Masters of the Modernist Short Story: Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and Alice Munro

Anton Chekhov and James Joyce were innovators whose short masterpieces in large part created the style and vision that was named modernist in the twentieth century. Eudora Welty and Alice Munro continued innovative portrayal of the humane irony and the moral acuteness present in Chekhov's and Joyce's vision of life, and added new comedy and intimacy to plot structure, character portrayal, and unified effect, the technical matters that comprise the artistic pleasure found in the modernist short story's style. All four writers in the course focus their tales on ordinary circumstances which give rise to poignant, startling revelations of how we make, and are made, what we are in the world. The course's aim is to understand how these revelations arise when a writer masters what Chekhov called "the compactness that makes things alive."