. Penn State's Electronic Reserve service provides students with access to copyrighted material in *.pdf format for easy downloading and printing. Students responded very positively to this use of the Internet: some days they were able to come to class without their heavy anthologies, and they loved the free access to almost half of the course's readings.
