Philip Weinstein, the Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Emeritus at Swarthmore College, will present a six-part seminar discussing short story collections from six American writers. Programs will be held online via Zoom on six Wednesday evenings from 6pm - 7:30pm, beginning November 16th. Prior to the first class, registered participants will receive a welcome email with Zoom access information and a reading guide.
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To go from Ernest Hemingway to Elizabeth Strout is not quite 100 years, but it is certainly enough time for us to come to grips with how brilliantly American writers have deployed the shorter form. We begin with two "masters"--Hemingway (In Our Time, 1925) and Faulkner (a selection of his finest stories, written in the 1930s). Everyone who comes after them is affected, one way or another, by the power of their work. But, while Raymond Carver's reputation is founded on his Hemingway-like tautness, you would never confuse his Cathedral (1981) with anything by Hemingway.
Thereafter we shall read Louise Erdrich's 1st great collection of stories, Love Medicine (1984). Our final pair of writers--Edward P. Jones (All Aunt Hagar's Children, 2006) and Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge, 2008)--take us into our current century; their careers, like Erdrich's, are still underway.
These readings are neither unduly lengthy nor unduly difficult. You will get in easily enough; my aim is to help you get in as deeply as possible. To that end, we will devote a separate session to each writer, so that you might come away with a finer sense of each one's typical syntax, lexicon, concerns, obsessions... I want you to turn them into your familiars--voices whose timbre and resonance will stay with you long after this course.
We will be alert, as well, to the larger "story of America" that they are each engaged in telling. Inevitably, such stories touch on dramas of race and gender and class--of black and white and red, of violence abroad and at home--that give America's past century its unpacifiable power to disturb.
Dates and reading assignments:
Wednesday November 16th: Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Wednesday November 30th: Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner
Wednesday December 14th Raymond Carver, Cathedral
Wednesday January 11th: Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Wednesday January 25th: Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children
Wednesday February 8th: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Philip M. Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Emeritus at Swarthmore College. His numerous publications include Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (1996), and Becoming Faulkner (2009). His newest book is a collection of essays entitled Soul-Error, published in May 2022. Professor Weinstein has been offering literary seminars in cooperation with the Vineyard Haven Public Library since 2012, and is the Honorary Co-Chair of the Capital Campaign for Vineyard Haven Library's expansion and renovation project.
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