1. The Modern American Short Story
A Brief Introduction
Blue American Literature Textbook p

2. The Short Story One of the most popular genres among American authors
Authors in the U.S. began to portray plots and characters that mirrored real life.
Modernist writers began experimenting with new ways of capturing the complexity of human life.

3. Literary Mavericks
Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Katherine Anne Porter energized the short story in the early 1900s
“to at last go out of myself, truly into others I met constantly in the streets of the city, in the office where I then worked, and still others remembered out of my childhood in an American small town.” -Anderson

4. Stream of Consciousness
Many authors of the early 1900s were influenced by the new psychological theories of the time
Sigmund Freud: sought unconscious causes for people’s behaviour.
Stream of consciousness: coined by William James in 1890, believed thought was a constant stream flowing through the minds without clear logic or order.

5. Stream of Consciousness continued
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Falkner, and Katherine Anne Porter
Defining elements:
-first-person POV
-a lack of conventional sentence structure or grammar
-”free associations” that flow through a character’s mind and link distinctly separate events
-interior monologues

6. The Interior World
Modernists reacted against formulaic, plot-driven stories that dominated the early 1900s
Instead they strove for the “artful approach to the significant moment.” –Frank O’Connor
Anton Chekhov: Russian writer, master of realistic detail and understatement
Used “slice of life” anecdotes
Lack obvious external conflicts, action-packed events, and clear climaxes; instead, the drama rages inside the characters’ minds

7. The Interior World continued
Anti-heroes: conflicted characters engulfed by indecision
Language:
-subtle and poetic
-Must infer what is being left unsaid: “It is no longer necessary to describe; it is enough to suggest.” –H.E. Bates

8. Hemingway’s Iceberg
“There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.” –Ernest Hemingway

9. Features of the Modern Short Story
Unspectacular, or everyday, settings
Themes of instability and loss
Plots without a clear climax or resolution
Understatement
Irony
Stream of consciousness
Anti-heroes