The Re-reading List: A Short Story Reading List
I teach an introductory literature course for college students that focuses mostly on the short story. But after having taught it for a number of years with only minor tweaks here and there, I decided it was high time to start revamping it. Thankfully, professors assigned College Communications 3 have a great deal of leeway in selecting what textbooks—if any—they will use, and so the first thing I decided, in order to give myself more freedom, was to dispense with the book altogether. Although the textbook was very useful those first few semesters in helping me organize the course, I wasn’t terribly excited by many of the stories—and, I’m sure, neither were my students. But to keep things somewhat simple, I decided (for this semester at any rate) to retain a few of my favourites from the book for my core lessons, including Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” for my lesson on irony, William Trevor’s “Kathleen’s Field” to highlight symbolism and metaphor, and Guy de Maupassant’s “Abandoned” to highlight setting. The big challenge, however, lay in selecting 18-20 works of short fiction for student presentations, the first nine of which would relate to various take-home essay topics. As it turned out, it was a much more overwhelming project than I anticipated. But it was also a great learning experience—and, I hope, it will be a similarly good one for my students as well.
