Understanding Fiction

These days--the last days of summer break--are work days, as I tune up syllabi, etc.  Today I was working on the reading list for my Understanding Fiction class, which is populated with short stories and two longer works:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.  I use a fairly consistent list of stories for this course, which I teach every couple of years, but change out a few of them for variety.  It's a first-rate line-up, including Sandra Cisneros, Toni Bambara, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ha Jin, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Ann Mason, William Faulkner, and Raymond Carver. I teach novels in other courses, but the short story always seems to work best in courses like this, mainly because it's a compact form that includes all of the basic elements of fiction and each story can usually be covered in one class period.  I also like the variety of voices in the stories over one semester, and I like the windows they open into the human condition.  Last time I taught this one of my students characterized the course as a kind of "psychology of literature" because we spent so much time talking about what motivated the characters, which is the central question in fiction I believe.