LITR 5439 Genres, Movements, Styles: The Novella or Long Story

Instructor: Craig White

Planned offering: Spring 2010? (If so, perhaps offered simultaneously at TDC)

Purposes / Objectives (in progress):

Research interests:

• Examine origins, development, climax, and residual appearances of the long story, tale, or novella / novelette / nouvelle.
• Climactic period coincides with Realistic / Victorian periods and occurs in transatlantic and continental context.
• Special print genre coincides with popularity of literary magazines.
• Style changes of Romanticism, Modernism, postmodernism?

Teaching interests:

• As many great fiction writers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries excelled in this genre, introduce authors or texts beyond usual classroom canon (e.g., Conrad’s Youth instead of Heart of Darkness; James’s Aspern Papers in addition to Daisy Miller)
• The genre permits a one-text-per-week reading schedule
• The genre often features in freshman-sophomore courses that some M.A. graduates teach in community colleges or in high school reading lists.
• For Creative Writing students, the novella is often the default genre of a fictional creative thesis or project, but students are unfamiliarity with its history or form.
• Optional writing assignment: Creative Writing students may draft part of a tale / novella. A critical introduction with research citations is required.

Possible texts (broadly chronological; choices and order unresolved)

Hans Christian Anderson (1805-1875), The Snow Queen (1845)

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), The Heroic Slave (1853)

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

Herman Melville (1819-1891), Bartleby the Scrivener (1853); Benito Cereno (1855, 1856), Billy Budd (1924)

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886); The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); The Open Boat (1897)

Henry James (1843-1916), The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daisy Miller (1878), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Beast in the Jungle (1903)

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Youth (1898), Typhoon (1899-1902), The Shadow Line (1917)

Kate Chopin (1850-1904), The Awakening (1899)

Edith Wharton (1862-1937), The Bunner Sisters (1891); Ethan Frome (1911); Summer (1917)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), The Metamorphosis (1912)

James Joyce (1882-1941), The Dead (1914)

Katherine Anne Porter, Old Mortality (1937); Noon Wine (1937); Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)

William Faulkner (1897-1962), The Bear (in Go Down, Moses, 1942)

Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951?) 

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Seize the Day (1956)

Philip Roth (b. 1933), Goodbye Columbus (1959)

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960), Coraline (2002)

the name of the novella is Noon Wine by Katherine Ann Porter, and it's set in Texas.  I haven't read it yet but mean to find a copy.  Wikipedia had an interesting paragraph:

While "Noon Wine" and its companion pieces, "Old Mortality" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," have been described as novellas, Ms Porter referred to them as short novels. Ms Porter, in the preface "Go Little Book . . " to "The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter," abjured the word "novella," calling it a "slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything." She went on to say "Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels."