What makes a short story a short story? In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe introduced this new, distinct genre in a review by describing brevity and coherence as central aspects of this kind of writing. Beyond a reference to these simple criteria, a clear-cut definition of a genre including such a multitude and wide variety of stories seems difficult to attain. Rooted in the oral tradition of storytelling, short stories nowadays display complex topics of heterogeneous, multi-ethnic societies and easily lend themselves to experimentation. With this seminar, we will have a closer look at the American tradition of short-story writing shaped by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Kate Chopin for example, but we will also deal with those short stories including contemporary and multiethnic voices beyond the United States in order to investigate the development of this genre in a North-American context. Is there a distinctively (North-) American way of writing short stories? Why is this genre so productive and compelling? – Questions, we will try to answer in the course of this seminar.
