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Teaching between the genres.

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Abstract

It has become commonplace in the development of literature courses to take into account the gender, racial, and ethnic diversity of works and writers chosen. While not sacrificing or de-emphasizing this important post-canonical reality, this essay focuses on how the college professor might design a course that takes into account issues of generic diversity as well. By destabilizing the boundaries between the short story and the novel, such a course might allow students to not only experience the complexities of literature on another level, but also to see how formal and thematic concerns intertwine.

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Recently, while designing a senior level college course on contemporary American short fiction, I was forced to ponder the difficult but oh so familiar questions of a post-canonical pedagogy: Who are the most seminal writers--those whom, even with canon expansion, one would be remiss not to include? What authors/texts best represent the trends and developments of the period in question? What authors/texts--and, just as important, what particular combination of authors/texts--best represent the diversity of recent American story writing? Having chosen to eschew the survey approach in favor of more sustained analysis of the work of a limited number of writers only made the process of choosing texts that much more excruciating.

Keeping in mind the relatively homogeneous group of students enrolled in the course, I determined that my first goal was to generate a reading list that featured gender, racial, and ethnic diversity. After much consideration, I found the mix of voices I was looking for: Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Toni Cade Bambara, Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros and Tim O'Brien. Although all of these writers (with the exception of Dubus) have achieved canonical status in the academy, they did provide the variety of perspectives I was seeking. What also emerged through the selection process was a very different kind of diversity, one that served to add intriguing depth to the course and thus meet my second goal. Not only did these texts--and our progression through them--complicate students' notions about gender, race, and ethnicity, they also served to complicate their understanding of the generic variations of the short story form.

We began the course in the most traditional way imaginable--with Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From, a collection of stories that spans the writer's all too brief career. This volume not only provided students with an accessible starting point for the course, it introduced them to the austere, lower middle class, and implicitly white world of...

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